Self-Employed

After a few months of debating whether or not to make the leap to become self-employed, and all the risk that it entails, I finally made it over that cliff today. I say cliff because it’s similar to hang-gliding, with the torment of the cliff standing in front of you, taunting you. There is nothing physically difficult about running up to a cliff and jumping off of it, no more than running on an endless field and taking a leap in the middle, but somehow your mind cannot let you forget that this particular jump will be different. You are reminded that you’re breaking a rule and that there’s nothing sensible about jumping off of a cliff. The job that I just left was a good one, with a lot of potential upsides, but ultimately it was a job where I would be working for career advancement and not to my personal fulfillment. Career advancement, the mechanical word that reinforces the notion that we are all cogs in a capitalist system that we do not control, frightens me. The next few years will be a grand experiment in an alternative type of career advancement, one in which I hope to allow my creative juices to flow. If you allow the height of the cliff to frighten you, you’ll never jump off.