You might say I got beat up this week. At least that’s how I put it.

No bloody nose. Nothing dramatic. Nobody yelled at me, nobody pulled a contract. Just a series of small things that, taken together, sat on my chest for most of a week.

The 11 PM email about a payment status. The math in my head about what the job should have cost compared to what I billed. (OOF!) The internal negotiation about whether to send another follow-up on an unpaid invoice that’s been out for two months. (POW!)

The juggle of fitting in all of my clients needs, logistics of travel and scheduling, balanced with time to prep…all while having to be creatively productive. (ZING!) The realization at 6 AM that the whole week was shaping up to be like this. (KNOCKOUT!!)

None of it had anything to do with what I’m actually good at.

The hard part nobody warned me about

The drawing is the easiest part.

The hard part (for me) is all this other stuff.

Eight years of drawing for a living, and the work I trained for is the easiest piece of the puzzle.

The difficult part is everything around it.

In my case, that means pricing the work in a way that’s honest about what it’s worth, asking for the money once the job is done, the administrative weight of running a small operation with Megan, and the mental space the unfinished invoices take up when I’m trying to do anything else.

When I’m drawing, I can escape and the focus. When I stop drawing, it’s hard escaping any of the rest of it.

The shape of work

I think what I’m describing (or trying to describe) happens to every working person, in every line of work.

The doctor who picked medicine and spends her time on insurance docs.

The strategist who picked the company for the mission and spends his energy on the politics.

The teacher who got into it for the kids and spends Sunday nights on a mountain of parent emails.

The job most of us picked is the visible part. The job we actually do is everything around it, and the gap between the two is where the hard parts live.

None of this disappears when you name it.

But naming it helps. And sometimes you need a business coach to do the naming for you. Mine beat me up this week, when I was already beat up, about how I’d been talking to myself about getting paid.

He pointed out that I’d been treating early payments like a favor someone was doing for me if they paid when that’s what the contract says. As an artist, attaching money to this has never come 100% naturally. But the real shape? I’d earned it, and needed to think like that.

That reframe was the tough part. I got beat up a little. But getting up off the mat is easier knowing the drawing is still mine.

Grateful you are here,

Wade