Note: I’m on my emergency vacation. Hooray for emergency vacation! So anything posted this week might not make sense. There. That’s my disclaimer. Carry on.

Right. Yesterday when I was ranting incoherently making my point that one of the hidden benefits of being self-employed is that no one can force you to move to Denver, I hinted that none of the drawbacks are what you think they are either.

So today I want to talk about that. And about what actually happens when you start your own business.

Which varies, depending on how seriously you take the pamphlets of doom.

Beware the pamphlets of doom!

Doom! Doom!

I mean, they were probably written by very kind, well-meaning parental sorts of people who are just worried about you. But they kind of end up sounding like my monster.

They tell you about how hard it is to run your own business and how most of them fail and how you’re doomed (doomed!) without a certain kind of plan and blah blah etcetera.

Then when you’re a. completely panicked and b. have no money and c. are searching for help in the middle of the night, you go online and find the exact same depressing stuff about the supposed pros and cons of being self-employed.

Let’s talk about this.

The supposed cons of being self-employed.

The two biggest things everyone seems to worry about happening to you are:

1. Oh no, you don’t have anyone to make you do the work, so you’ll probably just sit around in your underwear all day, staring at the wall and picking lint from your belly button.

… and …

2. You’ll get lonely not having anyone to talk to at the water cooler. Because talking to people at a water cooler is one of the stupendous joys of being alive and is also the only thing that keeps human beings from slowly going crazy.

Let’s talk about #1: not doing any actual work ever.

Okay. I know exactly one person this has ever happened to.

And it doesn’t even count, because she was so destroyed from years in corporate hell that after she quit her job, she needed some serious “having my emotional breakdown now, if you don’t mind” time.

Every other entrepreneur I know has the exact opposite problem. We’re all insane workaholics.

Not that we don’t procrastinate or mess around online or whatever, because we do. But mostly we just. can’t. stop.

In fact, for the first few years, we don’t ever stop working because, you know, no one tells us to.

I cannot remember who said this incredibly brilliant thing, but it’s something along the lines of:

“My boss is a jerk. And crazy. And treats me bad. Yes, I’m self-employed.”

Exactly.

If the hundreds of people that I know are any indication of anything, it is far more likely that your problems will be related to over-work rather than the slackerism everyone warns you about.

Let’s talk about thing #2: isolation.

Okay, this one might be a real thing. It does happen to some people. Then they get on Twitter and everything works out just fine.

And anyway, turns out you do end up meeting plenty of people in real life.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been running my own business for nearly four years and have not once wished I had someone to talk to at a water cooler.

Hello, introvert here. Sensitive freaking flower.

For me, not seeing people and not talking to people is like, the highlight of my life.

As disastrous past experience has shown, I cannot work in an office. I would shrivel up and die for any number of reasons. But one of them would be having to be in a room with other people that I did not choose to share this space with.

Also, meetings. I do not like them. Also small talk. I do not like it.

No, isolation has not been a problem for me. And anyway, I have the blog. I have Twitter. I have a gazillion internet friends, with whom I don’t have to actually share space and energy.

And this isn’t just me. I also know plenty of especially talk-ey connect-ey extroverts, and they also seem to be doing okay. So I think we can stop worrying about this and move on to the things you really should be thinking about.

Okay, here it is. This is what sucks about working for yourself.

Well, you already know what it is. Because I told you.

No one tells you to stop.

Add to that the fact that you have the most relentless boss in the world. And that if you try to delegate and outsource, you end up spending a lot of time managing.

And that you have to learn how to do stuff you don’t like. Like the dreaded “M” word.

(Though you know what? No one tells you the good part which is that all that “marketing” stuff is just a means, not an end.)

But really the main hard is Not Stopping — especially when combined with self-doubt. And, more often than not, one fuels the other.

Your stucknesses (guilt and fear and various internal blocks and monsters) push push push you to keep working. Until you’re exhausted. And then your exhaustion feeds the stucknesses.

Lovely.

The good news. There’s good news, right?

You learn.

About three years ago my gentleman friend and I instituted a strict no-working after dinner policy. Which we have been known to break occasionally for “work emergencies”, but we’re pretty clear on what counts as an emergency and what doesn’t.

Then we started our hour of yoga before dinner thing, which makes us stop working even earlier.

We also have cleaning the house every Friday morning. And we’re getting a lot better about weekends. We’ll do some writing, but not work-work (whatever that means at the moment).

Not to say that this always works because hi, I’m on emergency vacation. But my own personal emergency right now is more about my own internal stuff in reaction to external circumstances than it is about said circumstances.

You learn — and you keep trying.

You try to be a bit more conscious and aware of taking that time to actively not-do.

You try to be a little more patient with yourself when it’s not working. And not treat yourself in a way that no one else would ever put up with.

Because if one of the great joys of self-employment is no one gets to treat you like crap and not appreciate you anymore … then it kind of sucks if you become that person who treats you like crap and doesn’t appreciate you.

You might as well be appreciated. Because the rest of us need you.

And … now I’m going to try and follow my own advice for once and take a nap.

postscript.
I just want to point out how incredibly lucky it is that there is so much more good information about self-employment available online than when I started.

Seriously, this situation has improved tremendously since I was that person freaking out in the middle of the night, thanks to genius people like Itty Biz and Sonia Simone and Chris Guillebeau who are out there making sure you get actually helpful help.