I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m so relieved it’s saturday.

Being self-employed means doing what you love, and therefore not dreading mondays and having to wait impatiently for weekends to come and save you from hell (because every day of the week is supposed to be wonderful). BUT. Of course this is not always easy to achieve. Like in any job and any lifestyle, there are fantastic moments, and there are those really shitty, really stressful moments infused with pain and frustration. That was this week.

It started out with a major stress shitstorm. We dealt with some major technical issues on websites we’ve been working on (looking at you, evil plugins), risking the loss of all the stuff we’ve done so far. This put us into panic-mode, blocked our whole tasklist for a moment and it made us postpone some other projects, which we’re never happy to do. It made our time-management very confusing, as David (who usually takes care of our web design work) was blocked on this most of the time. The half of our week was ruled by this, it spaced us out and it made it impossible to do proper teamwork. Needless to say, a couple of dramatic office-fights happened. In the middle of the week, we planned to work on the go. It wasn’t a good idea at all, because the internet connection was scarce, and this made us lose so much precious time!

So far, our week didn’t like us, but that wasn’t over yet.

On friday, one of the things we had to work on was a simple map for the upcoming Street Food Festival. We started working on it early in the morning. How long could a simple map take to design? Both of us have done this before and absolutely love it. We thought it would take about two fun hours, but…NO. We struggled. It all started so enthusiastically (yay, a map!) to end up into desperation. We worked on it together. We worked on it separately. Tried to make it fun, then simple, colourful, then minimal, big, then small… I think we came out with about 27 different versions. All of which we hated. At 7PM, we were still on it, trying to find the perfect solution. It wasn’t happening. WHAT THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO DO?!! Yeah. Then, suddenly, after a lot of crying, yelling, pulling hair, we settled with a version which we sent to print. It wasn’t a miracle, we still hadn’t found the perfect map design to fall in love with, but we did find a solution which “could” work. That was the result of the very dreaded, sometimes incurable days of “creative block“. It is extremely frustrating, but it can happen to any creative, whether they’re passionate about what they do or not. I just wish it didn’t have to happen during this project, because we wanted it to be as awesome as possible. But then again, maybe we set the bar too high, and maybe this week was just a bad one to do it! Shit happens.

Seriously, nothing seemed to work this week. I’m so happy it’s the weekend. It feels like we’re in the safe zone, for a bit.

For those of you who read my post from last week (which was far more peaceful): What a contrast, right?

Well, you know what they say: after the storm comes the sunshine. Yes. For us it was the opposite this time, but we’re hoping to see some rays of sunshine next week.

Life is full of contrasts, and it’s paced by the good and the bad, the ups and the downs. When times are tough, weird, painful, frustrating, it feels horrible, but I guess in those moments are really needed to get to know and challenge ourselves. Taking a step back makes us realize “Hey, I’m strong, I went through this, and I’m doing fine!“. So we need to hustle and be patient. Things figure themselves out. And if they didn’t figure themselves out perfectly, then whatever. We can’t change this, that’s how life goes. That doesn’t make us into a bad person. We need to let that shit go.

And to follow up these sentences in an even more positive note: having something nice to look forward to does make it easier. I am excited about our weekend plans. This morning, we visited David’s aunt, which has a chicken coop. At the moment, it’s full of baby chickens (and as you know, there’s nothing more healing than a pack of cuteness). Today, we’re going to up-cycle some of our furniture and set up some pretty bookshelves in our room. Tonight we’ll be having dinner with friends, tomorrow we’ll be at the Street Food Festival, taking photographs, meeting other friends, and eating. OF COURSE. It’s a food festival.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone. And if you struggle, smile and be patient, this too shall pass!