I taught a paint party in the middle of the day and then went to pick up my daughter from school.
Pixie was in 3rd grade.
I had been going nonstop, party after party, and I never unpacked the car. Not from that party. Not from the two before it.
So I pull up to the pickup line five minutes late, and I look in my rearview mirror, and there is no seat. There is no floorboard. There is a wall of paint supplies where my child is supposed to sit.
She climbs in and squeezes into the little gap behind the driver’s seat and stands up the whole way home.
We lived one block from the school. One block. She held on and laughed and thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her.
I gripped the wheel and thought, what am I doing.
That was the side hustle years. Full time job, business at night, kid in the back seat standing between the paint bins.
I built it anyway. It worked. But there are five things I wish somebody had told me at the start, because I figured all of them out the slow, expensive way.
1. The Guilt Was Heavier Than the Work
The tired part I could handle.
The guilt is what almost took me out.
I was teaching full time with a new baby and running paint parties on the side, and I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not fix. On top of that, I felt terrible that I wasn’t volunteering at church. Everybody else seemed to be signing up for the nursery and I could barely stand up.
So there I was, doing three jobs, and the thing eating at me was the fourth one I wasn’t doing.
Then my aunt said something that rearranged my whole head.
She told me, “Teaching is a service.”
I had never once looked at it that way. To me it was a job. It was a paycheck and a parking spot and 850 kids a week. But she was right, and something loosened in my chest when she said it.
I was giving away enormous amounts of myself all day long. My whole life was already full of children.
So instead of forcing a fit that wasn’t there, I found one that was. I helped with the art program at church. I painted murals, which is my favorite thing on this earth.
Same heart, different shape.
Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand then. Guilt does not make you a better mother or a better Christian or a better anything. It just quietly eats the hours you were going to use for the work.
I carried that heavy blanket around for years, and it never once helped me.
2. Nobody Was Going to Hand Me Permission
There was one specific afternoon that changed everything.
I was finishing up art club with my 5th graders. And you have to understand, I had it good. The right district. A classroom with an actual window, which if you know teachers, you know is a big deal. A principal who trusted me and let me do all the giant crazy projects, the school wide murals, the full day chalk art festivals.
I had prayed for that job since I was 14 years old.
And I wanted to leave it.
That is what I could not forgive myself for. I got the dream.
I prayed for it and God handed it to me and here I was wanting something else on top of it. How dare I want more.
I’m standing in the doorway of my classroom telling the kids to have a good day.
And it comes over me, quiet and clear. It’s okay to go pursue the other thing.
That was the moment I understood that a person is allowed to have more than one dream.
Finishing one does not mean you have to stay in it forever out of gratitude.
I never actually stopped teaching. I just started teaching different people.
Nobody in my life was going to walk up and say, “You have our blessing, go build the thing.” Not my family, not my coworkers, not my own guilt. That permission was never coming from outside.
What I wish I knew is how much time I wasted waiting for it.
3. My Body Kept the Score Before My Calendar Did
One Sunday afternoon I was lying face down on the couch telling Bobby I couldn’t do it anymore.
Not dramatically. I did not have the energy for dramatic.
I had spent the entire weekend painting the samples for a party, unpacking from the last party, doing the grocery shopping, and attempting to be a decent mom and a decent wife. Monday was a few hours away. I had 850 students waiting for me.
My hips hurt so badly I felt like I was 100 years old.
That is what finally got my attention. Not the calendar. Not the bank account. My actual body, shutting down on a couch on a Sunday, telling me in the only language it had left that this pace was not sustainable.
I’m an empath, and most artists I know are the same way. We feel everything. We absorb the room. That is a gift when you’re teaching and it is a liability when you never turn it off.
What changed after that was not my work ethic. It was what I believed about resting.
For years I treated rest like something I had to earn. Finish the list, then you can sit down. The problem is the list never ends, so I never sat down, and I told myself that made me committed.
It didn’t. It made me useless by Sunday.
Now I put four to six days off on the calendar every month, usually a weekend or a Friday, and I take them whether or not I finished everything. That last part is the whole thing. If rest is a reward, you’ll never qualify for it.
It’s also important to remember that rest does not look the same on everybody. Bobby rests by watching a whole YouTube series about working on cars. If I’m watching more than 2 hours of TV, something is medically wrong with me.
My version is grabbing a coffee and wandering around Barnes and Noble. Or Marshalls. Or Home Goods. A new coffee mug or a pillow makes my whole heart happy.
I’ll come home after a full day out and Bobby will say, “You need to rest, you’ve been gone all day.”
And I say, “I just did.”
4. I Was Fighting My Own Brain Instead of Working With It
For a long time I thought I was failing at organization.
The truth is I was trying to be organized like somebody else.
My brain has the organizational skills of a raccoon. There are roughly 100 journals scattered around my house. Post-it notes live on my nightstand in case something hits me at 2 a.m. Papers everywhere. My thoughts go in nine directions at once and always have.
Bobby bought me an Apple Watch once.
It lasted about 12 minutes.
The notifications nearly sent me over the edge, and then the thing had the nerve to tell me when to breathe. Which, to be fair, I probably do need. I’m holding my breath right now.
When you’re building on the side of a job, the temptation is to go buy the system. The planner everybody swears by. The app. The color coded whatever. And then you fail at the system and you decide the problem is you.
The problem was never me. It was that I kept picking tools built for a brain I don’t have.
So I quit. I let there be journals. I let there be Post-its, paper calendars, poster boards, and random photos hung on my bathroom mirror to act as a vision board.
The biggest relief was giving myself permission not to go back through all the notes. For years I thought writing something down created an obligation to review it later. Now I know the note did its job the second it left my head. It’s there if I need it, and my brain gets to stop holding it.
Create in the chaos. It’s the only way some of us are ever going to create at all.
5. It Was Going to Get Lonely, and I Didn’t Plan for That
I tried to make a friend at Michaels once.
I know. But hear the logic. She’s into art. I’m into art. This is clearly going to work.
Bobby and Pixie went down another aisle on purpose so I could go “try and make a friend,” like I was being dropped off at kindergarten. My palms were sweating. I walked over and asked if she wanted to paint together sometime.
She said yes. We traded numbers. I was beaming.
She ghosted me.
I texted a few times and got nothing. Then I ran into her at Michaels again, which was as awkward as you’d imagine, and she apologized and said she was really busy.
We’re all busy. It takes two people to make a friendship.
I could have quit trying after that. A lot of women do, because the rejection stings worse in your 40s than it did at 15 for some reason.
But a friendship is built, not found. It takes the same things the business took. Hours. Repetition. Showing up when it isn’t convenient and when you’re tired and when there are forty other things you could be doing instead.
God talks about friendship more than people realize. It’s all over the Bible, which tells me it matters more than we treat it.
And the right ones do come. Not the ones I chased down in a craft store aisle, but the ones who text back. The ones who show up without being asked twice.
That’s the part I had backwards. I thought a friendship was something I had to go out and win.
But the good friendships are never one person doing all the work.
What I’d Do Differently
I would still build it on the side.
The nights and weekends were the only way it was ever going to happen for us, and there is something about building a thing after everybody has gone to bed that makes it truly yours.
But I’d carry less.
The guilt would go first, because it never bought me a single thing. No more waiting on somebody to tell me it was okay to want more than one dream. My body would get listened to the first time it complained instead of the fifth. Trying to be organized like other people would stop. And those one or two friendships would get protected the way I protected my calendar.
The “side-hustle” season ended. The business is my whole job now.
I still meet women who are right in the middle of it. They have the job, the family, a party booked for Saturday, and not much left over. They always ask me the same thing, which is how long it took.
The honest answer is longer than they want to hear.
The better answer is that the years were not wasted. Not one of them. Everything I run this business on, I learned while I was tired.
The women who make it are not the ones with the most time. They’re the ones who kept going when it was slow and unglamorous and nobody was watching
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