work life balance when you don't have a job job

I'm self-employed, and I have been since 2019 when I left my last "proper" job. That came after a couple years of wondering if I was just A Person Who Can't Hold Down A Job, who Lacked Work Ethic and was therefore Bad. Luckily, I'm good at being my own boss, and I've been able to get by financially, and also as a fun bonus, my mental health has dramatically improved.

But it does make things a bit murkier for me, when I'm trying to untangle what counts as work and what counts as leisure. And for whatever reason, my brain really wants to categorize everything I do as either work or leisure. Black and white.

I've been making a zine about this community cooperative I help run, and it's been such a fun process. I've gotten to combine watercolour painting, block printing, and zine-making, to create this cool piece of informative art, but my brain sure does want to discount that because "that's not art, that's work stuff".

I don't think that's fair to me, because I did work hard on this! But I also combined my 3 most favourite (currently, at least) forms of art, in support of an organization that I believe in, and I'm really jazzed about what I made. I haven't scanned it in to the computer yet, so this is just a preview of the final zine, but I'm gonna take this moment to brag a bit about what went into it:

First, I painted the background with watercolour paints, then I wrote the content and made zines happen, and finally I printed each one individually with a hand-carved logo for the co-op. It took a while and there were many troubleshooting steps. But I'm enjoying the fact that I can make a cool thing, and I can also let myself feel good about making a cool thing.

I've sort of lost the work/life balance thread in this post, because I got real excited talking about what went into making this zine. But, I guess that also speaks to the complexity of work/life balance - because I made up my job, I can decide that the scope of my job includes doing things I love doing for leisure, but that can also be a slippery slope, because sometimes doing things I love as part of my job, makes me stop loving doing the things. For now, combining things I love doing with my job has only amplified my joy. I suspect that as long as I'm in charge of my own creative endeavours, I'll continue enjoying the things, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I'ma enjoy enjoying my joy.

Originally posted May 11 2026