🥴 Bob the Neck Throb, Part Four

On service-based business seesaws, routine stacks, and crossing the change chasm

“There is no such thing as a work-life balance.
Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

—Alain de Botton

Catch up on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three here first. Where we left off . . .

I’m disappointed to tell you about Bob the Neck Throb and this series of events. You should have known better, my gremlin says.

But as I shared in part one, my defenses were down. It has been a tough few years. I have only been married for five, and had never lived with a romantic partner before Michael and I started sharing my 400-square-foot Nolita studio in 2017. When we moved to a new neighborhood in early 2019, I lost my familiar circuit and community of fitness studios from the previous seven years.

Adjusting to married life alone has been a big shift, especially for someone as independent (and perpetually single) as I had been. Throw in a puppy and a pandemic, and well, I know I don’t need to make excuses, but it has taken time to learn how each individual in our family unit thrives, and how to do so together. These are all worth fighting for, it has just been a steep learning curve for me.

Yesterday was my 13-year biziversary. We’re in the awkward pre-teen phase now. There’s no shortage of advice about what I could do next, but I am trying to listen quietly and patiently to my inner signals, and now my body’s louder sirens. That is the only thing that has ever worked for me. If I knew exactly what The Answers were, I would be taking those steps already.

As I shared in the previous installment, the “sacred third solution” hasn’t quite emerged yet.¹ Without my more scalable streams of income selling at the moment, I’m stuck on a service-based business stress seesaw:

I anticipated needing rest after this two-month super sprint, where so much client work collided at once, but I didn’t expect to crash so hard before hitting the finish line.

Mercifully, I left the two weeks afterward entirely unscheduled. And thanks to Michael, the perfect solution finally clicked into place. Or rather, something he had been encouraging me to do for years finally seemed crazy not to do.

Note: this is a four-part series of paid posts. Rolling in Doh is a mostly paid publication. This allows me to keep more sensitive information about my business private and provides psychological safety to share more openly, knowing the intimate details of my life aren’t Google-searchable, especially when they are relatively recent. I invite you to upgrade your subscription to read further; if not, there are plenty of open posts in the archives!