Julia Riede interviewed me about my experience as a designer, over here. Interesting experience; of course I love talking about myself as much as anyone, but some of the questions were hard. Notably “show your workspace” (oh no… it’s not a Pinterest-worthy light-filled studio!) and “where do you see your designs in five years”.
True story: an “imagine yourself in five years” type exercise once triggered floods of tears. I mean FLOODS. Apparently I have some issues. At that time, I just couldn’t imagine myself having made any kind of reasonable progress in my life over five whole years – which is frankly weird, but there you go, the 20s are a difficult time. For the most part, these days I think I have a better perspective; and yet I still feel like that, a bit. Actually a lot. It’s hard to see past the stuckness of the moment and acknowledge that progress happens anyway, bit by bit, and those bits add up to something worthwhile.
I’ve just now, this minute, considered where I actually was, five years after that floods-of-tears moment. I’d moved country, started a business and gotten a senior-ish job at The Observer. I would have been thrilled (and amazed) to know five years would get me so far. So. That’s worth remembering, what five years can do.
Five years with small kids is of course not the same as five childfree years. And yet.
MEANWHILE. Prompted by this fun exercise, and by the advice I keep reading to connect with people who are better than you (and, importantly, who are managing to do a lot despite the constraints of parenthood), I’m planning an interview series of my own. Rather than constantly whining about how haaaaard it is to do stuff, I’m going to listen to people who get stuff done anyway. Stay tuned.
Woolly thoughts (and fuzzy logic) 
In my experience, anyone who is a parent (particularly of young/pre-school kids) and gets shit tons of stuff done anyway has <em>LOTS</em> of help. I have a fair amount of help (cleaner/housekeeper, ironing lady, babysitter for when nursery pickups are problematic) and it’s still <em>UNBELIEVABLY HARD</em> to get stuff done (where stuff done = general house stuff, never mind keeping fit/healthy or fitting in time to be a partner or do anything that doesn’t fit into those categories which provides any kind of fulfilment) as well as working full time.
And while commuting and working full time is exhausting, I’m pretty sure it’s not as hard work as full time childcare (I don’t know for absolute sure because I went back to work when Jnr was 7 months old partly because of money, partly because it was already making me nuts).
I hear you on not wanting to feel like you’re constantly whining, but I also think you could give yourself more of a break. Because it is HAAAAARD. And not enough people talk about how actually fucking hard it is. So thank you for talking about it like you’ve done. I appreciate it. And I hope you find ways to get stuff done.