I rebuilt my relationship with work. Here’s what changed.
I used to think work-life balance meant finding a job that drained me a little less. What I’ve learned is that a healthy relationship with work is bigger than a flexible schedule or a nice manager. It’s work having a meaningful place in my life without taking over the whole thing.
I never imagined myself as a full-time freelancer.
As a type A, former “gifted kid” obsessed with words, my life plan was pretty simple: Do well in school, go to college, find a full-time job that lit my soul on fire, work hard, and climb the corporate ladder until retirement. The American Dream, or whatever.
Everything went according to plan at first.
✅ I got the degree (with honors!).
✅ I built the résumé: publishing, agency life, nonprofit work, freelance projects on the side.
✅ I climbed from junior roles to senior ones and collected company awards and industry-wide recognition along the way.
✅ I did everything I thought I was supposed to.
the cost of corporate career success
And yet over the years, I kept finding myself in my therapist’s office, battling work-induced burnout, anxiety, and depression. I struggled to get out of bed and go to the office. I became a shell of a person outside work hours, with little energy for friends, family, my partner, or my own creative endeavors. I couldn’t even escape work stress in my dreams-turned-nightmares. Something had to give.
As I barreled toward my breaking point, I had a conversation with my therapist that shook me to my core:
Her: “Have you considered quitting your job and exploring other options?”
Me: “Ugh of course. But job hunting is like another full-time job and the market is scary and everyone’s getting return-to-office mandates.”
Her: “I mean being flexible in your search. What part-time jobs sound interesting to you? Consulting? Volunteering? Could you work at the library in the mornings and freelance edit in the afternoons?”
Me: “THAT’S ALLOWED?” 🤯🤯🤯
It sounds so obvious in retrospect, but her permission to think outside the box of the corporate 9-5 truly changed my perspective — and honestly, my life. I began to let go of the expectations I was holding myself to that no one else was.
trying a new path
I started climbing out of my depression pit and planning my exit from the corporate structure I’d felt stuck in five days a week.
I reached out to my old freelance contacts and scheduled coffee with my favorite former colleagues. As I had those conversations with people like Jen at gvb, I felt my passion for words and content sparking back to life. Those early chats mattered because they reminded me work could be collaborative, energizing, and built on trust — not just deadlines, urgency, and depletion.
I started to imagine what my ideal life might actually look like:
slow mornings.
collaborators I trust and respect.
long weekends.
work I care about.
creative energy leftover after.
the ability to show up for my loved ones and myself.
When I imagined balance, I wasn’t just imagining less work. I was imagining more life.
I finally found the courage to try to make that life a reality. As 2024 rolled into 2025, I left my full-time job and officially became 100% self-employed.
the work part of work-life balance
A year and a half into self-employment, my relationship with work has never been healthier.
Here’s what that has looked like lately:
I was having a hard time getting my creative juices flowing to write this blog from my office, so I spontaneously drove to a cool coffee shop for a change of scenery. Now you have more words to read ;)
I hadn’t seen my best friend’s new baby in a while, so we met at a park at lunchtime on a Thursday to play and catch up. I ignored Slack until I got back home, and the world kept spinning.
One of my agency partners asked me to attend a call with their client to receive live copy feedback. I knew that call wasn’t the best use of my time or energy, so I trusted my gut and declined. No guilt spiral. No over-explaining. No one gave it a second thought.
When a client fire drill pops up, I can handle it without immediately feeling like my nervous system is on fire too. I’m not already running on fumes, so a last-minute pivot feels like a problem to solve — not proof that everything is falling apart.
If a webinar, conference, networking event, or coffee chat sounds genuinely interesting, I can make room for it without asking permission or pretending it’s a “doctor’s appointment.” Learning and connecting are part of my work now, not something I have to sneak around the edges of it.
I don’t have “coworkers” per se, but I do have a network of marketing professionals, women entrepreneurs, and frequent collaborators I can turn to when I need a second set of eyes, encouragement, or someone to bounce ideas off of. Work feels less like being trapped in one system and more like being supported by a community I chose.
As my own boss, I’m comfortably busy with interesting content work for clients like gvb, who value my expertise and opinions. I can take on projects that make sense for my skills, my capacity, and my life — and pass on the ones that don’t. If I’m done with client work at noon on a Friday, I don’t have to find busywork to fill my time until I can clock out.
None of this means work is perfect now. Clients still have urgent requests. Timelines still shift. Feedback still occasionally makes me want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a minute. But the difference is I have the margin to respond like a capable adult instead of a tightly wound ball of dread.
More importantly, I trust myself now. I trust that rest supports the work. I trust that boundaries make me better, not less committed. I trust that a healthy relationship with work doesn’t mean loving every second of it — it means work has a meaningful place in my life without taking over the whole thing.
the life part of work-life balance
The life part of work-life balance isn’t just “I can go to the grocery store at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday,” although, to be clear, that is a great perk.
It’s that my time outside work actually belongs to me again. My evenings aren’t just recovery periods from the workday (usually). My calendar has more room in it, yes, but more importantly, my brain does too.
Having my time back has meant I can say yes to parts of life that used to feel logistically impossible. I can travel during seasons when my old work schedule would have made that a nonstarter — looking at you, big fall work events that made leaf peeping long weekends impossible. I can plan a trip around what works for me and the people I love, not just around PTO approvals and coverage plans.
It has also meant being able to show up for people in ordinary, deeply meaningful ways. Now I have the energy and flexibility to:
babysit my sweet baby nephew when daycare falls through.
take lunch walks with WFH friends instead of waiting three months to find one mutually convenient Saturday.
call my little brother for a spontaneous life update or be more present with my partner because I’m not handing over the tiny, frazzled scraps left after work takes the best of me.
And maybe one of the biggest gifts: I have creative energy left over after billable work. For a long time, my creativity was something I spent professionally and had very little left for myself off the clock. Now, I have space for personal projects like creative writing, collaging, reading, cooking, or whatever new viral TikTok craft catches my eye. Not because I’m magically inspired every day — ugh, I wish — but because I’m no longer starting from empty.
That’s the part of “life comes first” I don’t think I fully understood until I experienced it. I used to technically be off work while still carrying work around with me everywhere — into dinner conversations, weekend plans, quiet moments, even my sleep. Now, when I close my laptop, I don’t just shut down my work brain. I come back to myself. I have enough internal quiet to notice what I want, what I need, and who I want to be outside of my professional output.
Work still matters to me. I still care about doing excellent work for clients like gvb. But it no longer gets to be the main character in every part of my life. It doesn’t get to spill into dinner, weekends, travel, relationships, creativity, or rest. And after years of letting work take up more space than it deserved, that feels less like a perk and more like getting myself back.
That time I was honored in NYC as a 2019 Rising Star in Publishing by Folio: Magazine for “the tangible impact I had in moving the ever-changing publishing industry forward.”
