What living with mental illness means for my business

What works for me + some of my favourite resources

I didn’t start working for myself because of recurring mental illness—although looking at it now, it makes a lot of sense.

In this post I want to share about my experience running a small business alongside recurring illness—in my case, mental illness.

Whether you’ve had (or have) mental illness as well or don’t, whether you’ve got chronic illness or not: dealing with our humanness, our ebbs and flows, is universal and something that this post will touch on.

There are absolute downsides to dealing with recurring bouts of illness as a self-employed person: when you’re not working, no money comes in and depending on where you’re based, there are few to no disability benefits available.

There are, of course, also upsides to working for yourself when you deal with recurring illness. Often, we can be much more flexible in how we plan our work. The increased freedom and autonomy that many of us crave when we start our own business means that we often have more space to plan around our needs.

I spent quite a bit of time over the past two years trying to figure out how to learn to live with recurring mental ill-health. My GP’s—well-meant—advice to “learn to live with it” sounds so ridiculously simple compared to the day-to-day reality. If I were to look at my search history, I’m sure I’d find many instances where I Googled “how to live with depression”, “how to live with mental illness”, “depression + recovery” and similar.

I never found the blueprint, the roadmap, I was looking for. As you might’ve guessed, I had to learn what I already knew: that I need to make my own roadmap. And that this roadmap is not something that is set in stone, or in any way as predictable as I’d like it to be.

Below, I’ll share how I’m navigating business with recurring mental illness and how that shapes how I work and the work I do.

My experiences with recurring mental illness

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