Glass or Ruby: If The Slipper Fits…

“Ruby or Glass?” the salesman in my head asked like I was at the market facing a toss-up between paper or plastic. “Do you want to be the sad tired girl who gets the good looking guy in the end, or do you want to be the rugged chick who makes it through the storm knowing there’s no place like home?” You know how I chose.

But really… That whole fairy tale freelance lifestyle bit? I’ve always seen it as a huge ploy. Kinda like the shoe sale where they say Buy One Pair, Get Another Pair Half-Off. No one NEEDS two pairs of new shoes on the same day. But it’s temptation – the kind that feels like fate. You read the ad, and already you know you’re going down.

We enter Corporate Burnout Land (or Mommy World, for some of you), and suddenly we get There’s No Place Like Home Syndrome pumped through our veins like crack. Like morons, we buy it. We enter Freelanceville knowing there’s no way we could ever go back or give up what we have, all because we love being able to say….. (drum roll please)…… WE WORK FROM HOME.

We work from home. What does this REALLY mean? We sit around watching television all day while pleasantly chatting on the phone with old friends, tending to the neighbors’ kids, hosting sex toy parties and baking snickerdoodles? That’s what several of my relatives think I do all day… but no. We work. From home. (Get it?)

We work from home. We get talked about like we’re huge slackers who can’t seem to land a real job. We pay out the ass for health insurance, if we aren’t lucky enough to live in Canada or to have opposite-sex spouses whose employers pick up our tabs. We hire people to do our taxes, because our brains hurt too much to learn to decode the IRS manual on the 1040. If we’re lucky we work long hours, sacrificing the time we’d once intended to spend with our loved ones, doing the thing we love because we’ve gotta do it longer and harder now than we ever did when we worked for someone else. We work for ourselves. This is our life.

But does it have to be this way? I thought up this shoe analogy on three hours of sleep in as many days, in between coming home from the airport from a funeral and being put on hold for the third time by a forth dentist office because my guy abruptly retired and I have a cavity (and no, I can’t wait until August, because my friggen tooth hurts, which was the entire point of my trying to make this appointment, thankyouverymuch). I thought up this shoe analogy, and I thought, “Shoes suck. I want a do-over. I choose barefoot.”

If you come around this blog, like ever, you’ve noticed I haven’t been around much. And when I am around, I’m writing posts like this. (I’d apologize, but I’m not wholeheartedly sorry, and half-assed apologies really aren’t my thing.) There is a reason for my absence. It’s called putting all the shoes up for adoption at the local women’s shelter and saying to those who stare at my long awkward toes as they melt into the blacktop, “Yes, I know my shoelessness will hurt like hell when the storm comes, and maybe I’m missing out on my prince. But I’m tired of dreaming other people’s big dreams, and I’m tired of being so friggen prepared. I prefer to live.”

Freelance. It looks free. Why isn’t it?

Maybe we set ourselves up for failure the moment we read the ad. In freelanceville, Buy One Get One Half Off only applies to moronic clients who can’t seem to understand the concept of paying an invoice on time.

At first glance – and maybe second and third — there is nothing free here. No bonus. No pat on the back. No get out of jail free card. But if we look again, maybe that isn’t true. Maybe part of being our own bosses is supposed to be giving ourselves those bonuses, those pats on the back. Maybe it’s our job now to get ourselves out of jail, whatever the price.

Looking at it that way these past few months has helped me. I don’t have to be the gal who Disney would swoop down from heaven to star as Blogger Princess. I don’t have to be loved, or even liked, except by the clients I choose to grant that privilege to. Yes, folks – I’ve learned a valuable lesson: I’m really in control here. It’s not just a sales pitch. I’m really my own boss. I really am in control of choosing my own clients. I don’t have to take on work I hate or work for people who can’t pay an invoice on time. Granted, I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve built up enough of a reserve where I can be so choosy; I no longer live paycheck to paycheck, as I did when I first started freelancing. I have earned the right to give up and throw it all away if I want to. After all, it’s my life. If I want to walk around in flip-flops come December, the only one who will suffer is me.

Like Dorothy, everything I’ve ever needed has been inside me the whole time. That’s the epiphany. The house can come crashing down and witches can taunt me. I don’t need a wizard. And really, I think the best way for me to survive – as a workaholic – is to ignore whatever might be behind that curtain. Kind of like window shopping – it’s evil. Those shiny ruby shoes are nothing but trouble.

But glass? What could be more uncomfortable than ruby but glass? I have to wonder about Cinderella, and whether that prince of hers wasn’t symbolic for the big career she’d one day marry. Maybe she was a workaholic. Maybe in the first draft she simply lost the damn shoe because her feet were so numb from walking around in her Corporate Function Drag that she didn’t notice she was stumbling home in one high heel, structurally imbalanced. Probably not… But ya never know…

So my question to you all, dear bloggy friends, is what are your slippers made of?