Small Change

How’s business? That is what everyone kept asking when I started out as a handyman. Starting my own business was exciting… and I took pleasure in it. Before long I had a little van, a local advert, a logo on my polo shirt and an answer phone full of customers.

I started the business on recovering from the second major depressive episode. Our life was changing because we designed a change. Judy had done me much good, and I was starting to enjoy perfectionism now rather than being held hostage by it. People had come into focus, and everything else was receding into the background; a natural order was forming. Work brought me happiness: I saw the stress lift from customers when I did the jobs they couldn’t do for themselves. Relationships with my family were the best they had ever been in my adult life. My relationship with Alicia was enriched by a deepened understanding of each other. Xavier was seeing more of me than ever. I had broken with a well paid job in education, during the onset of a recession, and we accepted that an uncertain future was better than the course I’d been following. The changes we made threatened our way of life as we knew it… right down to our little house… but we talked about everything and made decisions together. It was a risk and it took courage to break with the entrapments of a ‘normal’ life. We didn’t have all the answers but we did the best we could. Our motto, us against the world, would once again be tested, just as it had been when we first started seeing each other. We were preparing to break with a life in which we willingly gave up our time together in exchange for money. We were getting our heads around ideas of ‘what we wanted from life’ over ‘what we wanted to buy’.

These are risks that my parents found difficult to get their heads around. They appeared to see the world in terms of security and stability. They wanted Xavier to have a certain and determined future. In their own way I suppose they thought this was the path to happiness.

On reflection, it was some time before we had a clearer idea of how we would make ends meet. I was keeping the books, reluctantly, and a pattern was emerging. Business was growing but each month our income fell a long way short… we were biting deeper into the overdraft just to pay bills and I could see there were going to be problems ahead. The problems stemmed from our old debts, serviceable (ish) in my old job but now back breaking for our new business.

My good friend (and brother to me) helped me to put a figure on the problem; something that would mean confronting our finances and my own judgements about failing. To be in debt was one thing. To admit and share this fact was another… to put a figure on it was, well, painful. But the harsh critic in me had every opportunity to thrive in these circumstances and it took some rationalising. I needed to remind myself that ill health with depression had driven us further into debt as we used credit cards to put food in our mouths and pay utility bills. It was all we knew how to do at the time.

So my friend helped me face the problem and put us in touch with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. With his encouragement we took steps to put a plan in place before things got desperate, approaching our creditors early and agreeing payment plans within our tiny budget. We had a modest, but beautiful, marriage planned for the spring and he wanted us to start our married life together free of this worry. What he did for us, and how great a person he is, I will never find words for.

So the wind was turning in our favour. In the background however, old habits were surfacing and the business mentality was beginning to corrupt the dream we had for ourselves. The handyman business was there to help us get by; it was never intended to be the focus of life or the subject of grand expansion plans. I enjoyed the work… it was a place where people appreciated my perfectionist tendencies and where I could take pride in what I could achieve. My perfectionism had found a home and elsewhere my expectations were starting to ease up.

But vanity and drive were influencing me again. ‘How is business going?’… Well, the measure of a business is conventionally the size of its profits isn’t it? ‘Are you going to expand, I can see you with a fleet of vans in the future?’ ‘Where is your website? Get to work on it and get yourself out there.’ All these words of encouragement would start to awaken the approval junky in me, and set me to work on new and bigger projects. Jobs became pressured as customers were booked back to back. Smaller jobs were squeezed into evenings and weekends. The spaces that remained were filled further with quotes, invoicing, book work, advertising and research. Over the quiet week after Christmas I set about learning how to create a website for the business from scratch. Taking care of the site and propelling it up to the number one spot in Google searches would become another time consuming and obsessive quest, involving a steep learning curve.

The business model that pervaded my years in education, and that I had escaped from, had started to drive my daily life again. My drive came from a mechanistic will to be more efficient, productive and profitable. I didn’t need to be any of these things. None of these things were in my heart. I didn’t set out to be any of these things. I set out to earn a modest sum that would cover the bills and give our family time together. I set out to run a small business that wouldn’t grow and demand more of me. But I created a business where I had enough work for a small army of handymen… even though there was just me to respond to this demand.

An old brain hard wired to be a ‘wanter’ and ‘seeker’ (Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind), my approval junky tendencies and a society built on a business model of efficiency over welfare (Madeline Bunting, Willing Slaves) had combined to draw me away from the healthy life we had designed for our family. The resulting poor choices would lead me back to old habits, abandoning activities that brought me happiness (like making pancakes for my family each Sunday morning or walks in the woods), obsessing over margins, driving myself too hard mental and physically. Without realising it, I had changed course and was steering myself towards another depressive episode, creating the conditions for it to thrive again.

So again, I learn something from the journey. And now Alicia and I are figuring out how we can set sail again and stay true to our life’s course. It isn’t as easy as pointing ourselves in the right direction and pushing off. It is clear that holding a true course is not inevitable. It is why, I suspect, so many religions are punctuated with daily ritual, because it is recognised that following our life’s path is not necessarily in the flow of the world.