It is a Wednesday morning, a little past ten, and I am at my desk drawing a greyhound in a party hat. Honey is stretched out in a patch of sun on the floor behind me like a small furred loaf, and the jumping spider is doing whatever the jumping spider does when she thinks nobody is watching. There is nowhere I am supposed to be. Two years ago this exact hour belonged to someone else, to a calendar full of meetings and a role I was actually good at, and I would have been in a Google Meet half-listening, doodling in the margin of my notebook. That margin doodle is the whole reason I am here.
I did not leave my job in a blaze of glory, and I want to say that plainly, because the version of this story that gets told online usually skips the boring middle, and the boring middle is where all the truth lives. For years The October Creative lived in the margins of a full career in marketing and partnerships. I built it at night, on the weekends, in the quiet hour before the workday started, in the notes app at lunch. I loved a good deal of that career, truly, and I was not running from anything. I was running toward the drawing.
I went full time this spring, and I can tell you exactly how ready I felt, which was not ready at all. The numbers were not tidy. They did not line up one morning and announce that it was finally safe. I have come to believe that morning does not come, or at least it did not come for me, and if I had waited for it I would still be waiting, doodling in the margin of a notebook, promising myself I would leap next quarter.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about, and I mean it kindly. Going full time does not turn every day into a soft afternoon in a studio with a cup of tea and a perfect line. A fair bit of it is invoices and packing tape and sitting quietly with a spreadsheet, and I still have days where I rearrange the furniture on my to-do list instead of actually drawing anything. But the trade I made, the one that matters, is that the work gets my best hours now instead of my leftover ones. For years the drawing got whatever was left of me at nine at night. Now it gets me at ten in the morning, awake and warm and entirely mine. That is the whole thing. That is what I bought.
About the money, since it is the real question living underneath the question. I am not going to hand you a number or a formula, partly because mine would not fit your life and partly because I find those posts a little dishonest, the ones that make a leap look like a spreadsheet you can solve if you are clever enough. What I will tell you is that I left before it was comfortable, that I watch it closely, that some months are lovely and some months I lie there and stare at the ceiling, and that Parker and I made the decision together with our eyes wide open. It is not romantic and it is not reckless. It is just real, the way a mortgage is real, the way groceries are real.
So this is my letter to you, if you are the one still clocking in somewhere, drawing in your own margins, quietly wondering whether you are even allowed to want this. You are allowed to want it. You do not need anyone’s permission and you do not need to feel ready, because ready is a feeling that shows up after you leap and never once before. Start in the margins, the way I did. Keep the day job as long as it serves you, with no shame in that at all, because there is nothing noble about being broke and a great deal of good sense in a steady paycheck while you build the thing underneath it. And then one day, when the thing underneath has grown teeth, you will feel it pulling harder than the fear, and that will be the day you know.
It has been a few months now. I still get a small thrill every single time a Wednesday morning turns out to be mine, mine to spend on a greyhound in a party hat if I feel like it. I do not think that thrill is going anywhere, and I hope it never does. The oak tree out front is nowhere near October yet, but it will get there, and this year I will be home on an ordinary weekday to watch the first leaf let go, camera already in hand, no meeting to run off to. That is the part I still cannot quite believe I get to keep.
Warmly, Bria
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