This is about something I hear from creatives more than almost anything else, and yet it’s the thing we talk about least. How lonely it can be to run a creative business.
It’s a particular kind of loneliness, and I think that’s why it’s so rarely named. Because on the surface, you might not look lonely at all. You could be busy, doing well, surrounded by clients and messages and things to make. But the actual work of it, the deciding, the worrying, the working out what to do next, so often happens entirely on your own.
And part of why is quite specific to us. Think about the people around you. So many of them either don’t run a business at all, and so, however much they love you, they don’t quite understand what your days really look like, or the particular weight of it being all on you. Or they do run a business, but it’s in a completely different world, and what you’re doing is so different from what they’re doing that it’s hard to properly compare notes. You can’t quite explain the thing you’re stuck on, because it would take an hour just to describe the context. So you don’t. You just carry it.
And it builds up in the smallest ways. The decision you turn over and over because there’s no one to talk it through with. The win you don’t quite know who to tell, because the people who’d understand its real significance aren’t around, and everyone else will just say “oh, lovely.” The wobble at eleven at night when something hasn’t worked, and it feels, in that moment, like it’s only you. Like everyone else has somehow worked out the thing you haven’t.
That last one is the one I most want to talk about. Because it isn’t true, and I’ve seen it not be true, again and again.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after years of doing this work alongside creatives. The single most powerful thing isn’t a clever strategy, or the perfect plan, or one more course. It’s the moment someone realises that everyone else is quietly feeling exactly the same things they are. That flood of relief. Oh. It’s not just me.
I’ve watched that moment change people. Not slowly, either. Someone shares the thing they were half embarrassed to admit, the doubt, the fear, the bit they can’t work out, and within minutes, three other people have said “oh goodness, yes, me too, all the time.” And you can almost see the weight come off them. Because the story they’d been telling themselves, the one where they were the only one struggling, where everyone else had it sorted, quietly falls apart. And what replaces it is something much truer, and much kinder. That this is just what it is to build something. That the doubt isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. That you’re in good company.
And that shift, from “it’s just me” to “oh, it’s all of us,” does something a strategy never can. It changes what you believe is possible for yourself. Because it’s very hard to be brave, or ambitious, or to keep going through the hard bits, when you think you’re the only one finding it hard. It’s a great deal easier when you know you’re one of many, all figuring it out, all cheering each other on.
There’s a reason the people I see move forward fastest are so rarely the ones working in isolation. It isn’t that they’re more talented, or more disciplined, or that they’ve found some secret the rest haven’t. It’s that they’re not carrying it all alone. They’ve got somewhere to bring the wobble, and the win, and the half-formed idea, and people who genuinely understand what all of it means.
So if this is landing a little too accurately, if you recognise that particular quiet of doing it all by yourself, I’d gently offer you this. The loneliness isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you, or your business. It’s just the shape of the work, for most of us, most of the time. But it isn’t the only way to do it. So much of what feels stuck, or heavy, or impossible on your own starts to shift the moment you’re in a room of people who understand.
You were never meant to build this entirely alone. Almost no one who does it well actually does.
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