2019 was one of the most challenging years of my life, I desperately tried to juggle the last semester of my Masters of Marketing, and try to run my business Prop & Pose Co. during the busiest months of the year! I’m really proud of making it through but I’ll be honest, it was messy and it was tough. But I did get through it and I did a damn good job of it too.
If you had asked me in 2012 when I started my first degree in Architecture I would never have believed that I’d end up here. From when I was in Grade 7 I decided that I wanted to be an Architect when I grew up, and I just stuck with it. In hindsight I wish that I had thought harder but I don’t regret the path I took.
By the time I graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Monash Uni I’d largely fallen out of love with my dream. I’d spent basically the whole year thinking about photo booths and how much I missed doing photography as a job. So, with a whole lot of unearned confidence I started a business called Prop & Pose Co.
I took a break from studies and ran headfirst at this plan, but I had no idea what I was in for. It took a long time for the work to pick up, and in mid-2016 I almost had to give up and throw it in. Winter is dead for events, and I didn’t have work coming in for months. I was running out of money and I didn’t know what to do.
Anyway, eventually everything came good and by the end of the year I was back in business and it was thriving. I learned to accept the peaks and troughs of my seasonal industry and I kept going.
2016 was where my fling with Marketing started when I completed my Graduate Certificate in Marketing at RMIT. I felt like the biggest imposter, what did I know about Marketing? At around this time I had another development in my life, my mental health was quickly deteriorating.
I’m not going to go into detail right now, but I plan to write about it soon. My mental health is a huge part of my story and I want to be open about it. In the first half of 2016 I started to find it really difficult to get out of bed, basically impossible. My motivation levels were flatlining and it would take hours each day just to sit down at my desk to work. I didn’t know it at the time but I was developing some heavy depression and anxiety. To this day I still consider that the worst pain and hurt I’ve been through.
Over the following months I began to understand exactly why this was happening. I started to investigate ADHD as a possible explanation and it just explained everything so well. Eventually, I went through the extensive process of getting diagnosed. Finding out I have ADHD is probably to most important moment of my life.
As all this ADHD sh*t was going on I thought that moving out of home would be a smart thing to do. Don’t get me wrong, it was great but it put a serious strain on my spirit. I moved to the Northside of Melbourne and lived by myself, far away from most of the people I cared about. That was around July and by the time I was properly settled it was the busiest time of my year. So, I was living alone, working ridiculous hours every weekend, and trying to study at the same time…disaster. I lost touch with my friends, I became extremely isolated and I grew to hate it.
I spent the following few years cycling through seasons and academic semesters until I grew to resent how many weekends I lost to my business. Working weekends and losing your livelihood isn’t hustle, it’s bullshit and I quietly planned for the day I could leave it behind me.
It’s 2019 now and I’m so close to being done…with uni at least. Prop & Pose took up all the time I wasn’t studying. Once I finished my final units it was like this load was lifted off my shoulders and I felt free. My focus from that point was to get through the busy season and enjoy the end of the year.
I made it to 2020, and it started off well enough…
Thanks for reading this far, stay tuned and I’ll finish this story soon!
