Why Entrepreneurship Reason #1: The Freedom to Be Unstable
As Co-Founder of WritingCommunity.ca, I think it’s important for visitors of this website to understand why this business exists and who built it. I’m starting this blog, Disorder Inc., to share some of those stories and reasons with you.
SIDE NOTE: WritingCommunity.ca was Co-Founded by myself and my dear friend, Veronique. I will, of course, only be sharing my own personal experiences and opinions in this series.
As a neurodiverse person with a variety of mental health disorders, entrepreneurship has helped me find peace in my disordered brain. Over the course of this Disorder Inc. Series, Why Entrepreneurship, I’ll explain how and why self-employment has helped me survive and cope, and I will hopefully provide some advice and support for others like me in the process.
So, who am I? My name is Jessica Trudel, but you can call me Jes.
My childhood was anything but stable. While I was born in Timmins, Ontario, Canada and live in here today, I’ve come and gone many times. Four cities, 2.5 families, and more than 20 homes later, I am finally living in what I hope will be my forever home in the only city that ever truly felt like home.
Getting here was not easy. Having attended eight different schools by the time I graduated high school, three of which I attended in grade 8 alone, I wasn’t great at forming lasting relationships. I was bullied and abandoned at various points in my life, some for real, other times just perceived. That’s where mental health played its biggest role.
I can remember feeling depressed and anxious as young as 10 years old. I have very few memories at all from the years before that, just flashes here and there of things I might have seen or done. Family members sometimes contradict me and say these things never happened, so I can’t really trust my memories that much.
I was not diagnosed formally with any mental health condition until I was an adult and had the autonomy and wherewithal to take myself to the doctor. It was clear I had a mood disorder, with chronic depression, cyclothymia, and bipolar all put on the table as possible reasons. Finally, when I was thirty, a counsellor suggested psychometric testing to get to the bottom of it. Why this was never suggested earlier, I don’t know. After the tests, the doctor determined that I have Borderline Personality Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
These diagnoses put my entire life in perspective. The feelings of emptiness and abandonment. The inability to hold down a job. My frequent personality clashes with my bosses and co-workers. My self-sabotaging and self-injuring. My impulsivity. The list goes on.
Knowledge, they say, is power, and to an extent that’s true. This knowledge allowed me to do my own research to better understand myself. This knowledge allowed me to get prescribed the right medication (eventually…I’ll get to that in a future post). But knowledge can only do so much. Knowledge did not suddenly make my life or my brain more stable. Medication, too, can only stabilize my brain and moods so much.
That’s where entrepreneurship comes in. Self-employment gives me the freedom to be my unstable self without recrimination.
No job or employer ever gave me that freedom. There’s only so much work-life balance an employer can provide, after all. In the end, they need to know they can rely on your to attend that all-important meeting, to meet that urgent deadline, to work cordially with every co-worker and boss. Try as I might, I never could quite meet these expectations.
Granted, sometimes my bosses could have afforded me a little latitude. What a boss deems urgent is not always so, after all. But I know now, in hindsight, that many times I was in the wrong and just could not see it at the time. I was never knowingly or purposefully being insubordinate, of course, but in my mind, everything I did was perfectly justified by what I perceived to be the circumstances of the job, or the wrongdoings of others.
I started my first business in 2013 after my first “diagnosis” of bipolar. I believed the diagnosis then (again, more on that later), and decided to come clean with my bosses about my struggles. It’s important to note that no employee is required to tell their bosses about their medical conditions, and it’s certainly not always safe to do so. In my case, I was lucky to have great boss with whom I felt comfortable discussing my mental health. Those bosses were some of the best bosses I’d ever worked with and as I thought, they were extremely supportive. It was they that suggested I open my own business working from home with them as my very first client.
Without their support, I’m not sure I ever would have gone out on my own. At the time, I had three children to support, so knowing I had a guaranteed client gave me the confidence I needed to establish Cursor Communications. My first two years of business were incredibly fruitful, and even garnered me a Young Professional nomination for my local business awards.
I had found what I’d always been looking for: identity, respect, and freedom. I could decide how hard and how long I worked, which project I worked on, which clients I took on, and which projects to outsource when my mind just wasn’t there.
Most importantly, that first business gave me a better sense of self, a badge I now where with honour: I am an entrepreneur.
