New Year’s Eve as a prediction of the next year?

I’m not sure if it is a polish superstition or something I have heard from someone in my youth, but it stuck for good - the idea that your new year will be the same as the last night of the old year (and therefore go and celebrate!). So I could have predicted how my 2020 would be on New Year's Eve and it wasn’t looking good. I was running between bed and bathroom with a gastrointestinal infection and slept through midnight, completely exhausted and feeling sick.

Still, no one could have predicted what was about to happen globally...but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Besides not being able to celebrate the end of the year, I also wasn’t able to look back on my past year and plan my new year. This happened for the first time in a very long time and unfortunately I cannot show you my yearly sheet of ideas, plans and visions this time. It’s much harder to remember what I was thinking and hoping was going to happen in 2020 but maybe it’s better this way, because I’m sure it would be pretty devastating to compare it to reality.

I just know what I have written in last year’s post - that I wanted to get back to work right away with the help of a babysitter and my husband and the hope of my baby sleeping well during the days and night. I wanted to finish projects that weren’t finished the year before: the skillshare class, the newsletter, the preggo-journal and then continue working on business development, finding new assignments and contacting old and new clients.

Hopeful beginnings

“Yoga with baby” - follow the link below to see the animations

In the beginning of the year I tried to play around with animation and made a series about yoga with babies during the time the babysitter was there. I had one assignment for a CPR poster for a bar in New York City which was supposed to be the starting point to getting back to client work.

CPR poster for High Low Beverage Company

Luckily we ended the last and started the new year with holidays, little did we know that we will need all the good vibes and energy very soon.

Corona, the first.

In the end of February, beginning of March the Corona virus hit Berlin and soon afterwards we went into the first lockdown. For me this meant no more babysitter and therefore no more work. The baby was sleeping very badly at that point, especially during the days so I couldn’t use this time for work and my husband needed to do everything to save his business. I at least was still on maternity leave and getting paid, so I decided to use this lockdown to really be a fulltime mom and not to concentrate on anything else besides care- and housework. To be honest it felt pretty good to have this one focus for a while and I enjoyed the time I’ve spent with my baby and giving him my full attention. We went out into nature on family weekends and sometimes met a friend for a distanced walk. We were lucky enough to find a little garden that we rented and took care of for the next months. I was glad the first lockdown hit us while I was still sitting at home and being on maternity leave. I felt for moms around the world who had to work and take care of their children simultaneously and was rather grateful then resentful. But business wise I wasn’t able do anything while all of this happened and I can report nothing here. I was also off of social media for a very long time and to be honest this whole year I didn’t miss social media very much.

Summer, freedom and new ideas.

In the end of spring, beginning of summer the pandemic situation started to look better in big parts of Europe and we packed our van and went for a month of holidays in Slovenia. The nature, the freedom, the space - it was totally what we needed and finally during a long, lonely hike I had a new vision of what I wanted to do next with my business.

You need to know that after releasing my book in late September 2019 I was kind of uninspired for big personal projects and I hated that state. From the beginnings of zoluart, I have always had a vision of what I wanted to achieve: being featured in Flow Magazine, client work with well known brands (Calzedonia!), steady editorial work and income, writing, illustrating and publishing a book. I have achieved it all and now found myself uninspired. What was it that I wanted to do next? The idea came to me in July on a very steep walk to a lonely beach and so Local City Box was born.

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Just in time to start working on it, we have also found a daycare place for our son from August and so I started to slowly get back into a working situation.

During summer I also started to attend a weekly mastermind with fellow creative business owners. A mastermind is a structured meeting with the aim to help and lift each other and share knowledge. The badass women who invited me to join theirs gave me structure, hope, ideas and even work (I did one portrait for a family member of one of them and it was my first paid assignment since a long time, also my first income after maternity leave).

I had still only very few time to work, because of the settling-in-phase at daycare during which my son was attending the kindergarten only for a few minutes and then hours a day but it already felt like big freedom.

Magical timing.

A few days after my child went to kindergarten I contacted my workplace. I was still employed (in an area having nothing to do with creativity) and was supposed to go back in December. Part-time, like before. I was already pretty reluctant and could not imagine how it would all work out: two jobs adding up to more than 40 hours a week with a toddler who I didn’t want to send to daycare for more than 6 hours daily in the beginning. But still, I am all about financial security and I didn’t have the balls to quit the job. Let me rip off the bandaid : the job quit me. Or rather, my contract couldn’t be prolonged as the company didn’t survive the coronavirus. At first I was shocked, sad and scared. But after the initial feelings I was relieved. The decision I wanted to take but was afraid of taking, was taken for me. I have already told everyone that I was not going to go back to being employed after my maternity leave but in the end the maternity leave was much harder than I thought and I didn’t manage to build my business to a level of security that would give me the guts to just quit. But now I had to do what I wanted to do anyways - deep inside - for a pretty long time: go full time illustrator! Build my own company!

Lucky as I am, a few days after the job news, I got an email from a great environmental NGO asking me to illustrate their next campaign. It was a big assignment which I just finished a few days ago and it was one of the most rewarding work experiences I have had so far. I loved the subject of the campaign, the client was very clear on what he wanted but also extremely appreciative of my creative process and keen to give a lot of (positive) feedback. The contract was very fair and all in all I have found myself smiling while working and wishing for more work like this, being happy that I am going full time freelance in such a beautiful way.

Website header for Deutsche Umwelt Hilfe https://natur-ist-unser-kapital.de/

Looking into the future. Corona, the second.

So as you can see I didn’t manage to do what I thought I would do this year. No online course, no second book, no (regular) newsletter and I didn’t achieve as much as I wished for but (big BUT!) I am very happy with where I find myself towards the end of this year. 3 years of building my brand, finding myself, fulfilling my dreams and part-time zoluart are leading to a full time business and I am in for it! Can’t wait! I am planning to found a new company with Local City Box in the beginning of 2021 (still employed until the end of 2020) and continue to work with clients as zoluart. But I am also aware of how fast the situation can change - we are just in the second lockdown right now - and how fast it could be, that I need to dial back and take care of my son “fulltime” again, if the kindergartens should close one more time. We do have an emergency plan with my husband how, if that would happen, I could still continue to work at least 70% but it would not be easy (I already had a test run while my son was sick and 10 days at home). So I’m taking care of my physical and mental health and fueling up on power, sunshine and positivity for harder days.

And that is what I wish for you as well: stay healthy, stay hopeful, stay strong, stay positive. If I can do it, chances are good, you can too. Let’s leave 2020 behind us and visualize 2021 already!