A year in

A year ago, I was the work. If something got made, I made it. If a client was happy, it was because of something my own hands had done that week. There was a clean, almost physical satisfaction in that. The day ended and you could point at the thing you'd built. I miss it more than I expected to.

I still touch the work, but less and less, and that slow drift away from it has been the strangest thing to sit with. The hours I spend actually on a project are the ones I look forward to most. But more and more of my day goes to project management, and if I'm honest, that's not where I should be either. It's a role I'm filling because someone has to, not because it's mine. What we really need is a dedicated project lead, but I can't justify that hire until the pipeline is fuller and steadier than it is today, so I keep carrying it myself and telling myself it's temporary. The rest of my time goes to the things only I can do right now: making sure everyone has work in front of them, keeping the next projects coming in, selling. I spent years getting good at the craft, and the reward for getting good at it was, apparently, to spend most of my days on everything that surrounds it. I still make the thing sometimes. Mostly, now, I try to make it possible.

The part nobody warned me about is the weight. As a freelancer, the only person I could let down was myself, and I'd made a quiet peace with that risk a long time ago. Now there are four salaries that depend on decisions I make at my desk, sometimes badly, sometimes on too little sleep. That changes how a bad month feels. It changes what I'm willing to gamble. Some nights it sits on my chest. But it's also the most honest reason I've ever had to be better than I was, not for an abstract idea of growth, but because real people are counting on me to not be careless.

Having a co-founder rewired me too. I was used to being the whole decision: fast, unilateral, accountable only to me. Learning to think out loud with someone, to be talked out of something I was sure about, to disagree without it becoming a wound. That's a skill I didn't have a year ago and am still only halfway to. The trade is obvious in hindsight: I gave up the speed of being alone and got, in return, the relief of not being alone. Most days that's a good trade.

What I'm proudest of isn't the headcount or the revenue. It's the quieter thing: that I learned to let go of work I would once have clutched, and watched someone do it differently, sometimes better, and felt something other than threat. That trust didn't come naturally. I had to build it the slow way, by being wrong about people in the right direction.

I don't have this figured out. There are weeks I feel like a freelancer who took on too much paperwork, and weeks I feel like I'm finally doing the thing I was supposed to be doing all along. A year in, I think that oscillation might just be what it feels like. The title changed on paper in a single afternoon. The person catching up to it is still, slowly, arriving.