Becoming a full-time entrepreneur is a whole new world. I’ve been in business for over 2 years, but it still feels like I’m doing everything for the first time.
When you dedicate all of yourself so fully to your business as a solopreneur, you and your business enmesh into the same entity. There becomes no difference between you and everything you’ve built and run all by yourself. Your near entire sense of identity gets wrapped up in living and breathing your business and focusing on it 1,000%. Then the day comes where your business needs you less. There’s less work for you to do. It’s harder to fill what feels like empty time. You’re a full time entrepreneur now. You’ve accomplished the goals you set out to do, and next is the ‘now what?’
How do you fill all this time you now have? What if you work yourself into exhaustion, followed by your body and mind forcing you to rest, and then a period of feeling lost not knowing what is next. You ask yourself, “Do I have interests? What do I like to do for fun? Do I even know how to have fun?”
Being autistic myself, it seems like most autistics have special interests, and outside of my business I have none. I could consider my cats my special interest, which they appreciate, but that’s only one thing. There are no special skills or extra abilities. I never developed anything. Me and my business are the same. My business has become who I am – all that I am.
What comes next? How do you develop interests? Is there something you might like to do that could be fun? Who knows. I certainly don’t. I’ve spent the last 2 years giving everything, sacrificing, working myself into exhaustion multiple times, fighting for a cause I believe in so much, and there’s nothing else beyond that.
It’s like hitting a wall trying to uncover how someone goes about developing an interest and separate sense of self. I’ve tried numerous times to find something. All successful people have an outlet to keep them balanced. I just work instead. Create more work. There’s always new projects I can do, new stores, new websites, this blog, anything where I can keep myself busy and find ways to bring something new into the world.
Being a solopreneur is very lonely at times, and your work becomes all that you have. This is especially intensified by the fact I’m asexual and demiromantic. There’s no ‘normal’ part of my life. Only answer to myself, I make my own schedule, decide my work, am my own boss, full 100% autonomy – the entrepreneurial dream.
None of the people I know in real life get it. I’m on an island by myself locally. They all work professional jobs, have families and/or married, live in the outside world. Sharing my entrepreneurial aspirations, goals and experiences, quite literally gets ignored. No one relates. They don’t celebrate with me when I achieve things. Dead silence. It can be lonely being an autistic entrepreneur when you have no one in person locally who relates to your own experiences as an autistic person and/or as an entrepreneur.
Being asexual and demiromantic means all of this is mixed with the desire to prefer being alone with your cats all the time over having a significant other. I like to be left alone with my work and business and its hard to get that if someone were around all the time. They would want things from me I simply cannot give them, and since no one in your life relates to that, it gets lonely. I’d rather be alone all the time than force myself to be something I’m not. I’ve done too much of that in my life. Suppressing who you are to make your relationship person happy. It’s the real struggle behind being asexual and on the aromantic spectrum. Both the luxury of avoiding all the drama and heartache that comes with it, while simultaneously wishing you could at least have a friend near you who gets it, but I don’t.
Many entrepreneurs get out there and talk to people and network with others, but considering I cannot read facial expressions, body language, and at times cannot read the emotions of others, I’m only making educated guesses about what people might be thinking or feeling. This part of my nature and autistic alexithymic traits makes getting out there and networking sound like my own personal hell. I can’t relate to neurotypicals at all. I’m just so different from them, so unmasked, so used to not being exposed to them at all, I just can’t relate enough to have a productive conversation.
I’m in an autistic bubble because of my store and social media and only socialize with autistic people online. That’s where there is a whole world of people who might relate to at least one aspect of my life experiences, which makes me feel less isolated and alone.
When your business becomes all that you are, all you are left with is yourself. The moment it runs like the machine you worked relentlessly build and you’ve made it so efficient it needs you less, and then what?
That’s the big question for me at the moment. Who am I?
Ashley Lauren Spencer 