Real-Time Thoughts: Choose Your Hard

This entire weekend, I’m needing to squirrel myself away in my apartment here in Berlin to deal with a very unsexy, and energy-draining task. Taxes. It’s Friday night and I’ve already spent DAYS on this, with several more still ahead. And I’m so tired (crying emoji).

Only today have I felt like I’ve made some real headway and yet somehow it’s 10pm and I’m lying on my bed with my laptop open, my mind not quite wanting to rest and switch off.

You see, as a content creator and social media freelancer,  I’ve recently been selected for a tax audit here in Germany.  For three entire years.

The reasons for this, I can only speculate. Maybe it really is simply a random selection. Maybe the amount of travel throughout those years, alongside travel-related expenses and long periods spent outside Germany, simply flagged me as someone worth checking.

Or maybe governments everywhere are now beginning their own mammoth task of trying to fully understand what exactly content creators do and how this entire online world actually works. Ungreying the grey zone, so to speak.

The questionnaire I’ve been given to fill in goes into a surprising amount of detail about platforms being used. Insta, Tiktok, youtube, onlyfans (lol), myfriends (I’ve never even heard of this one). Questions are also being asked about gifted products, collabs with other creators, discount codes, donations etc etc etc. Lots of questions, in what seems to me, an attempt to catch up on the ever increasing ways people now earn money online.

And it’s understandable. Fair, even. Of course governments want to understand an industry that has evolved so quickly. But I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t felt frustrating too.

Especially as someone who is still very much figuring out how to sustainably make all of this work myself. To now be paying my accountant over 1000 EUR to support with the process, whilst also spending days gathering three years’ worth of documents, invoices, receipts and answers to pages and pages of questions.

I even had my poor mum on a video call pointing her phone at my old laptop while I tried to guide her through opening old folders of invoices and expense receipts. 

I’m not actually worried about the audit itself. In fact, going back through everything has made me realise I’ve probably been more conservative than anything when it comes to claiming expenses. What does make me slightly uneasy is simply not knowing where all of this is heading. What governments will ultimately decide is taxable, claimable, expensable, declarable and all other sorts of things.

Mostly though, right now, I’m just tired. Probably because I simply love creating, writing, sharing, building things… and admin side, while I do it, better now than the years before, it drains the hell out of me.

And in moments like this, when I’m perhaps at my weakest and buried in spreadsheets, I find myself thinking back to how simple life looked when I worked a more “normal” 9-5.  You work. You earn. Your taxes are deducted automatically. Your insurance, sorted. Your pension, handled. Sick pay, unemployment, structure, security. There can definitely be something comforting about that simplicity.

You don’t have to think about any extra admin at all really. And in these moments, a little part of me almost wants to give in and thinks, should I just go back? Why am I making this hard for myself?

I was thinking about exactly this while brushing my teeth tonight when I suddenly remembered a line I once heard on a podcast years ago. I can’t remember who said it.

But I remember the phrase: “Choose your hard.”

And it immediately put everything back into perspective for me. 

Because yes, sometimes being self-employed can be hard. But at the same time, when I’m deeply honest with myself, working a 9-5 would actually be so much harder for me. I know this from lived experience. Living a life with less freedom over where I work, how I spend my days, from where, what I create and how much autonomy I have over my own time.

Every path comes with its own challenges. Every path asks something of us. And I think sometimes we forget that. Spending so much time searching for the option that won’t be difficult that we forget it doesn’t actually exist. There is only the hard that feels worth it.

So I’ll remind myself of that over this weekend. That this is a hard I choose.

And despite the spreadsheets, the insecurity and extra admin, I’d still choose it again. Because for me, this is the hard that comes with freedom on the other side. And that’s a reward worth working for.

Okay, last word written for tonight. My laptop is finally closing, along with my eyes.