''You gotta work, b*tch"

Yes, but do I...?

Every now and then we have a song that goes around our house on loop. At the moment it’s ‘Work B*tch’ by Britney.

One of us will shout out ‘you wanna hot body?’

And another will shout back ‘umm, yes please! That would be very nice, thank you.’

‘You gotta work, b*tch.’

‘Ohhhh… really?!….ffs’

Recently I signed up to a business course, which I hoped would re-shape some structures in my business after a bunch of work got cancelled last year. And it’s been nothing short of existential. Not intentionally. And to be honest, when I’ve tried to bring any existential questions about purpose, identity and the sort to the course leaders I’ve had some raised eye-brows. Choose something that you feel really aligned with? That’s a lot of pressure, Sarah. But for me, it’s kind of essential. Unless the core of my being is shouting ‘yes! this is what I want to work on!’ I sort of don’t function.

I have battled for years with whether I am lazy. Work Shy. Avoiding the grind. And when I tell people these fears and they look at what I make they laugh. ‘How can you be lazy? You do so much!’ But I think the truth is the things I make don’t feel like work. Making my two hour one-woman show took energy, commitment and focus, but it didn’t feel like hard work. Launching and running Psy Fit has been a total joy from start to finish. Sure, most weeks I lie on my bed in protest before it starts wondering how I will muster the energy, but once I’m there it’s total flow. The things I build are from devotion, rather than duty. As soon as it feels like hard work (and by this I mean draining me of my life force energy), I start to question whether it’s where I should be putting my energy. Does this mean I’m lazy? Or do I just not want to feel like a machine?

Since burning out as a teacher in 2011, I’ve made it my mission to make sure work feels regenerative to me, and to those I work with. It really shouldn’t be taking from us this much. Yes, I believe in committing to things. Showing up. Putting energy into things that we care about. But the grind can do one.

There’s an amazing lyric in Martha Tilston’s ‘Artificial’, which she wrote about being in an office job:

This artificial me

I wanna show you what I really can be

Wanna run across the office tables

Saying ‘‘no you won’t have me

no, no you won’t have me

keep on running ‘til I reach the sea’’

YES YES YES.

Every day last week I did the homework for the course, showed up online in all the places you’re ‘supposed to’, played the role of the person who’s gotta work, b*tch. And at the end of every day I felt really depleted and sad. And every day I ran to the sea, like Martha, and remembered what it meant to feel alive.

Is this what it takes to run a business in 2026, I wondered?

If this is, I’m not sure it’s the life I want to build. There MUST be another way.

I also had to laugh at the absolute irony of me building a brand called ‘follow the aliveness’ and then sitting down to work on my corporate pipeline through gritted teeth, and thinking about how to communicate said aliveness in my linked in bio. You gotta work, b*tch.

Today I wondered if part of what I’m apprenticing with right now is uncertainty. There’s so much uncertainty EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD and to have it in one’s own life too can just be a little bit too much to bear. But maybe there’s nothing to be certain about right now. Maybe it’s about expanding our capacity for dealing with this liminality.*

And in accepting that, paradoxically, I feel a bit more settled.

A transitional moment of work and life. Preparing behind the scenes for the next chapter. A summer of integration. Allowing things to unfold. And not feeling that the only way to bridge that gap is to go back into old, out-dated, harmful ways of working.

So some questions for us all to ponder…

• what tasks in your work leave you feeling energised and full of life?

• is there anything you’re currently doing in your work that leaves you feeling more depleted and drained? Are there any other options?

• how do you want to feel each day?

Great to have you here today,

Wishing you all a regenerative week of aliveness (and lots of w*rk, b*tch!)

Sarah

*which I’m also enjoying reading about in Sarah Wilson’s brilliant book - i eat the stars - read it!