Why I've Worked From Coffee Shops Every Day This Week.

Hello from my local coffee shop chain. I’ve been coming here most days this week because the thought of working in a cold, need-to-be-cleaned-and-organised house gives me an allergic reaction at the minute.

I actually feel an itchless itch to abandon our terraced home this month. I’m justifying it by saying it’s cheaper to spend £2 on a cappuccino than it is in use my oil filled radiator for the day. Plus, I don’t pay commute money, so.

But working outside of the house goes deeper than just escaping the four walls of our currently Christmas-clad abode.

I want to be around people, escape my anxiously over-ticking mind, and remind myself a world exists outside of my own.

I’m not sure how accurate this statistic is, but 70 percent of freelancers have felt lonely, disconnected, or isolated while being self-employed.

For the last four years of freelancing, I’ve repeated to myself that loneliness is only worth it because I’m paid for it.

I’ve looked into taking a job where I’m salaried, but there isn’t a job that would give me the flexibility I need as a mum to three kids, who doesn’t have anyone else to pick up the kids from school every day, or stay with them during our multiple half terms and holidays.

Every day, I’ve gotten home from morning school run, plugged in my computer, made a proper decaf coffee in my Italian coffee pot, prepped my second breakfast, boiled the kettle to pour into my hot water bottle, and particularly placed the oil filled radiator as close to my body as it’ll get without burning me – to start work.

There’s no one to greet me when I get into work, no one to have cuppa with on break, no one to give me feedback on my work, no one to moan to, no one to bounce ideas around with.

Before I was working, I had the kids home with me, and although not always the most engaging company, they were human beings near me.

Until you’re alone for eight hours a day, five days a week, you may think that having some alone time sounds lovely. “Oh I’d love to have a bit of quiet,” people have said to me. I get it. But when you’re in that quiet all the time, it feels suffocating.

During the holidays, I’ve noticed the loneliness is more acute. Everyone is out with their work colleagues at Christmas work parties. Or they are “super busy” seeing long-time friendship groups from childhood and family that has come in for the holidays.

Sat at my kitchen table, anytime I finish a task, I have all this empty mind space. Without someone to talk to, my thoughts wander, often toward anxiety about any and everything.

Perhaps in the *slightly* warmer and drier months, I’d head outside for a run or walk, but when the rain is constant and the sky is endlessly grey, all I want is to be inside and warm.

And for these reasons, I have been escaping to coffee shops to work, like I said, justifying the cost every single time I’m at the till.

Being in the presence of people, even when I’m not talking to them, makes me smile. Since most people my age are working in offices, it’s mostly elderly people I’m surrounded by while I sip and type. I listen in on their conversations, often silently disagreeing with their political views, giggling under my breath about how they feel about children these days.

Many of them, I’m sure have also come for coffee to escape the oppressing sameness of home. We live in a world craving social interaction.

When I’m not looking at the computer, I’m people watching, how they speak to the staff, how they’re dressed, who they’re with. They keep my undirected thoughts occupied, keeping my loneliness and anxiety at bay.

I feel like I’m only a tiny part of a world full of beautiful, kind, and only sometimes cruel people, rather than on an island alone. Every single person I sneakily stare at is living, perhaps trying to survive, in this shared humanity. They each have their own joys and sorrows. Their own griefs. And somehow, knowing we have more in common than we don’t, summons a sigh of relief, even though my life circumstances stay virtually the same.

For now, coffee shop working is the only way I’ll stay sane as a freelancer, building it in as a cost I’m willing to pay for the sake of wellbeing.