I run Af Jord, which I have had for five years. I have previously been self-employed, so creating my own working life is not new to me, but it still feels like a movement I actively choose every day.

My journey has not been linear. It has been marked by both courage, doubt, pride, and periods where everything feels heavy. But the longing to shape my own working life and create something with my hands has always been stronger than the desire for the security of a salaried job.

Being self-employed means freedom, but not necessarily ease. And perhaps it is precisely the tension between the two that makes it meaningful.

It means that I can work in close contact with my own energy and my hormonal cycle. As far as possible, I plan my work around it. For me, it is also a quiet insistence that working life should be able to accommodate women's rhythms, not the other way around. It is wonderful to be able to be a whole person and a woman in my own business.

At the same time, it also means full responsibility, which can be draining. Especially during busy periods, or when January is grey, the children are sick, and sales are standing still. But even then, the thought of a salaried job feels more suffocating than the uncertainty.

The best thing is the balance between intensity and immersion.

When it is busy, it is a recognition that what I create has value. And when I sit alone in the workshop, in deep contact with the clay, I can almost enter a meditative state. It is my breathing space, especially as a mother of young children, when life can be intense and demanding.

There is also an enormous pride in opening the door to my own workshop. I feel gratitude every day.

It is rarely the big moments. It is the quiet ones.

When I have dropped off my son and walk along the water back to the workshop. I stop for a moment and feel the sea. When I enter the workshop, turn on the radio and a candle, and begin the day's work with coffee.

It is in the transition between home and workshop, between care and immersion, that I feel why I have chosen this life. For me, it is not about balancing two separate lives, but about being a whole person, both as a mother and as a ceramicist.

Experience.

I have been self-employed long enough to know that it comes in waves. You have to look at the year as a whole and not at a single grey week in January.

Just like in my own cycle, there are periods when the energy is low and everything feels heavier. I used to be hard on myself during those phases. Now I try to meet them with awareness instead of resistance. When you understand that everything is cyclical, you also know that it will lighten again. That realization gives me peace.

It also gives me courage to remember that I have actually created this. That I have held on for five years. It is not accidental.

I am incredibly fortunate.

During my ceramics education, I met my best friend, Tinne, who today runs Keramikværkstedet in Copenhagen. She is a crucial support for me. We had children at the same time, we both live with self-employed partners, and even though our businesses are different, we understand each other's reality to the core.

Without her, it would be much harder to remain steady in this choice.

She is in the process of establishing a network for women, which I have been invited to join. I am truly looking forward to learning from others.

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