Too Many Hats, Not Enough Headspace

Wearing Too Many Hats

Managing two Etsy shops, two TikTok shops, one website, four social media accounts, and a print farm sounded manageable when I first set it all up. It felt exciting, like I was building this interconnected machine where every part supported the next. But lately? It’s starting to feel like the machine is running me.

I wake up already behind. I open my phone and there’s a pile of messages, questions, and algorithm updates waiting. The printers are humming in the background, but instead of feeling productive, I feel pulled in a dozen directions at once.

The Push and Pull

The insulin pen cases are the thing that make me smile. They’re the reason I even started experimenting with some of this stuff in the first place. But they don’t pay the bills. The deck boxes do—that’s where the revenue comes from, the orders that keep stacking up, the products people keep asking for.

It’s a strange tension: my heart says one thing, my bank account says another.

Splitting Streams

Part of me knows I have to split things across different platforms. I don’t want to wake up one morning to find Etsy changed a rule and half my income disappeared. That fear is always in the back of my mind. But splitting streams means splitting myself—different listings, different rules, different customers. Every platform is its own job.

Some days, I wonder if I’ve traded the risk of relying on one stream for the certainty of spreading myself too thin.

The Social Media Trap

And then there’s social media—the glue holding it all together. It’s where people see the story behind the products, where I get to connect and share and be more than just “a shop.” But the pressure to always post, always engage, always keep up…it’s draining. If I stop, everything slows down. If I keep going, I burn out.

It feels like I’m constantly choosing between momentum and sanity.

Where Do I Cut?

I don’t know the answer yet. I know I can’t keep all of this going at the same pace forever. Something has to give. Do I let go of the thing I love, or the thing that pays? Do I scale back on social media and risk fading into the noise? Or do I double down on one stream and let the others go quiet?

Writing this down is my way of admitting: I can’t do it all. I don’t need to have the perfect plan today. But I do need to start making choices before the choices make themselves for me.

Right now, I’m just trying to figure out how to breathe in the middle of it all.

👉 If you were in my shoes, what would you cut back on first?