From the Kitchen Table
I work at three in the morning sometimes. The desk lamp makes a small circle on my keyboard. AJ is sleeping. This is the story of how the kitchen table became this chair.
I work at three in the morning sometimes.
The room is dark. AJ is sleeping. I do not turn on the ceiling light. I have a small desk lamp. It makes a circle of warm light on my keyboard. That circle is where I work.
The chair I am sitting on right now is a gift from AJ. The iMac is a gift from AJ. The AirPods are gifts from AJ. We were supposed to get married in Tagaytay. Then Taal erupted. Then there was an earthquake. Then COVID came. We had a small church wedding instead. We saved a lot of money that way. AJ used the savings for the things I had been praying about. For years. Since my Google days.
For a long time, the voice in my head said this:
“You do not deserve this dream workstation. Your back is already old. You have degenerative disc disease. Your spine is twenty years past your age. Sit at the kitchen table where you belong.”
If you are working from your kitchen table right now, I have been there.
For a long stretch of my freelancing life, the kitchen table was my office. Just the small wooden mesa. The same chair we used for dinner. That was where I opened my laptop and worked.
Later I bought a desk for five hundred pesos at Sunshine Mall in Taguig. A small cheap mall. A small cheap table. I was proud of it. It was mine.
My first computer was an Acer. Then a MacBook Air. The iMac came after the wedding. The dream chair came after the iMac. Each one came in its own time. The kitchen table taught its lesson first.
The lesson was this: accept and work happily with what you have.
I think the inner critic wanted me to skip that lesson. It wanted me to either hate the kitchen table or hate myself for needing more than it. Both are the same trap. Both forget that the table was a gift too, in its own season.
I have one body. That is what my spine kept telling me. Eight hours a day on the kitchen chair. One body. One back. One life. So the chair matters. The desk matters. The small circle of lamp light at three in the morning matters. Not because the gear makes the work. The work makes the gear necessary.
This is the part I want my fellow freelancers to hear, especially the ones who are sick or limited or quietly behind. You are not less faithful because your setup is small. You are not more spiritual because you can suffer at a wrong-height table. Stewardship of your body is part of stewardship of your work. A five hundred peso desk is a real answer to prayer. So is an iMac. So is the patience in between.
The Lord knew I needed this iMac. He also knew I needed the five hundred peso desk first. He gave them in that order on purpose. The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit. Small beginnings are not punishment. They are training. They teach your hands what enough feels like, so that when more comes, you do not become a stranger to gratitude.
There is something in me that still tears up at three in the morning. The lamp. The keyboard. The chair my husband chose for my old spine. I did not climb my way here. I was carried, slowly, through eruption and earthquake and a virus that closed the world. God did not owe me any of this. He gave it anyway, in the order I could carry.
Tonight, before you scroll for the next dream chair, sit at the table you have. Put your hands on it. Thank God for this one. Ask Him to bless the work you will do on it tomorrow. The next one comes when it comes. And if it never comes, this one was still a kindness.
For the glory of God.
- Lala