When It Rains, It Pours (And Sometimes You Drown)

Or: why I've been MIA and what almost broke me this holiday season

You know that old saying, “When it rains, it pours”?

People usually say it like it’s a good thing. Business is booming. Projects are flooding in. You’re in demand. The hustle is paying off.

What they don’t tell you is that sometimes, when it pours, you drown.

And I almost did.

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I haven’t written in weeks. Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I ran out of things to say. But because I’ve been underwater - literally working until 2 AM, grinding through weekends, traveling to shoots while running on fumes, trying to keep my head above water with a client that pushed every limit I didn’t know I had.

The irony? This is exactly what I’ve been writing about for months. Building systems. Setting boundaries. Creating sustainable workflows.

Turns out knowing the theory and living the practice are two very different things.

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🎥 The Job That Should Have Been a Red Flag

The project came in hot during the holidays - always a dangerous time to say yes. Decent budget. Exciting opportunity. A brand I respected. Everything looked good on paper.

Except I wasn’t set up for it.

Not structurally. Not emotionally. Not with the right team in place to support the scale of what they needed. I thought I could muscle through it like I’d done before. Solo filmmaker mentality: just work harder, sleep less, figure it out.

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

Midnight edits after my kid went to bed. Weekend shoots that bled into weeknight pre-production. Client revisions that came in at 9 AM on Saturday with a Sunday morning deadline. Travel days sandwiched between deadlines with no buffer. And the whole time, this gnawing feeling in my gut that I was one missed deadline away from everything falling apart.

I was making it work. Technically.

But I was drowning.

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💡 The Difference Between Capacity and Capability

I could do the work. That wasn’t the issue.

I’m capable of shooting, directing, editing, client management, project coordination—all of it. I’ve done it for 20 years. The skills are there.

But capability isn’t the same as capacity.

Capacity is about infrastructure. Support systems. Margin. The scaffolding that holds everything together when the pressure mounts. And I didn’t have it.

I didn’t have an experienced editor I could hand off to when I was traveling. I didn’t have a producer managing client communication while I focused on the creative. I didn’t have enough buffer in my schedule to absorb the inevitable scope creep. I didn’t have the boundaries in place to say, “This timeline doesn’t work for us.”

I had skills. I didn’t have support.

And that gap almost buried me.

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🧱 When Systems Aren’t Just Theory

I’ve written about building systems like they’re some kind of creative life hack. Repeatable workflows. Standardized processes. The unglamorous infrastructure that makes sustainable creativity possible.

Turns out those aren’t optional nice-to-haves.

They’re the difference between thriving when it rains and drowning when it pours.

Because here’s the thing: when you’re operating at the edge of your capacity, there’s no room for error. One thing goes wrong - a shoot runs long, a client changes direction, an editor doesn’t deliver on time - and the whole house of cards collapses.

Without systems, you’re always one bad day away from chaos.

I knew this intellectually. I preach it in this newsletter. But I didn’t feel it until I was on the other side of midnight, staring at a timeline I couldn’t hit, realizing I’d built a business that only worked when everything went perfectly.

And nothing ever goes perfectly.

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🎯 The Hard Lesson

So here’s what I learned, the hard way, during the busiest (and hardest) season I’ve had in years:

You can’t scale yourself.

You can get better. You can get faster. You can optimize your process. But you - one person, with finite hours and finite energy - can’t scale to meet unlimited demand.

At some point, growth requires infrastructure, not intensity.

It requires saying no to projects you can do but aren’t set up to support. It requires investing in people, systems, and margin before you’re drowning. It requires building the scaffolding before the weight gets too heavy.

I didn’t do that. I thought I could just work harder and scale in real time. And it almost broke me.

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🔄 What Changes Now

I’m not here to tell you I’ve got it all figured out now. I don’t.

But I am making changes. Real ones.

I’m building a bench of freelancers I can bring in when projects get heavy. I’m implementing systems for client onboarding that set realistic timelines upfront. I’m blocking out admin days so I’m not editing at midnight because I spent all day in meetings. I’m getting better at recognizing when a project requires infrastructure I don’t have - and saying no.

Because the goal isn’t to work more. It’s to work better. To build a business that doesn’t require me to drown every time it rains.

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The truth is, I love what I do. I love the creative challenges, the problem-solving, the craft of making something out of nothing. But I also love my family. My health. My sanity. And this holiday season reminded me that you can’t sustain a creative career by sacrificing everything else.

So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been: I’ve been learning this lesson the hard way.

And if you’re in a similar place - saying yes to everything, working until you can’t see straight, telling yourself it’s just temporary - let me save you some pain:

It’s not temporary. Not unless you change the structure.

Because when it rains, it pours.

And you can either build the infrastructure to handle it, or you can drown.

I’m choosing infrastructure.

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Cheers,
Alex