The "mood at work" trend is all over TikTok right now and I have been deeply, shamelessly consuming it. If you haven't seen it: people do little video diaries of their actual emotional state at different points in the workday. The corporate ones are especially unhinged. Perky professional in a blazer at 9am. Same person at 2pm looking like she's been through a small war. By 4pm she's either defeated or absolutely feral and the music shifts accordingly. Extremely relatable if you work in an office.
I do not work in an office. I work in a closet.
That is not a metaphor. My recording setup lives in a converted walk-in closet in my apartment, acoustic panels on three walls, a mic stand, my interface, a keyboard I keep meaning to upgrade, and just enough room to turn around if I do it carefully. It's warm in there. In summer it's very warm. The rest of my apartment is my office, my couch, my kitchen, my practice space, and also where I live, and there is no boundary between those things. My desk is eight feet from my bed. Sunday, my beat-up acoustic, hangs on the wall across from where I eat breakfast.
When the "mood at work" videos started flooding my For You page I thought: I should document mine. So I spent three days actually paying attention to my emotional arc through a studio day because I'd never really catalogued it before. I just sort of... existed through it. So here it is. The self-employed, indie-artist, working-from-her-closet edition.
Mood 1: 9am, delusionally optimistic
This is the best version of me. I'm on my first coffee, made in the little moka pot with the scratched handle, and I have a list. The list is beautiful. The list has five items and a realistic timeline and everything on it seems genuinely doable today. I'm going to track two vocal passes on the bridge section, answer three emails, post something that isn't just a repost, and maybe, MAYBE, actually deal with the metadata situation on my distributor dashboard that I've been avoiding for six weeks.
I feel excellent. Lazarus the pothos on my windowsill is drooping slightly, as he always does, but I've watered him and given him a little encouraging nod. The sun is at the right angle. A response came in overnight from someone who found HEATHEN HYMNS through a playlist and just wanted me to know it made them feel less alone. I'm riding that. Everything is possible at 9am.
Mood 2: 11am, encountering resistance
Something is not working. I can't tell if it's me or the track or the room or the fact that I had a weird dream last night and part of my brain is still processing it. Four takes of the same eight-bar section and all four are technically fine and none of them are right. I know this sound. The sound of my voice being technically present and emotionally absent, and you can hear it in playback immediately if you know what you're listening for. The sound of performing instead of feeling.
I close the session. Go make more coffee. Stand in my kitchen for approximately five minutes staring at the middle distance like a Victorian ghost. This is part of the process, this is normal, I remind myself of this. It does not help immediately but it helps eventually.
Mood 3: 1pm, the chaos window
This is when everything that isn't music decides to need attention. The email I sent last week gets a response that requires another email. My phone has seventeen notifications, most of which are TikTok telling me something is performing well and I should "boost" it, which I am not going to do. My landlord leaves a voicemail about something involving the boiler that I transcribe and read three times and still don't fully understand. Biscuit, the neighbor's dog I sometimes watch, is apparently staying with me this weekend, which I forgot and which I'm actually thrilled about because Biscuit is excellent.
The 1pm window is when being self-employed starts to feel like being three people with different job titles who all share one brain and none of them have enough of it. The musician needs to be present and emotional. The business person needs to be responsive and clear. The social media person needs to be vaguely entertaining and not forget to post. These three people do not always get along. At 1pm they are actively arguing.
I usually eat lunch somewhere in here, standing at my counter because sitting at a table feels too formal for a meal that is frequently leftovers or the contents of a half-empty jar of peanut butter. I do not have a lunch break. I have a pause where food happens and then it's back to it.
Mood 4: 3pm, the slump and the ritual
My energy crashes at 3pm every day without exception. I've tried fighting it, I've tried scheduling around it, I've come to terms with it. At 3pm I'm no longer capable of making good creative decisions. I know this about myself the way I know I can't parallel park on the first try or that I will always miscalculate how long it takes to get to the airport.
What I do at 3pm instead of fighting it: I do the mechanical stuff. Format the metadata I've been avoiding. Update the spreadsheet where I track streaming numbers, not obsessively, just logging. Respond to the emails that don't require me to think, just to be polite and organized. Clean up session files. The filing equivalent of work, the kind of tasks that feel productive without requiring anything that isn't operational.
Sometimes I take a walk around the block. Twenty minutes. No headphones. Just the city, which is always doing something absurd. I come back marginally more human.
Mood 5: 5pm, second wind (the real work happens now)
This is my secret. Most people shut down after 5pm. I spin up. My brain, which has been warming up all day like an old car engine, finally hits its operating temperature somewhere around evening. I don't know if this is insomnia or night-owl biology or just the fact that I grew up in a household where the evening was when people finally sat down and talked and things got real.
The city gets quieter. My apartment gets darker, which means the lamp situation becomes what it always is, warm and close and just this side of cozy. I light the candle on my desk, it smells like cedarwood and something unidentifiable and I've had it for four months and it's finally burning low. The closet booth feels right at this hour. My voice opens up. The takes I couldn't get at 11am happen at 6pm, 7pm, sometimes later.
This is why the album sounds the way it does. HEATHEN HYMNS was almost entirely tracked in the evening or at night. There's something in the nighttime air of that closet, figuratively, not literally, there's no actual air in there, it's a closet, that I don't have access to during daylight hours. The songs needed the dark. So did I, apparently.
Mood 6: 9pm, talking myself into stopping
The dangerous hour. I'm in a flow state and I know that if I stop, the thing I'm building might not be there in the same shape tomorrow. The 9pm version of me wants to keep going until the session is done, the mix is done, the everything is done. The 9pm version of me has absolutely no concept of the 8am version of me who will be paying the price for this.
I have a deal with myself, which I violate frequently: stop at 10pm on nights that are not adjacent to a deadline. Write down exactly where I am and what I was doing in a note that my morning self will actually understand. Close the laptop. Go sit on the couch and watch something dumb or read something that isn't screens, and try, I really genuinely try, to let the work stay in the closet for the rest of the night.
I succeed at this maybe sixty percent of the time. The other forty percent I'm back at the desk at 11pm having "just one more listen."
Mood 7: 11pm, making peace with what got done
The day is over. Here's what actually happened today versus the beautiful five-item list I had at 9am. I tracked those vocal passes, not two, one, but it was a good one. I answered two of the three emails. I did not post anything but I filmed something that might become a post. The metadata thing is still pending. I did find out that "Both / Neither" has been streamed in forty-seven countries, which absolutely broke my heart open in the best way, and I sat with that for a while.
This is the mood at work for the self-employed creative: it never maps cleanly onto the plan. The wins are different from the ones you anticipated. The losses are different too. The feelings that come up between 9am and 11pm are not particularly professional-looking, no blazer moment, no clean 5pm shutdown, no separation between the person doing the work and the person the work is about.
But I built this life because I couldn't be the person in the blazer. Couldn't do the managed professional mood arc. My mood at work is messy and nonlinear because the work is messy and nonlinear and so am I, and that's actually the whole point. The album out there in the world right now is proof that the closet booth and the second wind and the 9pm negotiations were worth something.
So yeah. Mood at work: completely feral, deeply fulfilled, perpetually behind on metadata. How are you doing out there?