I Bought The Ring Light Anyway

Dear friend,

I bought a ring light this week. $34, from a listing with four stars and one review complaining that the cord was too short. My Etsy shop made $61 last month, total, before Etsy took its cut. So the light cost more than half of what the whole store earned that month.

I bought it anyway. That's today's letter. You're allowed to spend on the thing before the thing has paid you back.

A girl in my group chat runs the same shop, almost exactly. She sells resin earrings, decent reviews, photos taken on a windowsill at whatever hour the light happens to be good. She has priced out a $34 ring light twice this month and closed the tab both times, because the shop hasn't earned $34 yet this month, and somewhere along the way she decided that settles it.

That's the math almost everyone runs. Earn first, then spend. It sounds responsible. It's actually a rule nobody wrote down, and it keeps her holding a phone at a window while the light she needs sits in a cart she won't check out. Here is the trap.

She sells earrings for $18 a pair and has sold eleven pairs this quarter. That's $198, minus Etsy's cut of about 6.5%, so $185 came into her account. A $34 light is 18% of that. Not nothing. But small enough that if she waits until it's "free" on paper, she'll be waiting through a month of photos this bad, taken at a window, in whatever light shows up.

The trap is believing permission has to be earned by the exact account it's spent from. It doesn't work that way for me, and it doesn't for her either. My shop and my life share one bank account. The $61 the shop made, the $40 I got from freelance proofreading, the light bill: same number. The ring light doesn't have to wait for the shop's number to grow. It just has to be a real $34 I actually have.

I checked out the cart Tuesday night. $34 for the light, $6 for shipping, $40 total, out of an account holding $612 before rent came out three days later. That left $572. Still enough for rent, still enough for groceries, still enough for the $9 subscription I keep forgetting to cancel.

The light didn't owe me a sale before I could own it. It doesn't have to earn its keep first, and neither does the $19 clip-on backdrop sitting in a different cart, the one I still haven't checked out yet. That's the fourth thing this year I've told myself to wait on, and the waiting never once made the number in my account any bigger. Here is where that sentence usually gets talked out of itself.

I'm not going to tell you to price out your own $34 thing today, or make a list of everything you've been waiting to buy. That's homework, and this letter doesn't hand out homework.

Here's what's true instead. If there's something sitting in a cart, something that would make the work you're already doing look like what it actually is, you don't have to earn it first. The number doesn't have to grow before the thing gets to exist in your life. It can just be a real purchase on a Tuesday, out of a bank account that also pays rent, buys groceries, and covers a subscription you forgot about.

You're allowed to spend on the work before the work has proven it deserves the spending. You're allowed to buy the thing that makes eleven pairs of earrings look like eleven pairs of earrings, not eleven photos taken at a window at six in the evening, in whatever light the sky happened to leave behind.

Today you get to receive the version of your shop that has decent light in it. That's the whole instruction.

Keep the door open,

P.S. The ring light shipped with a phone clamp that doesn't fit my case. I ordered a $6 clamp separately Wednesday. It hasn't come yet, so the light sits on my desk, plugged in, doing nothing so far.