Taking Stock
Tax season can reveal feelings about risk, momentum, and what’s required to keep going
By Sue Pendleton, Founder
Tax season has a way of making things real. There are few times of year that force quite the same kind of clarity as tax season.
The receipts.
The totals.
The comparisons.
The numbers, all gathered together in one place.
Things that felt abstract while I was living them suddenly look very concrete on paper.
And this year, that hit me harder than I expected.
I’m self-funding ENSOhello, and seeing all of those costs laid out together was more than eye-opening. It was scary. At times, it was downright terrifying.
I had started a business once before with two former coworkers, and that experience felt very different. It was a service-based business, and our initial investment was relatively small. We each put in about $2,500. There was risk, of course, but not a great deal of pain attached to it.
ENSOhello has been something else entirely.
Creating an actual thing, even one that lives in digital form, comes with very tangible costs. And trying to build the best possible MVP has required a constant balancing act: listening carefully to feedback, resisting the urge to get too precious about making it perfect, simplifying enough to prove the concept, and still trusting my gut when something feels worth the added investment.
That kind of trust feels very different when the money is your own. And when it affects your family, the vulnerability deepens.
When instinct gets expensive
One of the things I’ve been realizing is that instinct feels different when there is more at stake.
It is one thing to trust your gut in theory. It is another to trust it when it means spending more money, taking on more risk, and living with the possibility that you may be wrong. Building ENSOhello has required that kind of trust over and over again.
Not blind trust. Not reckless trust. But the kind of trust that comes from listening carefully, paying attention, weighing what I’m hearing, and then still making a call when there is no guaranteed answer.
That is a vulnerable way to build something. And in many ways, it feels surprisingly similar to putting my own art into the world. Because the deeper risk is not just financial. It’s personal. It is the risk of believing in something enough to keep going even when there is uncertainty, uneven progress, and no clear promise of return.
The numbers tell one story. My art tells another.
At the same time, taking stock this year also showed me something encouraging. I made more money from my art than I have in previous years. I’m proud of that. I have been slowly building an audience, and this past year, there were signs that those efforts were leading somewhere. I was represented by a gallery for the first time, and that made a real difference.
And then, like so many things in the art world, that momentum was interrupted. The gallery closed.
That, too, is part of the story.
There can be movement.
There can be growth.
There can be signs that something is working.
And then something outside your control creates a bump in the road anyway.
I know so many artists live in that exact tension. You begin to feel a little momentum. You start to think maybe something is opening up. Maybe the audience is growing. Maybe the work is finding its way. And then something shifts. A gallery closes. The market changes. Life intervenes. A plan falls apart.
It does not erase the progress. But it does test your relationship to it.
Where my art life and my startup life collide
What struck me most this year is how much my ENSOhello world and my art world collide at exactly the same vortex. On the surface, they are very different. One is a startup. One is my art practice. One lives in product development, strategy, testing, and funding. The other lives in painting, audience-building, galleries, and creative growth.
And yet the emotional center is remarkably similar.
Both require putting something deeply personal into the world. Belief before proof. Risk, vulnerability, and persistence. Trying to build momentum while knowing that some of what happens next will be outside my control.
And both force the same deeper questions to the surface:
Is it worth it to keep going?
Can I push myself more?
If I do, will it be worth it?
Do I have the heart for what this asks of me?
Those are not just financial questions. They are creative questions. They are human questions.
For creative people, numbers are never just numbers
This is what I think tax season revealed to me most clearly. For creative people, taking stock is never only an accounting exercise. It is an emotional reckoning.
The numbers matter, of course. They should. They are part of reality. They can tell us what was spent, what came in, where there was movement, where there was strain, and where something may need to change. But for artists, numbers are rarely the whole story.
There is not a lot of conversation in the art world about ROI, P&L statements, or measurable outcomes in the same way there is in business. And yet when we are forced to look at our work in those terms, when the receipts are there, the earnings are there, the totals are there, it can bring up a lot of feelings.
Because creative minds do not look at numbers as numbers alone. We see the effort behind them. The hope behind them. The time. Courage. Risk. Setbacks. Small wins. And the questions they stir up. A spreadsheet can become an emotional document very quickly.
And perhaps that is because creative work is never just transactional. It is tied to identity, meaning, desire, and belief. So when we take stock, we are not only reviewing a year. We are also confronting what it asked of us.
The real question is not only what the numbers say
In corporations, the answer is often supposed to be in the numbers.
Did the return justify the investment?
Did the strategy produce measurable results?
Does the performance support continuing in the same direction?
Those questions matter. They matter in business, and they matter in art too.
But I do not think they get the final word for creative people. If you are an artist, or a founder, or anyone trying to build something deeply personal, the real question is often not just: What do the numbers say? It’s also:
Is the passion still there?
Do the benefits still outweigh the costs?
Is the drive strong enough to grow?
Do I still have the heart to keep going?
That, to me, is the real center of taking stock. Numbers can inform us. Humble us. Wake us up. And even scare us. But they cannot answer that deeper question for us.
What taking stock is really for
I think that is why tax season, uncomfortable as it may be, can still offer something valuable. It gives us a moment to stop moving long enough to see what is actually there. Not what we hoped was true. Or we feared was true. But what is true.
What did this really cost?
What actually grew?
Where is the momentum real?
Where is the strain real?
What feels worth continuing?
What needs to change?
What am I building, and what is it asking of me?
For creative people, those are powerful questions. And maybe that is what taking stock is really for. Not to reduce our work to numbers. Or shame ourselves. And not to force everything into a neat formula. But to look clearly. And feel honestly. So we can decide, from a more grounded place, what we want to keep carrying forward.
The heart required to keep going
I do not think most artists keep going because the numbers always make immediate sense. And I don’t think founders of deeply personal ventures do either.
We keep going because something in us still believes.
Because the work still matters.
Because the drive is still there.
Because even when the path is uncertain, the desire to make, build, try, and continue is somehow stronger than the fear.
That does not mean we ignore reality. It means we let reality sharpen the questions. And when I take stock this year, that is where I find myself. Not with all the answers. But with a clearer sense of what is real, what is growing, what feels vulnerable, and what still feels worth believing in. Sometimes that may be the most honest kind of progress there is.
