sometimes a side hustle is about more than money.

It’s 2020 and almost everyone has a side hustle.

What is it that propels us to seek out a secondary “career” of sorts? Well, mostly money. Gone are the days of single-income families (or, ahem…single people) with robust savings accounts. Living as an independent person in an urban environment can prove financially challenging, so many of us find a way to supplement our income with passion-projects-turned-side-hustles. My foray into cooking, recipe testing and eventually, food styling and photography came about a bit differently.

I, well…err…reverse side-hustled? I’d never considered pursuing food styling and photography as a career. I kind of just fell into it.

Picture it: Chicago. 2010. (+50 points if you caught my Sophia from The Golden Girls reference) I was working myself ragged at a thankless retail job for peanuts. In an effort to balance out my shoe habit-driven spending, I decided to (gasp!) create a budget. A budget for everything except shoes…because beautiful footwear should not be constrained by a budget. Don’t fight me on this.

I started with groceries. Big city single dining basically centers around grabbing takeout when you get off the train after a long day because you’re too tired to cook and your apartment kitchen is likely so small that you avoid it at all cost…and it really adds up. I set out with a $50/week budget, hope and a prayer, but I found so much more: a love of cooking for myself and friends, creating not only delicious, but beautiful food and the desire to learn how to share what I was doing with others.

As my confidence in the kitchen grew, I began to hone my photography skills and started shooting the food that I had prepared and submitting photos to local contests. I even had a couple of images receive honorable mentions in The Chicago Tribune’s weekly online photo challenge. When I landed at the Urban Outfitters corporate campus in the Fall of 2014, I found myself surrounded by creatives and loads of opportunity to build a “side hustle.” Everyone had one.

I started feeding my coworkers and launched @delores_and_bee, my food photography and styling “portfolio” of sorts on Instagram. I collaborated with coworkers who side-hustled as event planners, caterers and boutique creative workshop hosts. I secured representation with a creative arts agency and started selling photos as stock imagery. I jumped at the opportunity to take on semi-professional recipe testing. I found it exciting to play a small role in bringing someone’s dream of writing a cookbook to life while bettering myself and absorbing more knowledge in the kitchen and beyond.

All of this happened while I worked 60+ hour weeks in a completely new role in which I felt lost and unsupported. Cooking, styling and shooting became my respite and a way to feel successful while feeling utterly inept in my chosen career. I loved what I did, but with an insurmountable workload (such is life!), I spent my days smiling through feelings of inadequacy and my nights and weekends desperate to pull myself from a combination of depression and fear of professional failure.

I’m incredibly grateful for my accidental side hustle. It was never about money. It gave me confidence. It gave me a community. It gave me hope when everything fell apart. It saved me when the job that I felt was going to positively alter the trajectory of my career was set ablaze and I watched from the sidelines as what I’d worked so hard to build slowly burned to the ground. It has lit a new fire in me. One that has inspired me to pursue opportunities that merge my list-making, project-managing, people-developing, process-streamlining skills with my creative side that I’d all but buried and forgotten before rediscovering that part of myself through Delores + Bee.

So what’s next? Maybe my “accidental side hustle” is my future. Maybe it’s a small piece. Maybe it’s the whole pie. Maybe it’s the ultimate operational-creative mashup! There’s one thing I know for certain, though…I’ll continue to learn, grow and ultimately succeed, and it won’t be by accident.