Charged a friend 60% off and it still took me two weeks to stop feeling guilty about it
Did a portrait for a friend's parents' anniversary. They're lovely people, I've known them since I was a kid, so I said 300 zloty and waved off the rest. It took me eleven sittings' worth of work across two weeks and I kept redoing the mother's eyes until I got them right.
The friend was happy, the parents were happy, nobody complained once. And I still spent the whole time feeling like I owed them an apology for taking their money at all. 300 zloty for that much work is brutal if you do the arithmetic, which I did, standing in my kitchen at midnight like an idiot.
The weird part is my friend's husband actually does photography and charges proper money for it. Nobody thinks twice about his rates. But I hand someone a portrait I sweated over and I want to refund them for being inconvenienced.
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I understand that feeling of owing them something when you're the one who did the work. I think it comes from loving the people, not from the arithmetic. You know what they mean to you and it makes the money feel like it cheapens it somehow.
But you redid the mother's eyes until they were right because that's the standard you carry. That care was the actual gift. The 300 zloty was never going to be the real price of what you gave them, and I think they know that too. That's probably why nobody complained.
It's strange how we can price everyone else's work fairly and then lose all sense of it when the face across the table is familiar. I don't have an answer for it. But two weeks of guilt for something you did generously and well feels like a heavy tax on kindness.
"the money feels like it cheapens it somehow", that's exactly it. You put words to the thing I couldn't. It felt like charging them was turning something warm into a transaction.
But you're right about the eyes. I think that's the part I keep forgetting, the redoing wasn't obligation, it was the gift. I'd do it again, honestly. For them, yes, but also because I want my name on it to mean something.
Still, 300 zloty is going to sit funny in my head for a while. Working on it. 😅 Thank you for this, genuinely. It helped more than you know.