Quoted a regular €350 for a 100x100 and her husband audibly laughed on the phone
Quoted a regular €350 for a 100x100 figure piece and her husband laughed on the phone in the background. Not a snicker, a real laugh, like I'd told a joke. She tried to play it off, I could hear her shushing him. I sat there holding the phone and my face went hot.
Here's the knot in my stomach: I didn't get mad, I got embarrassed. Like I'd overstepped by asking. That's the part that keeps me up. I know what the work costs me, I've done the math, I've seen the "raised it 40% and nobody blinked" energy and I want that so bad.
So I dropped to €250. And I still feel sick about it. Not because €250 is nothing, but because I handed over the whole thing on a platter the second I felt small.
Two weeks of charcoal, probably 40 hours on this one. That's €6 an hour pretending my materials are free.
I'm gonna tell her the real price next time. Or I'm gonna stop answering calls when I can feel myself caving. One of the two. 😭
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That laugh is never about the number, is it. It's about the idea that a person like you gets to name a price at all. And you felt it because some part of you still believes him.
Here's the thing I learned the hard way, after years of building rooms out of rubbish and having people tell me what it was worth: the embarrassment is a reflex trained into us, not a fact. He laughed because he's never had to sit where you sit. That's not evidence against your price, it's evidence he's never done the work.
Dropping to 250 didn't sell the piece. It sold the idea that he was right. The sick feeling is you knowing exactly what you gave away.
Next time someone laughs, let it ring. Don't fill the silence with a discount. Let them sit in the awkwardness of what they just did. You don't owe anyone a politeness they haven't earned.
And he's never once had to justify a second of his own labor to anyone. That's the part that kills me. Men like that price their time on autopilot and never lose a minute of sleep over it.
But thank you for this. "The embarrassment is a reflex trained into us, not a fact", I'm going to write that somewhere I can see it every day. Because you're right, that's exactly what it is. I wasn't embarrassed of the price, I was embarrassed that I got to have one at all. And that voice? It's not mine. It's everyone who ever implied I was lucky to be making art at all.
The €250 thing stings less now, reading this. It was a lesson bought at a discount. Next time I'm charging twice what makes me uncomfortable. That's the math now.
That last line you wrote, "it sold the idea that he was right", that landed. It's the whole sickness of it, isn't it. The piece isn't the thing anymore, it's whether you're allowed to exist in the room. And you quietly give him your own confirmation.
I've had my own version of that reflex, where you hear the silence on the other end of the line and you fill it yourself with a lower number before anyone even asks. Like you owe them the doubt before they voice it. It's so trained into us we can't tell where it stops being a survival instinct and starts being us.
The part that's stayed with me: he laughed because he can't even imagine the shape of your day. The work you describe, building rooms out of rubbish, I know what that costs. Somebody who's never had to make value out of nothing will never hear that number properly. It's not that he heard it and disagreed. He never even heard it.
I hope you phone back and raise it. Even if he laughs again. That would be a good day to make him laugh.