How Squarespace got me out of depression

I was 28 years old, working out of the bedroom I grew up in.

It wasn’t really my bedroom anymore. I had turned it into an office.

I’d been freelancing for about a year and a half and hadn’t made any money in months. My wife had gone back to work, and I was a stay-at-home dad with a one-year-old.

Every morning, I sat down at my computer and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything.

That wasn’t literally true. I had degrees. I’d had a good job. I’d done the things that were supposed to count as accomplishments.

But I hadn’t built anything of my own.

Now I was back in the house where I grew up, trying to make a living from the same bedroom I’d slept in as a kid.

I was depressed.

I was bouncing around from gig to gig to whatever I thought might make some money. One day I was doing one thing, the next day something else. I was always trying to make something happen.

I was doing anything and nothing at the same time.

I could work all day and still go to bed feeling like I hadn’t gotten anywhere.

There was no thread connecting one day to the next. Nothing I was building toward. I didn’t know where to point myself.

Around that time, I was talking with a friend about where I was.

He asked me a simple question:

“What do you love to do that somebody would pay you for?”

I knew the answer almost immediately.

Making websites with Squarespace.

Most of what I knew about online business at the time came from internet marketing. Leads. Conversions. Landing pages. Optimization.

Squarespace felt different.

I could build something, run into the limits of the platform, and try to find my way around them.

That thrilled me.

The limitations were part of what made it interesting. Finding a workaround felt like discovering something.

And following that interest gave me something I hadn’t had in a while: somewhere to go.

I started thinking about where Squarespace itself was going.

I could see designers specializing in it and businesses forming around it. I believed that eventually people would sell templates for the platform.

I wanted to be part of that future.

So I started SQSPThemes.

I was sitting in my childhood bedroom feeling like my life had gone backwards, while building something for a future that hadn’t arrived yet.

For the first time in months, I knew what I wanted to do when I woke up the next morning.

And then I knew what I wanted to do the morning after that.

I had direction.

Over time, direction became devotion.

I went deeper into Squarespace. I learned the platform, figured things out, wrote about what I found, and helped other people solve problems.

Eventually, people started finding me.

And paying me.

I share this story because when you’re in a crisis of sorts—when you feel disconnected from yourself or out of alignment with your life—getting honest about where you are, who you are, and what you desire can give you somewhere to start.

Then comes another question: What do you love enough to devote yourself to, and where can that devotion become valuable to someone else?

I return to that question often when I work with people going through transitions of their own.

What pulls you in enough to keep going deeper, even before you know where it will lead?

That’s what Squarespace did for me.

It didn’t hand me a career.

It gave me somewhere to point myself.

And at a moment when I couldn’t see where my life was going, that was enough to get me moving again.