The Big Chill

What Happens When You Walk Away From The Insta-perfect (Yet Ultra-stressed) Life Of A Successful Entrepreneur? These Women Said “Hell No” To The Hustle And “Hello” To Inner Peace

- Meg Mason

WHEN KATE PASCOE SQUIRES woke up from having a hysterectomy for chronic endometriosis, the first thing she did was reach for her phone. At the time, she was one half of Kate & Kate, a cult homewares company she and her sister-in-law, Kate Pascoe, had founded five years earlier. Both of the Kates had young children and made the company profitable through passion, 50-hour weeks and a commitment to the business that manifested itself in answering emails from a surgical recovery ward. “When it’s your own business, and it’s going well, it’s so rewarding,” Pascoe Squires says. “You’re getting all this great feedback and so much instant reward that it can become like rats with the pellets – you just can’t stop.”

But faced with the prospect of another season, with the investment of time and money required, the travel and trade shows, Pascoe Squires realised she was exhausted. As was the other Kate. “We’d been ignoring the long-term toll it was taking and it became very obvious what we needed to do.”

It was time to step back. Although privately there was grief (“a gaping hole in life and the question of what to do next”), the hardest part was announcing the hiatus on Instagram. Anyway it was phrased, it would read like a failure. “It was a proactive choice and it wasn’t like we’d failed, but there’s almost a shame about slowing down or not working,” Pascoe Squires says.