Some of you have made music with me over the years. You know what being in the room with me is like. Since my birthday is coming up, I’m hoping you’ll take a moment to hear what I’m asking for.
This past year, I decided to start something new. I wanted to nurture spaces that are explicitly neurodiversity-affirming. I wanted to make music that reflects the histories and cultures of the communities I’m in—not a fixed repertoire, but a living one. I wanted more instruments, wider age ranges, and a room that doesn’t sort people by developmental milestone or tax bracket. I wanted people to be able to attend as often as they like without paying more.
And I wanted to charge less than it costs to run the program, on purpose, knowing I’d be fundraising constantly to fill the gap. For years I taught in programs I couldn’t have afforded myself. That felt like a problem worth solving.
Enter imeetswe. We’re in our first year, and this is our Spring fundraising appeal. It would be a bait-and-switch to offer sliding scale classes and then only appeal at fundraising time to folks that are enrolled, so I’m reaching out to you. If any of this resonates—as a donor, a sharer, or just someone who wants to know more—I’d love for you to take a look, and share widely. Thank you!
Three conversations happen regularly in our community.
A colleague texts: “what are you charging for lessons?”
Another sends an email: “a school offered me this schedule and this salary—is that reasonable?”
A third says, in person, something harder to articulate: “I feel like I need to charge more for a private gig, but I don’t know how to explain why.”
These are not three different questions. They are the same conversation, framed in different contexts—and the reason it keeps coming up is that most of us learned to price our work by looking sideways at what others were charging, or by accepting what we were offered, rather than starting from what we actually need to live.
Our starting point needs to be what an artist (or other part-time gig workers) needs to live—not what any particular institution, context, or tradition has decided an artist’s time is worth.
Start with the number
A living wage in the Bay Area—meaning housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and modest participation in ordinary life—runs roughly $100,000 per year for a single adult. That number will be uncomfortable for some. Sit with the discomfort for a moment before moving on, because the discomfort itself is information.
The numbers bear this out. A one-bedroom apartment in Oakland or Berkeley—the most affordable corners of the inner East Bay—currently runs between $2,000 and $2,300 per month, with Berkeley averaging around $2,270 and Oakland around $1,980 for a one-bedroom. That is before utilities, renters insurance, or the reality that many working artists need a dedicated space for practice or instrument storage that a standard one-bedroom does not accommodate. In San Francisco proper, a one-bedroom averages $3,790—a number that effectively removes the city from consideration for an artist building a career from scratch.
Food for a single adult cooking most meals runs $450 to $600 per month in groceries, with monthly grocery bills for a single adult ranging from $400 to $600 depending on shopping habits and dietary preferences—and that figure assumes discipline and time, two things a fractured freelance schedule does not reliably provide. Add modest dining out and the occasional meal grabbed between gigs, and a realistic food budget lands closer to $650.
Healthcare is where the arithmetic becomes genuinely alarming for independent workers. The enhanced federal subsidies that had made Covered California plans affordable for freelancers expired at the end of 2025 and were not renewed. For those earning above 400% of the federal poverty level—roughly $58,320 for a single adult—the full unsubsidized premium now applies, which in many Bay Area metro plans exceeds $700 to $900 per month for a single adult on a mid-tier plan. An artist earning $100,000 gross is above that threshold. Health insurance alone, at the lower end of that range, costs $8,400 per year before a single co-pay or prescription.
Transportation compounds everything. An artist who carries instruments—a cello, a keyboard, percussion equipment, a sound system—cannot reliably depend on BART and a bicycle. A car means insurance, registration, gas, and maintenance: conservatively $400 to $500 per month. Going car-free is possible, but transit gaps are real—and the rideshare charges that fill them have a way of arriving all at once, on the weeks you can least afford them.
Then there is the tax structure of self-employment itself. A freelance artist earning $100,000 gross pays self-employment tax of approximately $14,130—the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare combined—before federal and California income taxes. Total tax liability at that income level runs roughly $30,000 to $34,000 annually depending on deductions. Take-home is closer to $66,000 to $70,000.
Run the budget: $2,200 rent, $650 food, $800 healthcare, $450 transportation, $200 utilities and phone, $150 in professional expenses—instrument maintenance, strings, reeds, music, scores—and $25 in renters insurance. That is $4,475 per month, or $53,700 per year, before a dollar of savings, before an emergency, before a plane ticket to see family, before anything goes wrong. At $66,000 take-home, what remains is $12,300—just over $1,000 per month—for everything else a life requires.
$100,000 gross is not wealth in the Bay Area. It is the arithmetic floor of a life that does not require choosing between healthcare and rent.
We are going to work backward from $100,000.
A sustainable working year for an artist looks something like this: forty working weeks, thirty hours of paid work per week. That is 1,200 billable hours annually—not the hours you spend preparing, maintaining your instruments, traveling between gigs, managing your schedule, or recovering from an intensive week. Just the hours a client is present and paying.
$100,000 divided by 1,200 hours is $83.33.
We’ll call it $85. The extra $1.67 per hour is not generosity—it is a small buffer against the gap between a clean calculation and a life that does not run on clean calculations. Instruments need repair. Gigs fall through. A student cancels the week you needed them not to. The $85 baseline assumes that a working artist’s year will be, in some measure, imperfect—and builds that assumption into the rate rather than leaving the artist to absorb it after the fact.
That is your baseline hourly rate. Not your asking price for everything—as we will see, some work warrants more—but the floor below which a straight hourly arrangement stops supporting a dignified life.
Not all hours are equal
Here is what the baseline assumes: that you work a relatively clean thirty hours per week during working weeks, with predictable scheduling, minimal dead time between commitments, and enough calendar continuity that you can plan your life.
Most of us do not work under those conditions. And the gap between the baseline assumption and the actual texture of freelance arts work is where the money disappears.
Consider three types of client relationships, and what each one actually costs you.
The single-hour client wants one hour, at a time that works for them, possibly in a location that requires travel, possibly with an instrument you have to transport. That hour does not exist in isolation. It brackets dead time on either side. It may strand you somewhere between other commitments. It requires the same preparation as a longer session. And if it falls in the middle of your day, it fractures the working block that might otherwise have generated two or three additional hours of income. A single-hour commitment carries a real cost beyond the hour itself, and your rate should reflect that. A reasonable premium is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent above your baseline—not punitive, but honest.
The contiguous block client offers two or more consecutive hours in the same location, without travel between. This is the condition under which the baseline rate makes sense. The overhead is amortized across the block. Your preparation serves multiple hours. Your day remains legible. This client is not doing you a favor—they are simply meeting the basic condition that makes the baseline viable. The baseline rate is appropriate here. It is also the floor. Volume alone is not a reason to discount.
The multi-block client—a school, a program, a recurring institutional relationship—offers the most, and should be asked for the most in one specific sense: not a lower rate, but a more useful schedule. An institution that can offer you Tuesday and Thursday mornings, consistently, across a full session, is giving you something more valuable than money alone. They are giving you a scaffold on which to build the rest of your calendar. Adjacent blocks from other clients can attach to that scaffold. Your week becomes a coherent structure rather than a collection of isolated obligations. When negotiating with institutions, the scheduling ask is as important as the rate conversation.
One of the most powerful things an artist can do for their own calendar is to stop building it around individual client availability and start building it around their own working architecture. This means choosing your times first—the blocks that fit your energy, your transit patterns, your instrument load, your recovery needs—and then inviting clients into those times, rather than the reverse. A client who asks “when are you available?” is asking a reasonable question. The answer that serves you is not a list of every open hour in your week. It is an offer: I teach Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in this location, at these times. Here is what is open. That framing is not inflexibility. It is the structure that makes a sustainable practice possible.
Group instruction fits naturally into this architecture, and it is worth saying plainly to prospective clients why. A group lesson is not a compromised version of a private lesson—it is a different and in many respects richer learning environment. Students in a shared setting learn not just from the instructor but from one another. A beginner watching an intermediate student work through a passage learns something about the path ahead. An advanced student asked to demonstrate or explain consolidates their own understanding. Mixed-age and mixed-skill groupings, far from being logistically inconvenient, replicate the way musical knowledge has always actually traveled—through communities, through listening, through proximity to people at different stages of the same journey. Peer-to-peer learning is not a pedagogical concession. It is a feature.
For the artist, the case is also straightforwardly economic. Three students in a ninety-minute block, each paying a group rate, generate more income per hour than one student in the same time—while requiring a single preparation, a single location, and a single slot in the calendar. The efficiencies are real and they compound across a well-structured week. When you share this with prospective clients, you are not upselling them or managing them. You are inviting them into a model that works better for everyone: for the artist who needs a coherent schedule, for the student who benefits from a learning community, and for the parent or patron who is, whether they know it yet or not, investing in something more durable than a transaction between two people in a room.
This framing belongs in your intake language from the beginning. Before the first lesson, before the first invoice, a prospective client should understand how you work—not as a disclaimer, but as part of what makes working with you worth it. Something as simple as: My teaching is organized around group and paired sessions, which I find produce better outcomes for students and allow me to maintain a sustainable practice. I’d love to talk about how that might work for your situation. That sentence does several things at once. It positions group learning as a pedagogical choice, not a scheduling workaround. It signals that you have a practice with a structure, not a collection of available hours. And it opens a conversation rather than closing one.
The Bay Area layer
Everything above assumes a relatively frictionless working life. The Bay Area adds friction at every point.
Housing costs are the most visible part. At $100,000 gross, after taxes, a Bay Area artist is navigating one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. The living wage figure is not generous—it is the minimum required to remain housed and functional.
Transportation compounds this. Getting from one gig to another takes longer here, costs more, and frequently involves carrying instruments or materials that make transit difficult. A lesson in someone’s home in the hills is not the same as a lesson in a studio two blocks from your house. The travel is real work, and it belongs in your rate calculation.
Space is the hidden variable most artists underestimate. When a client invites you into their home or their school, they are providing infrastructure—a room, a piano, a floor. When they do not, and you are expected to provide or rent space, the math changes dramatically. Studio rental in the Bay Area can run $40-60 per hour or more. That cost does not disappear because it is inconvenient to discuss. An hourly rate that does not account for space rental is subsidizing the client’s infrastructure out of your own pocket.
Finally, schedule density. The Bay Area’s geography and the complexity of people’s lives means that filling a room—building a class, a cohort, a consistent group—is genuinely hard. When you find a time and place where people can reliably show up, that configuration has real value. Protecting it is not rigidity. It is asset management.
A note on scheduling as access
Many artists in our community are neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, or both. The overlap between neurodivergence and a life in the arts is not coincidental. The same pattern-recognition, intensity of focus, and sensitivity that makes the work possible also shapes what sustainable working conditions look like.
For autistic artists, regular schedules and replicable routines are not preferences—they are the infrastructure of functional work. Unpredictable scheduling is not merely inconvenient; it carries a cognitive load that accumulates across the week and affects the quality of the work itself.
For artists with ADHD, intense focus periods need protection on both ends. A schedule that allows for deep immersion followed by genuine recovery is not indulgence—it is the condition under which the best work happens. A scattered calendar of single-hour commitments spread across the week is, in this light, not just financially inefficient. It is architecturally hostile to the work.
This is worth naming not as a disclosure but as a design principle. A schedule built around predictable blocks, protected recovery time, and calendar adjacency is better for neurodivergent artists. It is also, it turns out, better for everyone. The neurodivergent case just makes the logic visible.
Bringing it back to the three conversations
Your colleague who texted asking what you charge: now you have a number to start from, and a way to explain it. $85 is the floor for a contiguous block. Single-hour work, travel, space, and schedule friction each adjust it upward.
Your colleague evaluating a school’s offer: the salary question cannot be answered without knowing the schedule. How many hours per week? Are they contiguous? Is travel involved? Does the schedule allow for adjacent income? A number that looks reasonable in isolation may not survive contact with those questions.
Your colleague who felt she needed to charge more for a private gig but couldn’t explain why: she was right. She was absorbing travel, instrument transport, space provision, and schedule fragmentation—and pricing none of it. The discomfort was her knowledge of the real cost, looking for language.
The discomfort was understandable. The words just needed to catch up. What follows is the language our community has been reaching for—a framework built not from what the market offers, but from what we actually need to live, work, and keep showing up.
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud: there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world; and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not important enough to take the time to craft. Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to: Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find a rhyme, if they know that one is coming: (you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?) (If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend). When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited memory to do the work of storytelling, passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas– you might start to wonder which skills we should be focusing on, when passing information along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it, and with confidence can say what I’m going to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent; for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm was just the way they knew their brain would remember it; and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen, you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow; the calming force of human expectation, and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again, like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders, that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
When a child grows up in an environment where there is only one source of support, and that source of support is unpredictable, unstable, and capable of harm, the child’s identity becomes tied to that of the person they rely on. They may learn that if they go along with their caregiver, their needs will not be met. In this case, it can actually be a successful adaptation to learn to counter the caregiver, if that means getting their needs met.
The problem arises when this child never gets the experience of being supported by a field–by the wider community. They lose their ability to form bonds with a variety of people who might meet their needs in more healthy ways. Their whole identity calcifies into a constant state of opposition to the only person they recognize–their unstable, unpredictable, possibly abusive caregiver.
Sound familiar? We see this type of dynamic within families all the time. We also see it in our national politics, and more and more on the international stage as well. Leaders and governments are galvanized around opposition to some party, population, or set of policies. In doing so, they lose their ability to live in the world of phenomena: the only thing that exists is that to which they are opposed. It’s toxic, maddening, heartbreaking – overwhelming to anyone paying attention.
So what do we do, when this state of affairs arises? Providing coherence, context, nuance only gives more information to be pushed against. In psychology, there is the idea of triangulation: ceasing to engage in dyadic entrapments and focusing instead on a shared field of engagement.
We have had many opportunities to form cross-cognitive bonds with those who are oppositional by constitution: nuclear proliferation, climate change, Covid 19: these all appear to be the kinds of existential threats that we can unite around. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive bias, not a rational train of thought. None of these threats are fast-moving enough that we can recognize the danger before forming an opinion about it. This opinion gets formed by the same framework that locks us into oppositional mode in the first place.
I’m more and more convinced that only a fast-moving apex predator like Godzilla will be recognized as a force of triangulation that we can unite around opposing. In fact, the original Godzilla film from 1954 had a humanist, anti-nuclear subtext, which, of course, was stripped out when the film entered the US market.
Perusing reddit today, I noticed someone posted about wanting to start a men’s group and asking for fun ideas. Many of the comments were followed by an enthusiastic “yes!” or other signifiers of feeling seen. Nothing in the post spoke to my identity or special interests.
I don’t point this out to knock anyone’s interests. On the contrary, seeing people feeling inspired to get together and create community is one of my special interests, so I shared in the joy, even though I recognized that this particular group would not be a group where I would feel seen.
And I recognize that even though I present as a man, if I were to advertise and start a men’s group, both the people who showed up and myself would likely end up feeling awkward. I would likely have to do a lot of masking to appear as if I was feeling in my element, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a support group based on gender presentation.
On a whim, I did a search for [women’s group] in the same subreddit. There were several different threads, and, unsurprisingly to me, the activities and issues being described felt much more akin to my nature. I didn’t get that feeling of “yes!,” though, or if I started to it was tempered by the understanding that regardless of how I feel on the inside, or the activities I enjoy, or the topics I like to talk about, I likely would not be regarded as a part of the community were I to attend unannounced. I get it, but again, I’m left feeling unseen.
In my life, one of the most-asked questions I’ve received about my identity is “are you gay?” Remember, gender and sexual preference are not the same. I think what people might be picking up on is that while I present as a man, I don’t feel that I inhabit a male identity that resembles the men I see around me. Does that make me a trans person. I don’t know, honestly.
Because gender is a social construct, the rules of gender presentation are created (mostly without awareness) by the community. For example, there might be a group for trans adults who would hear my description of myself and feel that I am like them – we see one another and feel seen – we are relationally similar. Another group of trans people might have a different sense of what it means to be trans – they might recognize me more were I to feel a strong need to present on the outside in ways that align with my feminine insides. They might tell me, “you’re not trans: you’re bigender.” I might take their word for it.
Because gender is a social construct, my autistic mind generally either doesn’t see the structure that people around me see (because I just see information, and coherence comes later), or, seeing it, immediately tries to deconstruct it and question it’s validity. When people ask me things like “are you gay?,” I take it kind of like people asking “how are you?” From years of trial-and-error, I’ve recognized that in most cases, people don’t really want to know the answer. They want to feel safe. They want to get just enough information so that they know how to be and not offend anyone. They want to be able to place me, within the list of categories they have devised for people to fit into.
More and more, I’m comfortable being unplaced. I recognize that it’s a valid and valuable state of being. (Maybe that makes me nonbinary. You’d have to decide: I’ll totally come to your nonbinary social group, if you recognize me as such and invite me). I suspect that if more people were comfortable being unplaced, being who they are, then there would not be as much controversy around what to me is a thoroughly uncontroversial reality. Some people take their social constructs very seriously, and conformity is a life-or-death affair. When I notice someone like this, from my unplaced state (these are often the people who ask if I’m gay, as if they would be totally unphased if I walked up to them and asked them if they are straight), I find myself relying on my white, male, large-bearded-man privilege (regardless of feeling like a terrified little girl inside), and, when the question comes, I often will ask them, “what makes you ask?,” or, “what does gay mean?” This is a much more efficient way of shutting down an awkward conversation than just not engaging. Were I smaller, and more feminine, and non-white, I might not feel as safe to be that direct.
And that’s been the case for most of my life: my big giant man disguise helps keep the frail, frightened girl inside safe, protected from the harsh realities that girls face in our society. It’s kind of a remarkable arrangement, actually. Sometimes I do feel like it would be amazing to have a body manifest that appears the way my insides feel. And on the flip side, I think it would be amazing to feel what it was like on the inside for a person who thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world to show the fish they just caught on their dating profile – my body is well-suited for that mindset.
But mostly, I just think it’s a good idea to let people be who they see themselves to be – on the inside, on the outside, relationally, emotionally, all the ways. And to allow ourselves to be a little unplaced, ourselves.
Who am I? That’s up to us. Let’s try to make it a pleasant arrangement.
an interesting consequence of being both autistic and adhd is the push-pull, fast-slow, act-ruminate, interplay between these two processing styles, that beget strong long-arc themes: pattern-recognition, justice sensitivity, rejection-sensitive dysphoria; and also tolerance for ambiguity, conflict resolution, and a need to articulate the awkward unspoken paradox.
looked at as a snapshot, i can appear to be by turns reactionary, quick to judge, and disruptive; or emotionally flat, ruminative, or disengaged. It is this paradoxical dynamic that causes me to crave nuance, and reject binary paradigms; to love deeply and also feel hurt easily; to rejoice in a graceful solution, but also to be the first to point out the inconsistencies in that solution.
i make a lot of mistakes and missteps, but i process the consequences of those mistakes in granular detail, sometimes for decades. i will find myself advocating vociferously for an idea which i may have previously rejected; or stopped in my tracks, hearing a word, and becoming lost in contemplation of the moment that that word was formed in the mouth of the person who hadn’t heard it before, but deeply needed to articulate something that had not before been articulated.
i have a strong desire to connect with people directly and deeply; and yet, even after a moment of deep connection, that connection will not translate into immediate trust, which i only experience through myriad moments of connection over time, if at all.
what’s fascinating to me now is that the language for a person like me–autistic and adhd–are quite new constructions for qualities that have always been part of the human experience. they come to us from the mouths of scientists, who, to their credit, look at things for a long time and talk about them; but to their detriment, these terms arose as descriptions of difference relative to a norm, rather than as healthy human characteristics. this paradox is just information to be articulated and, hopefully, digested in the great body of human understanding.
love your neighbor, kill your idol, consider the consequences, and have a nicely nuanced day.
As someone who has worked with children and their parents for 25 years, I would say that I have had more than my fair share of positive human interaction. I know there are many people who love me, and I know that I am a good person and that I am lovable.
(In Christian summer camp in Oregon in the 70s, we even made pendants out of slices of wood and gimp {plastic lanyard cord}, in decoupage, no less, {we used shellac}, with the letters IALAC: I Am Lovable And Capable. Why am I sobbing right now? Those letters never did sink in, really. But I always loved camp, and always cried on the last day.)
(don’t worry, that’s not code. i’m just having a moment)
That being said, I have to work to remember all of this positive human connection, and sometimes I feel utterly invisible. Today, for example, when crossing the street on a green light, a car with tinted windows (I couldn’t see the driver at all to make eye contact) turned left when I was well into the intersection. I put my arm up (I’m not a small person) and had to take 4 full steps backwards, fast, (I don’t do fast), and I could feel the draft from the car that missed me by an inch, and slowed down not at all. It was like I didn’t exist.
Or at the store this evening, standing literally in the middle of the entrance waiting to put my cart away, and people moved around me as if I was not there. And when I did sense an opening and moved forward the slightest bit, someone surged by me and glared as if I had tried to ram them. I had moved about an inch at that point. I then waited even longer until there was a moment to act. Moving with care (and with dyspraxic, intentional motor planning) or any hint of hesitation was not an option.
Somehow these moments of invisibility effect me more deeply than when people are outright rude or hostile. Somehow, hostility makes more sense to my nervous system than not being seen. Living, as I do, in a big giant man disguise, I’ve become familiar with the ways that it makes sense for some people to show hostility. I try not to take it personally. But I seem so obvious, at least to my self. I can’t be invisible in the times when I want to be, so when I am, it’s unsettling.
(Sorry, I’m just falling apart, here, remembering when I was about 7 years old, and I called my Uncle Keith on the phone, and I had never heard an answering machine before, and when I heard his voice on the line I kept trying to get his attention: “But Uncle Keith! It’s me! Ricky!” My auntie and my Naná tried to explain it to me, but I was inconsolable for a while, kind of like now)
(Some of us don’t grow out of it)
Then there are the times (this hasn’t happened during the holidays, when it would make sense), when I run into someone I haven’t seen for a while, and we have a nice conversation, and they say “let’s get a coffee sometime,” and then I’ll follow through in a light way so as not to trigger obligation: “great to see you. I’ve got some time next week if you’re free, otherwise, let me know a good time for you,” and then I never hear from them. This actually happens fairly often. Sometimes I even summon the courage to try again months later, and crickets.
I do my best not to take it personally, because I know everyone is time-poor and every interaction creates an obligation and an offset that must be recouped at some other time in the week. It’s like running into a friend in the car next to you on the freeway, but their lane is moving faster than yours. And then you text them the next day: “so cool to see you!” and get no response (true story).
Ghosting, or non-response, has become normalized. For someone whose nervous system is wired for connection, and who builds his schedule around being available, I have never felt more invisible. It’s like we’re living in a post-relational world.
(It’s like I was wired for a particular purpose, that appears to be no longer purposeful)
I know I am extra sensitive, because of my particular nervous system. I also know that there are many people with nervous systems like mine who have not been blessed with all of the warmth and positive interactions that I have been so privileged to experience who are having a hard time these days.
(or maybe I actually am neither lovable nor capable, which would be a simple explanation for the whole shebang, so there’s that)
All of this just a long-winded way to say be kind to one another, and I hope you have the wiggle room to text back the friend you see in the car next to you on the freeway.
