Starting a home bakery looks different with multiple sclerosis

Desiree Lama traces her love of baking to time spent in her grandmother's kitchen as a child. Those memories shaped her idea of what baking should feel like: creative, comforting, and tied to family. After completing a PhD in May, she decided to turn that love into a small home business: Lucky & Severus Bakery Co.

Practical tensions: ambition versus capacity

Lama describes a tension familiar to many small-business founders but intensified by chronic illness: an enthusiasm for building something new alongside a body that had new limits. Baking at home involves more than recipes. It requires hours of standing, mixing, decorating, lifting, cleaning, packaging, and also marketing and customer service. That workload clashed with her physical needs.

Rather than stopping, Lama adjusted expectations and operations. She asked herself what she could realistically take on, when to slow down, and how to grow the bakery without sacrificing health. She reframed the business as something that can be built differently: pacing production, accepting smaller batches, prioritizing tasks that match her energy patterns, or delegating and outsourcing when possible.

Personal lessons and mindset shifts

Running the bakery became a learning process about creativity, perseverance, patience, and adaptability. Lama found that loving an activity doesn't guarantee unlimited capacity to do it the same way she once imagined. She emphasizes that building something meaningful can follow multiple paths and that it's possible to pursue a passion while taking care of oneself.

Lucky & Severus Bakery Co. is still developing. Lama views the bakery as part of her broader journey rather than only a business venture. It's a practical exercise in balancing ambition and health—finding workable routines and acknowledging limits while staying engaged with things she enjoys.

Desiree Lama was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis at 17 and experienced early symptoms at 14. She is a 20-something PhD graduate living in Austin, Texas, who writes about being a disabled, bisexual Mexican woman and the everyday realities of living with MS. Her column presents personal reflections rather than medical advice.

You can pursue the work you love while changing how you do it: scale tasks to your capacity, accept new rhythms, and build a version of success that protects your health.