Yep. Ideally you get some sort of actual paid email account, with someone that only provides email (so you don't have issues elsewhere that lead to loss of email account), and then you get your own domain (with no other services that you're using), and forward your gmail to that domain, and point your personal domain's MX records to the new email address, and start using an email address on your personal domain from here on out, but failing the separate email, at least getting a domain and pointing an email address to your current Gmail account, and starting to use that new address instead, gives you a migration path to reduce your reliance on Gmail.