Almost exactly five years ago I sat down at my desk for my first day as a full time freelancer.
I had nothing. No work. Not a drop.
I’d left my PAYE job before Christmas, my part-time lecturing gig had just finished til the next academic year and the freelance writing work I’d been doing on the side to give me a run-in had unexpectedly dried up.
Looking back I don’t know how I wasn’t absolutely shitting myself. I had money saved, but it wasn’t going to last long.
In fact I felt a weird sense of calm. I sat at the kitchen table and made a plan.
I would get out of the house with my laptop as much as I could. I would let as many people as I could think of know I was available for work. And I would write about it all, relentlessly.
Somehow, it worked.
I look back now and think how lucky I was, really, that I managed to get off the ground at all.
I didn’t expect to make it through my first six months – I just wanted to be out of my old job SO BADLY that I ran as hard as I could in the other direction. And when I looked up after a few months and realised I was *doing it* (look, no hands!), actually making enough money and doing something I loved, it was a total surprise to me.
Five years on, somehow, I’m still here.
I’m not an evangelist for freelancing. It’s the wiggliest, wobbliest path you could walk on and I don’t think that instability works for everyone. And I’ll never say I’m freelance for life because life changes and people change. And economic times most definitely change.
But I am immensely grateful for making it through the last five years of running a writing business. I’ve worked with some genuinely amazing people, learned a LOT of shit about myself I didn’t know. I’ve got better at what I do and better at owning it.
And I’ve really, really enjoyed it.
Now I get to do content and comms for a small, lovely roster of regular nice folks, write for Freelancer Magazine, and generally have enough space for new projects and clients to keep things “interesting” 😉
Funnily enough – the first lead that came in on that very first day as I sat down at my kitchen table (reader, I CHEERED) is a client I’m still working with five years on.
I don’t think there’s a course I can sell you on how to do it.
And to be honest it might all end tomorrow.
But “so far so good” is absolutely fine by me.