When I started a full-time job in April 2020, I was coming off of a burgeoning freelancing streak. I like to say that I’m not good at freelancing (objectively untrue) and that I don’t like it (true, for a variety of reasons), but the reality was, stuck at home and with nothing but time on my hands, I had built up a successful stable of freelance clients for the first time in my life. But you know what I like even better than a freelance contract? Health insurance and having an employer extracting the taxes from my income so I don’t have to think about it for even a minute by myself. So I took a full-time job and said adieu to my freelance career.
Except I didn’t, really. With so much time on my hands (see again: still stuck at home 99% of the time), I held onto most of my freelance clients, and after work and on weekends turned in journalism assignments and corporate freelance work. The work day ended and the work night would begin, researching or interviewing or writing. I never stopped working. I couldn’t shake my scarcity mindset and my fear of needing more money and ensuring I had enough projects to keep me going even if I got fired or laid off or something else horrible happened. The day after Thanksgiving in 2020, wrapped in a blanket on the couch and picking at mouthfuls of leftover mashed potatoes, I typed out and filed a 2500 word piece of sponsored content. Most weekends were like this.
I did this for almost a full year before I burned out and needed to stop working lots of little jobs in addition to my 40-hours-a-week job. Anyone could see this wasn’t sustainable, but it took me a long time to unlearn the anxiety of possibly losing my day job (I was never going to get fired, I was just scared of being new and bad at a new thing in a new field, combined with what felt like unyielding global tumult) and needing a backup source of income (or 8).
Eventually, I stopped basically all of my freelance work. This was mostly by my own doing, learning to be firmer with my boundaries and feeling comfortable saying no more often, which I recognize is a huge privilege. Occasionally the freelance work ended by itself (RIP, Medium Writer Partner Program, you were an incredible source of income while I had you). Yes, I have written the occasional newsletter and even the occasional journalistic piece, but by and large, I have retained all non-9-to-5 hours for unpaid Maya time. And it’s been great! I get to hang out with my friends, and Chase, and my skeeball team, and read books and watercolor and lift weights and go for long walks and take naps without sitting bolt upright, worried about another looming deadline.
I have been experiencing an odd sensation recently, though, and that’s the slightly foreign feeling of craving writing again.
It took two full years but I think I finally got over my writer burnout and the subsequent writers block that made opening every new blank Google Doc an exercise in torture. So this is all to say: I’m ready to put pen to paper and work on that book proposal; I’m ready for freelance assignments (though I will remain somewhat judicious about what those look like); I’m ready to write more. I’d love to work on a meaty profile or a feature story; it doesn’t need to be about tech (in fact, I would prefer it be not wholly about tech but maybe about something adjacent, whether that’s “wellness” or internet culture or something else entirely). You may hear from me here more or you might not; I like the capriciousness with which I choose to send this newsletter, I think it makes my readers feel less obliged to open them on a regular basis and prevents my writing from becoming too routine. But if you have freelance projects, I think I’m ready for them.