One Lesson From The First Month Of My Freelance Life

How I found misery again and how nothing changed except when I looked closely

I quit my very cushy and comfortable job earlier this year. It was a dream job. It was an industry where I gave my 12 years, learned more than I could have ever imagined, traveled the world, earned solid money, earned a lot of appreciation, made exceptional friends and built a very promising career.

But I was not happy. In fact, I was severely depressed and miserable, to the point that quitting seemed like the only choice I had to make at that point. I wanted to end the cycle I was suffering in and explore what's out there.

I took my three beautiful months to travel to remote places and learn to farm. I met the most incredible people working for our planet, volunteered for many meaningful projects, loved the lifestyle of living in a small village in the mountains, understood what a community really means. I got superbly motivated and clearer on where I wanted to be in my life. I also remembered again what it is like to be happy.

But I had to be back to figure out ways to keep my new ‘traveling and learning without income flowing in’ life sustainable. And it has been oh so very painful! I have lost my sleep completely. To describe it very exactly, I have a constant churn in my stomach, I am constantly in fear, I have lost all confidence I was such a butterfly about in my previous life, my anxieties are of some new species now- quite different from what I have ever experienced.

And no at this point of the article, that would typically be the turning point of the story, is not going to lead towards some success mantra or an online course I am offering. I wish it was. But at this time it is not. What this is going to lead to is figuring out root causes of unhappiness and negative challenges, whether as a freelancer or as a corporate lord, and possibly how they can be problem solved.

When starting to work as a freelancer (just four weeks now), I dived into looking for online freelancing jobs aggressively, learn how others were doing it, especially the self-promotion and marketing side of it, hours and hours of online research and writing, online courses, and leaving all this with no god damn idea of what exactly my goals were and how I was going to achieve them. I am still completely clueless as I stand today.

But that again is not the point of this story.

If my anxieties have doubled, then that's a sign of something gone very wrong. I looked closely at how I was living my days as a freelancer, constantly worried, not giving myself enough breaks, not taking a good amount of time to just create art in its purest form, not giving time to my witchcraft and contact my spirit animal. Later ones are rather high on my happiness checklist!

While there are practical issues of paying your bills, if things that I genuinely love to do and that make me happy are slipping because of those ‘practical’ issues then I am not going to break the cycle of suffering I set out for. Then I am back in the same model of focusing a lot on the challenges of earning money rather than the creativity part of my work, on the business person in me rather than the artist.

A very obvious lesson here, we tend to forget, is to maintain the balance between our physical and spiritual aspirations. So I converted this straightforward teaching into an actionable list for me to manage my days. I make sure that things that feed my soul are absolutely part of my day, no matter what. In fact, I try very hard to start my day by doing a few of them so I have a happy heart and I am in the right rhythm to do my practical work later.

Again this is work in progress for me but instead of trying to desperately work it out to sustain myself as a freelancer, I am focusing on first to straighten my lifestyle and the daily choices I make. If I do not have this right, there is little chance of happiness and peace, whether I work remotely from Bali or sit in a corporate office on the 49th floor of a New York building.

~

Vaishali Paliwal

I am hungry to learn about the journeys of others who have taken similar paths and who are figuring out how to live the life of a creative while simultaneously supporting themselves. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback either way. Please leave a comment if you want to share something with the community here on this subject:). Thank you!

Related posts:

If Gangnam Style was your first introduction to K-pop, then you need to know that there is a lot more to Korean music than PSY doing this iconic dance move: Kpop is one of the fastest growing music…

Smart contracts are immutable by definition. Once deployed, they cannot be updated or changed. Then why would someone want to change a smart contract and for what purpose? In this blog post, we…