Freelancing has never been this fantastic before ... or frustrating
What a wild year to be a freelancer.
You likely don’t need me to remind you … but we are in March 2021, which means we’ve already spent 12 months in varying degrees of lockdown. Personally, I’ve found these 12 months to have increased the pace and intensity of all the stressors associated with freelancing.
The weeks in which I have too much work alternate with weeks during which I don’t have enough work. Some days I seem to be in an intense love relationship with my work; on others, I don’t think anything I do is good enough. Sometimes I hit peak concentration working from home, on other days I boil over with frustration because it takes me hours to send a couple of emails. There’s nothing new about any of these feelings in themselves, except that my highs and lows tend to be less extreme during ‘normal’ times – and they also tend not to follow each other in such rapid succession.
Those who start freelancing leave behind the stressors that go along with salaried positions and are met with a set of new uncertainties in exchange. A Leapers poll from 2019 reveals that the below things used to keep freelancers up at night before the pandemic:
for 86%, it was their irregular earnings
80% indicated that clients never properly brief them or provide clarity on a project
77% said they don’t have the skills to complete a job
71% said that clients ghost them (a client ceases to communicate or slows projects down)
69% said they worked long hours
66% said they felt alone and that they did not have anyone they could share their stress with
No wonder that these existing stressors have worsened and intensified during the last months. The future is uncertain, as a result of which assignments also are. The daily operations of many clients have been turned upside down, as a result of which their communication with freelancers sometimes fell short. And if 66% of freelancers already felt alone in 2019, there’s a fat chance that that number has climbed to 99% now. All of which has made freelancing extra … intense this year.
But how do you handle this increased intensity? As a freelancer, you alone are responsible for … basically everything 😬 , including your mental well-being. If we don’t write our own evaluation reports, if we aren’t our own HR manager and design an ergonomically friendly workspace, no-one will.
At the same time, there are a lot of things that have a direct influence on our mental well-being but that we can do frustratingly little about ourselves. Freelancers have for instance been complaining for years that invoices are systematically being paid too late, but we haven’t seen any changes so far. It’s why looking after your mental health as a freelancer mostly appears to revolve around little steps, doing what you can and being patient with yourself when things aren’t going so well.
Amid all the upheaval, I personally try to remind myself why I became a freelancer in the first place – because I love flexibility. When things aren’t going well and I haven’t got enough work, I try not to fight this with all my power, but take a step back and allow myself some rest. When things are going well and I have far too much work, I go full speed and try to work as much as I can. This is how I sort of bob along with the waves of the pandemic and how I manage to keep my head above water. Thankfully I’m surrounded by life buoys: friends whom I can turn to and a supportive community of freelancers.
We recently held our first Friendly Freelancer afterwork drink over Zoom 🥂
These kinds of tactics unfortunately don’t work all the time, and they don’t work for everybody either. It’s why, in December, I was relieved to read that the Belgian government will reimburse the cost of eight therapy sessions for self-employed people due to Covid. Three months later there still is no information about how you can receive this support – but it’s coming. As soon as we find out more, we’ll tell you about it here. In the meantime, we’d like to hear from you: how did you experience the last 12 months as a freelancer and what are the things you do to look after your mental health? Send us a message at freelancerthefriendly@gmail.com
Speak soon,
Selma
What I’m reading, watching, listening to this week:
This Q&A session about freelancing and mental health
Interesting read: are we misdiagnosing women with “imposter syndrome”?
Some good advice if you can’t stop comparing yourself to other freelancers
This newsletter was written by Selma Franssen, a Dutch author, journalist and presenter living in Brussels. In two weeks, you’ll hear from Linda A. Thompson, a Belgian journalist, content writer and translator.