"If I don't ask to be treated and paid fairly, I'm also setting that precedent for other freelancers"
Freelance climate communications consultant Cass Hebron on working on your passion, our obsession with productivity and recovering from burnout.
Cass Hebron, a freelance climate communications consultant, used to to have one coffee meet-up per week with a person she wanted to get know better. It was her strategy to build up a professional network as someone new to freelancing and someone who’d moved to Belgium from the UK not too long ago. I thought her simultaneously casual and super organised approach to networking would make a great topic for a Friendly Freelancer Q&A.
But when I finally met up with Cass to do the interview, she was a few weeks into a sick leave for burnout symptoms. We chatted for a little bit and after a while, I realised it’d be disingenuous and silly to stick to the original plan. Burnout is real, and though we try hard to keep this newsletter positive and uplifting, that should never mean shying away from tougher subjects. I hope you find this interview as meaningful as I did.
P.S. Cass also writes a very popular newsletter called The Green Fix. 🌳 Be sure to check it out.
Linda
You went freelance a good 18 months ago. How have things been going?
On the one hand, it's been amazing. I did not imagine that, within a year of freelancing, I’d be working with branches of the UN, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, or the BBC. Also, I love the flexibility of being able to travel whilst I work and working from anywhere, and having the independence to decide what work I do.
On the other, it's so much more work than being an employee. As an employee, you didn't spend all your time also doing the invoicing, figuring out your budget, trying to make connections, always thinking about where the next project is going to come from.
When did you realise you were showing burn-out symptoms?
A long time after I actually did. My friends, for perhaps a year, had been telling me – you need to slow down. And I would say – I like being busy. And: I can't take a break because I don't have paid leave. I cared so much about what I was doing that I felt guilty about the prospect of not contributing to climate action. I finally acknowledged I had burnout when I started to feel physically exhausted all the time, getting quite dizzy and weak, and having all these vitamin deficiencies.
Why do you think you developed burnout symptoms?
Some reasons are individual. My passion is my work and climate activism is inherently a very emotionally difficult thing to do. Then there’s the financial instability. I choose to work with NGOs and they’re dependent on their funding. They might prepare a whole campaign linked to a proposal from the European Commission and hire a copywriter for that and, then, at the last minute, the Commission delays the proposal and the campaign is dropped. Suddenly, you have no work for a month. That happened a couple of times and that was very stressful.
I think there's a temptation, particularly for freelancers, to think that the issues they run up against are personal. Do you feel there were also structural factors that led you to develop burnout symptoms?
I have individual issues in the way that I approach work. But a lot of these issues, they're not actually individual, but things that a lot of people have developed. We have this social norm of productivity as something to glorify and aspire to because we have been brought up in a capitalist way of thinking and a capitalist economy, which values growth, overproduction and overconsumption. Oh, you're walking somewhere, why not listen to a podcast while you do it? Or, why not be counting your steps? The same things that have led to the climate crisis are leading to chronic burnout and skyrocketing mental health conditions across society. Because we treat ourselves the same way that we treat natural resources – to be extracted and emptied.
But how do you intend to extricate yourself from that?
It's very hard. I've been trying to reframe it by taking this overused idea of productivity and reapplying it to things that I feel provide value in the world. I care about the time that I spend with friends and family, the time that I spend actively improving the world around me in whatever way. If I don't feel like my work is contributing to that; if I’m sending emails for the sake of sending emails – I’ll take a step back and say: ‘No, I'm going to save that energy for where I can actually do something that improves the world and makes me happier in the process.’ So, I’ve flipped around my calendar, my internal list of priorities. The time I spend behind a laptop now fits around the time that I spend with family, friends and other people.
Isn’t there a real risk that you’ll be back to your old ways in a few months? Given that the structural aspects you touched on haven’t changed?
It is a risk. I’m trying to mitigate this by going part-time as a barista, to not count entirely on freelancing to create my income. Also, even though I've only been freelancing full time for a year and a half, I’ve found that you can start to be more picky about your clients. So, now I don't work anymore for ones that are not going to pay fairly, or that think that I'm demanding too much.
Of course, ultimately, we do need a system change to make sure that people don't get stuck in this system of not earning enough to live whilst working 50 plus hours a week. But I can't single-handedly change that through some tweaks in my way of working. What I can do is use my privileged position as a middle-class Western person to be more explicit in what I will and won’t accept in terms of the way that I'm treated as a freelancer; the people that I will work for; and what isn't and isn't a fair rate. If I don't ask to be treated and paid fairly, then I'm also setting that precedent for other freelancers.
How do you feel about going back to work in a few weeks’ time?
The time I've had off so far has made me realise how deeply ingrained this need to be productive is. So, I don't want to claim that I'll go back so enlightened and zen because I've never been that person. At the same time, I refused to take any leave for over a year, because I thought – I can't afford to; I don't need to; my entire career will fall apart if I vanish for a month. But ultimately, what I keep learning is that there are no rules about how to build your working life. I thought that I couldn't freelance for climate issues full time. But I am. When I said I wanted to start giving workshops in addition to copywriting, people started to invite me to workshops.
The things that feel impossible to do are not actually impossible, and things that feel like they would be the end of the world never are. We think of all the obstacles, but the power of saying – this is what I want to do, this is what I'm going to do is very, very effective. That's one thing I hope I will remember in the future. That if it's ever too much again, that I can take a break. There are no rules. I make the rules.