Newsletter #23 - Give Yourself A Break! - Mighty Freelancer

Hey everyone,

*Looks around*

*Dusts off keyboard*

Sooo…it’s been a while since I sent a newsletter 🤭

Thanks to everyone that has checked in to see what’s going on. You’re the best!

Basically, I just needed to press the pause button for a bit.

I’m writing this on a plane to Madrid, and even the seat copy is reminding me how important it is to step back unapologetically from everything if you need to.

As freelancers, we push hard every day to: find work manage work do the actual work take care of admin stuff walk the dog play with the kids cook clean answer 571535 emails and try to keep some semblance of ~~life balance~~ sanity at the same time.

I’ll throw some ongoing nomad problems in there as well.

Basically, being a solo business owner means there’s a lot to manage on the daily.

Celebrity gif. Amy Schumer holding a ginormous glass of wine that's bigger than her head. She closes her eyes and holds the glass in two hands as she begins to chug the wine. She drinks sloppily, letting the wine run down her face and shirt, as she drinks in rapture.

Annnnnd don’t even get me started on how weird the state of freelancing is this year.

Check out Emma and Kaleigh’s latest podcast WTF Is Going On With Freelance Writing Right Now? if this is affecting you and you need some expert perspectives.

Anyway, I gave myself permission to de-prioritize my own projects for a bit, get some clear headspace, and regain my focus.

And it’s been awesome!

But somehow that “stepping back” went from “Sod it, I’m not writing an email this week” into 6 weeks of “Oops I did it again…“

This has made me unsure if I’m:

a) Having an existential crisis (I’ve done the mid-life crisis already, and I don’t regret the muscle car OR the motorbike)

b) I’m not really that excited about what I’m doing right now?

And this is at a time when I’m working with 3 Fortune 500 companies and a couple of very cool, scrappy startups.

I should be hecking proud of where I’m at.

But also — I’VE BEEN TYPING FOR SEVEN YEARS.

While I was debating this current state with the universe and eating my bodyweight in salt and vinegar crisps, I saw this post from fellow freelancer Kaleigh Moore:

As you can see by the responses, this really hit home with a LOT of other writers.

Yay, validation!

I think the biggest challenge for long-term freelancers is that we can’t simply quit our job and find a different one. We’re kind of inseparable from what we’ve built.

And I can 100% guarantee we don’t want to go back to managed office life either.

So we need to find a way to :

a) Take what we’ve built and transform it into a new business model, or

b) Start a completely different business (e.g. Abbey Woodcock moving from copywriting to…cheese!)

I’m curious to hear from you if you’re reading this and are thinking of making a shift of some sort in your own freelance biz.

Whether that’s moving into coaching, digital products, course creating, or something totally different altogether.

Hit reply and let me know!

See you next week (promise!)

Rachael