I woke up thinking about you today. It’s a courageous and wonderful thing you’re doing. I can’t imagine you will look back one day and think ‘I wish I’d stayed in that job’. Going freelance turns us into a different type of being, one that there’s no going back from, in my experience.

I woke up thinking about you, but really I was thinking about me. I was remembering the time in 2009 when I decided to give freelance life a go. I was in a different position to you – I’d left my job (and everything else) six years earlier to go and work in a refugee camp. After three years there, and a year working in another overseas job, I came home to the UK and s short-term research fellowship. When that ended, my intention was to get a job in the UK, settle down and build a life having got ‘all that’ out of my system. But I was free – I had nothing and no-one, and it turned out that it was quite difficult to give up that freedom. Also, it was the best chance I had to try working as a freelance Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) specialist. I had nothing to lose.

The first few months were terrifying. I had no work. I spent my days scouring Reliefweb for consultancy projects I might have a chance of getting, going for long runs around Edinburgh and doing yoga. I’d never been so thin or so healthy. Work started coming but the fear didn’t leave. Over the first six or seven years there were periods of no work and no prospect of work. I realised that Jan/ Feb were particularly dry months. I spent the start of several years in a panic that I would never work again – until I did, of course.

Now, 15 years later, it’s different. I do less work and get paid more for it. I only work with people I know and like, people and organisations with values aligned with my own. Mostly I don’t need to look for work – it comes to me. It’s a wonderful position to be in, but it’s taken years to get here. Years of no work, too much work, the wrong kind of work and hardly any life outside of work. This isn’t something I wish for you, but I wouldn’t wish away those years for myself. In fact, they have given me one of the greatest gifts of my freelance life – the confidence that work will always come. This confidence remained despite the loss of all my work when the Covid pandemic hit and I wasn’t able to travel. I was back to scouring Reliefweb for consultancy work I could do remotely, sending off applications that I never heard back from. Until finally one was successful, and I was off again.

My work has changed since then. I don’t want to work as much, and I’m certainly not going back to the impossible travel schedule I had before. But I won’t be giving up the freelance life. It has changed me and I can’t change back. You leaving your job has prompted me to think about what the freelance life brings that I value so much.

‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open’.

Martha Graham

Above all, it’s the ability to be true to myself in my work life. Certainly, I’ve compromised in the past, doing jobs that didn’t feel right and perhaps, with hindsight, I should have withdrawn from. But I went into them for the right reasons, believing that the work had value and would contribute to the overall good. That is a privileged position to be in, and not something I would give up easily.

I also love the buzz of the new. A new opportunity, new things to learn, new people to meet.

I love the wide wide network of people I’ve worked with and connected with, all over the world. I’ve met some incredible people and great friends.

I like that even if a job doesn’t work out the way I expected, there’s a natural end to it. Lessons learned, move on.

Every day is different. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two months’ time, never mind in a year or five years, and I love that! The future feels open and exciting.

The lifestyle really suits me. I love new challenges, learning, novelty and the pressure of having to produce something quickly and well. I love the negotiation and keeping everybody on board with where the project is going.

But more than anything, I love the person I’ve become through 15 years of freelance life. It has been liberating. I wish you the same.