I’ve Gone Professionally Feral
How I learned to release the reigns on my career and roam freely.
During the dot-com boom of the late ’90s, when I was 22, I interviewed for a job at a startup that was doing the then revolutionary business of putting government transactions online. Over a salad at a bougie cafe in midtown Atlanta, I fielded questions from the CEO about my background, my current job (I had an entry level gig at a PR agency) and what I wanted to do next (mainly I just wanted to get the job at his company, which was a hybrid admin/content manager position).
I’m pretty good at small talk, which has always given me a leg up at answering questions I haven’t previously thought through, but there was one that completely stumped me: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Despite this being a staple question of modern corpo interviews, I couldn’t form words around it. In my brain were abstract notions like “control” and “freedom” and “flexibility,” but I knew that none of those had anything whatsoever to do with what a prospective employer might want to hear. I flubbed my way through it, saying something about how I wanted to move up in the company while keeping an adaptable schedule. I could see him give me a quizzical look before moving on, and I wondered if I had tanked the whole thing. Luckily I hadn’t — he offered me the job the next day.
Looking back now, I find it significant that I knew on a gut level that I wanted to be a freelancer way before I even knew what that meant. For the next 15 years, I slipped in and out of full-time jobs in PR, but I always felt uncomfortable with the idea of one company owning all of my time. I think there are lots of reasons why, not the least of which is that I’ve always had serious reservations about dedicating my life and labor to promoting the work of others, but also I think it comes down to some intractable and insistent part of me that needs to be independent.
Not that it’s been totally deliberate, the way that I got here. It was more of a gradual inching toward something that scared the shit out of me — being solely responsible for keeping money and gigs coming in. But in retrospect, my background trained me for it. After a couple of years at the startup and then a couple more at another corporate gig, I went to a PR agency, and that’s where the seed of this lifestyle took root. At an agency, you are employed by the agency, but you work for different accounts. Sometimes those accounts stick around for a long time, and sometimes they don’t. So I got used to seeing business come and go, and how when you did good work, you’d either keep clients around or attract new ones. I also learned how to find and pitch new business, what people cared about when it came to picking an external vendor or contractor and how to keep them happy. I learned to tolerate the instability and ebb and flow of client engagements, in other words. It made the prospect of freelancing less terrifying.
A few years ago, I took a full-time job with a company that had been my client at the last agency I worked for. For a year and a half, I was their inside PR/corporate communications/marketing person, and I was miserable. Mainly because the company just wasn’t taking off (another startup), which was exacerbated because it was the only thing I was working on. The work itself could be rewarding, but I missed having clients. It’s nice to be able to switch gears and work on different tasks and subject matter periodically. It keeps things fresh and interesting, for one, but it can also serve as a buffer for the misery of assignments that are going poorly. So when they laid me off last summer, I was mostly relieved. After yet another 9-to-5, I think I was finally ready to try something new.
But even then I was still afraid of going 100% freelance. I didn’t have a whole lot in the way of savings — unemployment benefits helped keep me afloat for a while — so I initially started interviewing for full time jobs. It seemed less intimidating to imagine landing a steady paycheck directly deposited into my bank account and a company-subsidized health insurance plan. As much as I craved the independence, I was still struggling with the idea of cobbling together the not-insignificant amount of income it would require to support my big city lifestyle.
But while I applied to and interviewed for lots of full time jobs, I kept my eye out for consulting gigs. By the time the holidays rolled around, I was in dire straits financially so I took a life raft in the form of a contact copy-editing gig. It would keep me going into January, at which time I could kickstart my job search again. And then suddenly after New Years, two things happened: the copy editing gig got extended, and I got a retainer PR client. I’m not a person who believes in fate, but this seemed like the perfect twist. The copy editing gig paid the bills, while the retainer pushed me over the limit. I could afford to survive and with a few months runway to spare.
So off I went. Forced into the contract world, but not mad about it and not in a state of desperation. And I’m happy here, at least for now. I have all those free floating concepts I thought about during that job interview years ago: Freedom. Flexibility. Control over my own time and my own professional destiny.
It’s early in the game, but I’m optimistic that I can make a living this way. Not that it’s not still terrifying — I can already tell that I’ll always be anxious about finding the next gig — but right now, the tradeoff is worth it. I’ve since added two new clients, and I love my current schedule, which is a combination of working from home and working on site at the client’s office. Plus, I’m going to be able to work remotely while visiting my family in Georgia in a few weeks, and then I’ll be taking a two week vacation in early July to Australia, where I’m sure I’ll clock a few more hours. I would not be able to do these things with a full-time corporate gig.
But back to my original point. When I say I’ve gone professionally feral, I’m exaggerating, but what I mean is that I’m not sure I can be owned anymore. I don’t mean to say that I can’t take orders — I can, and I do. Constantly. Clients are nothing if not demanding. I just really, really love being independent. No one can tell me I can’t go on vacation. No one can even tell me I have to be on a certain call. Because my time is not owned fully, I hold the cards as to dictating how and where I spend my time, and I can tell you this: it makes all the difference in the world.
