After 15 Years of Freelance, I Got a “Real” Job
Is this the future of work?
My social media feeds became full of content promoting AI and I knew it was time to make a change.
Back then, in 2022, I was still trying to keep up with social media marketing of my writing. Posting regularly, even scheduling posts so they’d go out while I slept. I was everywhere. Even tried Instagram a few times, posting pretty stacks of books instead of selfies because I’m camera-shy.
Marketing, we were told, was what writers had to do to survive.
“Market yourself or else!” I’m sure you remember the content gurus shouting at us. It was hard to avoid. Be everywhere, in their faces all the time, or you’ll become invisible, they said. AI quickly became the tool to help us do exactly that. But after a year of exploring the various social spaces, I already knew it wasn’t for me. I’d seen the graffiti on the public bathroom wall, still called Twitter then, and recognized it was time to get a real job.
In my teens and early 20s, plenty of people told me writing wasn’t a real job and listening to them led to a job I wasn’t suited for. I spent a painful two years classroom teaching before I took a chance and began my writing career.
