From The Trenches: Arianne Nardo
arianne nardo tries on the Home-Werk life for size
I have always dreaded Sundays. Compared to the ambling, no-pressure mood of Saturday, Sundays feel like a blackhole. Time lost to a collection of errands and expectations. The T Magazine Sunday mythology of luxuriating over a pot roast in the Cotswolds or traipsing through art galleries in suede boots has ruined the weekend for me. Those ethereal people aren’t going to Target or suffering the indignity of a second clogged drain. They are reading for pleasure and scoring vintage YSL online.
The day of rest and all of its searing ironies, by 3 p.m. I would stare at my computer anxious over the work I should have started and irritated by the fleeting hours of freedom I should have claimed. It’s a paradox, like owning a magnificent and crumbling historic estate – all that responsibility and devotion to something beautiful, no matter how much you give, it will always demand more.
For all of 2019, I was a full-time freelancer and detested every one of those Sundays. And, since we’re being honest, I can admit that this has everything to do with my spectacular failure at free agent life. After a layoff torpedoed my neurotic but steady role as a full-time editor, I went head-first into a fortunate and unrelenting existence as a professional plate-spinner. It was exhilarating for exactly four months. My nerves were shot by Christmas.
Writing, like teaching, is one of a handful of careers that the world tends to oversimplify. It’s just translating ideas into sentences – anyone can do that. And because there are senior VPs who text and creative directors who write emails, there is limited understanding of the chasm between decent copy and professional copy. This is why offering someone $400 to completely revise their website content seems fair. Why $150 for a well-sourced and fact-checked digital story is typical. Words are cheap. Given that we’re immersed in some form of digital literacy every waking moment of the day, hiring a writer to create content for virtually nothing doesn’t register as absurd.
But a gig is a gig, and life is expensive, so it’s easy to make concessions. And that is where I found myself every month: Intellectually agreeing with the sound “demand more, demand better” advice of my smart, business-minded friends while spinelessly just saying yes to work whenever I was offered. I passed on exactly two stories during that entire year –and not without the deep, paranoid sense that I was assassinating my future self.
When hustling is not a choice but an act of survival, assignments take on a different meaning. I felt compelled to say yes because saying no was the more frightening option. If you say no, you cease to exist. You are silently escorted to a spot that sits between mostly forgotten and “call, if no one else is available.” You are graciously relegated to the promotional e-blast list. To be perceived as unreliable or unwilling by a client was worse than logging into my checking account on the second of the month.
And these two things are inextricably linked. While it’s always about the work and meeting a deadline, what being a gun-for-hire really meant was that I was in the service business. There’s skill and talent and a fair amount of lying about what you can actually do but being good-natured is just as critical. No one has time for attitude. My own experience as an editor in-house at different media outlets taught me that. Dramatic people would always be one-time contributors. Somehow, they never understood why. I would rather starve than be considered difficult.
Freelancing is like placing bets with your eyes closed: If you don’t capitalize on the current situation, you don’t know when the next opportunity will come along. This was all part of my daily calculation. Time spent on an assignment that covers my wifi bill or saying no and using the afternoon to sell my possessions on NextDoor. For me, that seize-the-moment mentality was exciting at first. Getting each job was a thrill; I was doing things! But then there was the confronting the reality that I would be permanently attached to my laptop because the work kept coming. And that welcomed in massive anxiety.
I was ecstatic for the projects, but I was also panicked and overextended, contorting myself into various positions to keep things running. The obvious, but striking difference between a FT employee and a creative mercenary is the absence of continuity in the kinds of duties you take on. Saying, “I don’t feel like being a part of this branding session,” or “Someone else can write that feature,” isn’t an option. I was up at 4 a.m. replying a day late to an event invite or doing background research for an interview that morning because I was a corporation of one and my name would literally be on this.
It was in the ungodly hours that the idealized, liberated version of freelance life started to evaporate for me. I did not have a work-hard, play-hard existence. It was work hard, have another mini-emotional breakdown on my bed while on the phone with my mom, contemplate a job at Sephora and then go grocery shopping. There was no off-duty time. Just another deadline, another offer, another attempt to outrun mediocrity.
A sane person would invest in project management software or set productivity timers or adopt any number of excellent strategies that will be uncovered on this site. But I basically didn’t sleep or exercise, ate anything that didn’t need to be heated or prepared and found a way to grind it out. Until one banal day, a realization hit: I was too invested in the outcome. I was working like a senior member of the staff. I devised solutions for problems that hadn’t come up, had ideas for the next issue I wasn’t a part of yet, sourced images just in case.
Instead of treating it like the clean and clinical transaction that it should have been – my effort and energy for a Venmo deposit – I made freelancing personal. I operated like a satellite office with ridiculously high standards and then felt slighted for sacrificing so much time on a project even though no one expected me to. Exactly zero people cared how many hours I had spent procrastinating, or toiling, or dreaming about delivering something heartbreakingly excellent. That was all fiction.
Being independent meant I was free to self-aggrandize and fantasize about glorious results, but that would have to be on my own time. The freelance exchange is about producing. It’s quick-turnarounds and next to no say in the outcome. I gate-crashed this scene with enthusiasm and the runaway belief that I’d be happy doing a little bit of everything for everyone while still being connected to the result. But the euphoria was short-lived and at was on to the next thing. In the end it felt like a lonely purgatory of Sundays, scrolling through the sting of procrastination.