I think that there have been multiple occasions of impact. I think for one, swimming as a facilitator, you're constantly updating, you're constantly evolving and taking the input and the feedback from your experiences and incorporating them. In terms of one specific thing, I very recently actually in my pro bono work, not my paid work, I do community meetups and check-ins and had an experience of realizing that the advice that I always give to other folks, I forget to follow myself. So this was an example of since I'm doing this for free, I don't ask anyone to help me out, but I always tell facilitators, never facilitate by yourself. And then I had a situation that was a little bit, yeah, it was just confusing and a bit unexpected. And in that moment, thankfully, the community members who come regularly were able to support and engage in the way that I was incapable of in that moment. But it really made me step back and look at, okay, even though this is pro bono work, I still need to heed my own advice and I still really need to re-examine how I'm approaching this.

So in the beginning, something that really impacted me on this freelancing journey, or my freelancing journey, was when I partnered with another freelancer. We were still very much in the early stages of trying to find our footing, understand our worth, trying to see how each other worked, you know, now that money was involved. In these early stages of figuring things out, I'd say a lot of what we did to keep our overheads low was to build relationships with clients, with potential clients, with venues, with people, so that we didn't have to pay too much for things. And this was back in 2020. It was the first time we'd been able to create a more formalized workshop series where people were actually paying for an eight-week course. And we'd made this agreement with a company, I will not name them, that we would be allowed to use their space to host these workshops in exchange for making them, the company, a podcast, which, you know, I say this out loud now and it sounds utterly ridiculous, but I had been away and my partner, my business partner and I, or the other freelancer and I, hadn't had proper time to speak things through. She was super keen to get the venue sorted and basically just said yes to us making a six-part podcast series where we did absolutely everything start to finish. We sourced guests, we did interviews, we wrote scripts, I did the narration, everything for 2,000 euros. And yeah, that is what they would pay us because they were also then letting us use the space, which was obviously, looking back now, a complete ripoff. They got so much out of us and because the communication hadn't been clear in the beginning and because we were largely not so self-confident yet to ask for what we deserve, we ended up doing a crazy amount of work for very, very little money. And, you know, the reasoning behind it, I guess, was a bit more nuanced also, that we were, or that the company was very, very well known. They were a big brand name and we'd hope that having that name would then get us more work. And I think in part it did, but now it's just, it's a sacrifice that I'm not willing to make again. Saying that, I am currently in a position where I am waiting for a client, a potential client to get back to me on a proposal that I'd sent, including budget, and I'm still left with the same feeling that I had in 2020. You know, am I asking for too much? How far do I go before I cave? What is my limit? As a freelancer, when there's no money or income guaranteed and nothing stable is guaranteed, there is this fear, this constant fear that nothing else is going to come.

One piece of advice that I wish that I had been told earlier, or at least somebody had really driven home to me earlier when I was starting out as a freelancer, is actually to treat yourself as a business. Even though you're not, you should still sort of think, okay, I need to pay myself a salary. There are my business activities that happen somewhere else, and I have business expenses that belong to the business, and I have my personal expenses, and I should separate them into separate accounts and think of myself as a business with one employee, me. This all comes from an experience that I had with the tax office in Germany, who are sort of notoriously quick to ask for money, and there was one year that I had a letter from them where they were asking for essentially half the entire year's worth of income that I had earned for that year in a single payment that was due within three weeks time. And I managed to get through that issue in the end, but I think kind of only because I had been quite regimented as treating it as a business, and then when I got such a big bill, it wasn't a reflection on me being bad at managing myself and managing my money, it was a reflection on the business. That was a really good time to blame my boss for all of the problems that had happened. Business bed, not personal bed.

When it came to freelancing for me, it was a combination of things. When I'm thinking about who I am and what I am, I've always loved this area and this idea of independence. Not only that, but for myself, I also see myself in the future being able to set up my own business. And so being able to freelance is this thing where I feel like for me, I'm not in necessarily one or another particular workplace. I am very big on the intuitive response that comes from things. Everything that's ever happened that was bad and didn't fit, I swear, I can promise that I always, in the beginning, there was something that was like, this is going to be a thing. And it is always about once acknowledging that that's going to be a thing, being able to assess, okay, is this a thing that we fight through or that a thing we have to fight through? Or is it something that can be completely just left? And I think this is also important.

Basically, I just wanted more control and agency over the kinds of projects that I wanted to be involved in and know that if I needed to take a break because I was feeling exhausted, because I was feeling burnt out, that I could without feeling this pressure from an agency that I needed to be constantly going and always, like, always, always showing up, always being on someone else's time. So yeah, that's kind of how I got into this freelancing lifestyle. The piece of advice that would have been really helpful to me when I was starting freelancing would just be to have some kindness towards myself and to be able to forgive myself on the days where you just, it's impossible to always show up 100%, I think, and you're going to have days where you just don't get through your to-do list and you don't feel like you're achieving the things that you should be doing. And so I think I would tell myself in retrospect to just not hold on to that so much and make judgments about not being able to be a freelancer or not being disciplined enough to just, yeah, let it go, forgive yourself, move through it, and know that you can wake up the next day and show up for yourself then.

I started writing a film in 2021. I got very serious about it towards the end of 2023. We began shooting at the beginning of 2024. We shot over six days and then I went into post-production. And when I had the first edit together, I really didn't like it. I sat for like two months about like every day behind the computer just trying to rearrange it, edit and figure out what's wrong. I eventually found that there were a couple of key scenes that I had not written very well. They just needed a rewrite. But this had cost me. I'm not going to say how much it cost me, but I could have like put a down payment on a house basically to have shot this version of the film. So I was broken at the idea that the only way to fix it was to go into some kind of reshoot because I was calculating how much is this going to cost me now, you know. I kept it to myself for a very long time because a lot of people knew that I was working on this project and I didn't know what to say to them, you know, like about like that I didn't like it, like it hadn't gone well. So I kind of suffered in silence for a while. But after some time, I just started talking to some people about it and opening up, chatted to some friends of mine about it. And I eventually met this guy who worked in animation and he's worked on several like pretty major animations. And we were just talking about the freelance life and creativity and all that. And I eventually, he was asking me what I was busy with. And so I just told him about the film. He's like, oh, OK, sounds interesting. How's it going? And I was like, I'll be honest, I'm sort of like not happy with where it is. I don't know what to do with it. And he was like, well, what we do in animation is there's a common problem around like writing a story and then viewing the story where you write a story and you think it feels one way, but you never know until you see it on the screen. So what animators do is we always do test versions of the story where we sketch it out in an animatic. We just do hand drawings. Right. And we scan those into a computer. Then we do sound effects, whatever, whatever. And it turns out I learned after this that Disney, Pixar, all of the major animation studio use this exact same technique. The film that they make at the end of their process is like the 60th iteration of the film that the guys who work in the industry have seen before they actually put something out. And it blew my mind because I was kind of like if I'd known that technique, I would have just sat with animatics beforehand and like drawn the whole thing out until I until I thought it was in a good space. So it's like, OK, great. Thanks for the advice. I went back home and started working like that night on animatics for the scenes that I wanted to redo. I did that over three months and I found through that process exactly what he was describing happened where I iterated, iterated, iterated, and I eventually ended up with a much better version. So I eventually finished filming it. I did the reshoots and all that. So I have a complete film. But it was just a lesson for me in it is great to keep connecting with and speaking to people in the industry. Right. There's like a wealth of knowledge around you at all times. And if you keep ideas to yourself, if you keep experiences to yourself, you know, you suffer in silence, but you also you learn far less than what you are capable of learning if you keep communicating with people, because there's endless and constant opportunities for you to leverage other people's expertise in other areas and use it in your own space.

Well, one piece of advice that I did in fact have when I embarked on my freelance journey but kind of ignored was to always have a contract in place and a rigid payment plan, even if the client is a friend or someone you trust or someone you've worked with before, and that it really makes sense to insist on a down payment before you start work. I was too worried at the start as a freelancer of coming across as easy to work with, as personable, as chill, as easygoing, but what I didn't realize was that you can still be chill and easygoing, but also exude an air of professionalism by insisting on contracts and down payment that will actually work in your favor rather than against you. Oh, there is one really bad one in particular, and it was a friend worked in a startup who were doing kind of a taxi app, and of course I was my friend, you know, I don't need a contract here. All the people at startups seem really chill, and I did them up a bunch of designs. We agreed on like 500 euros payment, and then they just kept dragging their heels, and it eventually, I ended up by chance on a night out in the pub with him and a few of his workmates, including the CEO, who got drunk and across the table, like laughing at me, told me, we're not going to pay you. The man laughed in my face.

My favorite clients are the ones that I never hear from. Working freelance allows me to work with people all over the world and completely remotely as well. So what that means is a lot of the time I'm working with people who are based in a completely different time zone and so I'm working over their night and they wake up to my finished product. And those are my favorite types of jobs because the client is never on my back, I get to work completely at my own schedule and I work very efficiently, smarter, not harder or longer. And that's the best thing about this job I think is that I can sort of work completely to the beat of my own drum.

My freelancing journey kind of started sporadically, kind of out of nowhere. I think it was kind of thrusted upon me in all the best ways. I got laid off at the time and was unemployed for a very long time and wasn't feeling like I wanted to jump back into that corporate sector or wanted to really feel like those environments were fulfilling for me. So I ended up going with freelancing. And ever since then, it has been really, really cool. It's been a journey for me to say, you know what, I can make my own rules. I can kind of create a guideline or a blueprint that's all my own. And that's something that I thought I never could have working in systems like I did in the past. But yeah, freelancing just fits more for my personality and the way that I am. So freelancing kind of allowed me to say, hold on, wait, I can actually take control over this and I can do a job where I'm happy doing it, but also feel like I'm not contributing to a negative part of societies. So I'm very particular with the jobs that I take, what clients I work with. We both have to kind of align on that because my creativity is not to be monetized. It's not to be made and packaged into a perfect corporate box. It's something that is ever evolving and ever changing. And through the lens of freelancing, it just makes that ability of being exactly who I am better.

the sort of freelance career that I now have, I'd say began when I was about 29. So that would be back in like 2017 when I lost my job at the startup I was working at. I got laid off in a huge round of layoffs and part of the reason I was working for that startup was like, Oh cool, security. I was like, all I want is holiday pay and vacation time and like a steady paycheck and that'll be enough. And I sort of was willing to sacrifice, I don't know, personal fulfillment for the perception of security. And when I got laid off for no fault of my own, you know, it was nothing that I had done. I was like, Oh, so all that security was actually a complete farce. Like it wasn't actually there. And I thought, okay, well then what's the point of sacrificing the things that I like doing, sacrificing my time and going to a job that I don't really care about. And so, yeah, that was when I was like, well, I'm not going to do that again. I've got to find a way to work for myself because at the very least, when I work for myself, if I need to get more, then I can put more in. Whereas like working at the startup, it was like I put more in, I worked lots of overtime and it never got me a raise. It never got me more pay. It never got me more clout in the company. And in the end, I got fired, you know, just like everybody else, regardless of how much I was putting in. I always thought I would really dislike the insecurity of money. Like, you know, oh, no, I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from. But actually, that to me is way less difficult than the knowledge that every day at 8 a.m. I got to be somewhere that someone's dictated that I have to be there regardless of my state, regardless of the work I have to do or don't do all the insecurities. And I say that in air quotes of being a freelancer, they're so much less painful to me than I always imagined they would be, because the things that come with freelancing are so much more valuable. I get freedom. I choose when I want to work. I choose how I want to work. I choose with whom I want to work. I'll never I'll put it this way. I will never go back to having a full time job. Never. There is no world that I want to live in where like I'm working for someone else's dream. I'm going to work for my own. And so far, the universe has proven to me time and again that when I invest in myself and believe in myself and believe in my dreams, then the universe provides.

I worry about the lack of government support and workers' rights and ability for freelancers to be protected monetarily or with their time by clients. I think that's really important and there needs to be more structure there or more ability to be able to ask for a fair amount of money for the work to be paid fairly for their labour. I think that's really hard for freelancers in the beginning to know what is fair and to know their rights and each country is different. It's tricky to navigate, particularly when you feel like you're on an island by yourself and you don't have any collaborating peers.