The Perils of Freelancing

Being a freelancer for the past 8 months had been one of the most exciting and simultaneously scary thing that have happened to me in a long time.

Even though I have been running my own small businesses since 2003, they have always been done under the safety and comfort of being a student and having some form of backup safety net that is my parents. I always knew that if something went wrong with the business, I’d still have enough money to eat and could always start again in the future.

Today, it is slightly different. I have financial obligations, parents to support, bills to pay and student loans to return. And all this while living in the cloud of unstability (of income). It is a little un-nerving. Not knowing when the next paycheck is coming or when my client is going to fire me, makes making financial commitments that much more difficult.

There’s always this lingering thought as a freelancer that I’m not making enough money and that maybe tomorrow, just tomorrow, I’ll have to resort to eating bread and water for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I know that its not necessarily true, but its going to take a while to break out of that psychological frame of mind and this is the irony of freelancing. While it is supposed to free you to allow you more time to work on things that you enjoy, it also shackles you with the burden of making more money with what ever ‘free time’ that you have.

This journey is going to be a long and I better get used to it.