The waves we’ll create: Freelancing!
Welcome to this blog-meets-newsletter-meets-journal section of my website.
After talking about it for so long, I’ve finally taken a leap into following my nose and my interests down rabbit holes and making a career out of this as a freelancer!
At first, and from a distance, freelancing was the promised land. It was everything I didn’t have. It was freedom, it was growth, progression. It was finally answering the call from the creativity-God.
This call was the call to not hide, to trust myself, to trust my calling(s), to remind myself that we don’t have to stick to the already-trodden paths.
Now that I am said freelancer, it is all those things. It is the promised land indeed. Although, I’ve discovered that there are still hiding places here. There are ways to exist small, there are ways to self-sabotage and there are ways to get stuck. To avoid great opportunities, to doubt, to become comfortable, to only tread the trodden paths that within the less-trodden path… you get me?
The ‘free’ part of freelancing can feel like a bit of a sad irony when you find yourself telling people that you are now freelancing whilst feeling fundamentally unfree.
In attempt to unlearn some of these behaviours and put the ‘free’ back into freelancing, I’ve been reading ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron which is a 12-week workbook for recovering perfectionists, and ‘shadow artists’ (artists in hiding). One part that has particularly stuck with me thus far is when Cameron was talking about our brains relative primitivism and survival-driven instincts. Particularly our brains resistance to anything new because new feels unsafe and unchartered. New has no favourable guarantee. Our brains quite literally prejudice us against new ideas.
I think about this quite a lot as a photographer because due to content and photo-viewing platforms like Instagram and TikTok, there is a proliferation of content that is imitated and imitated. It’s art imitating art, or trend imitating trend. Content creators learn what goes viral and then the imitators imitate…and do well!
Around photography there is no shortage of trends: of couple engagement photographers, of blurry gen-Z style photos, of humans-of-New-York style portraits, of fast paced photo reels playing to a song that is transposed five keys above the original. Not to mention the use of viral sounds - Instagram even has a ‘template’ section for this to make imitation much easier!
I find myself tempted to copy. Simply because it works. It’s good, it’s liked, it’s got an audience. I feel as if I am on the ‘right track’ if I take a photo that looks like something else I’ve seen. It’s a complete external validation-driven way of being an artist. In fact, it’s a way of operating that is completely at odds with artistry at all. It bypasses the inner artist and all of the things she’s got to say, her curiosity, her instinct to innovate and experiment. It’s a mitigation of risk but, as i’m learning, art should feel risky. Self expression should feel somewhat dangerous.
I’m not saying that as artists we’re only truly artists when we’ve created something brand new. I don’t know if there is such a thing as brand new, but I do know that authentic, internally driven art carries an energy with it. A confidence and defiance that lights a fire in us and those who resonate with it.
I find this with poetry a lot. Poets bend language backwards in order to say something that I didn’t think could be put into words. They break the rules. And, I who somehow somewhere along the way became a stickler for the rules can only say: “I didn’t know we were allowed!”
But that’s the thing: there are no rules and so no one’s coming to grant you permission. The affirmation isn’t coming. There’s no one coming to give you house points or a gold star or to tell you the rules of the classroom. No one’s coming to tell you who to sit next to or even to level the playing field. You’re sat at your desk, waiting for the lesson to begin but the teacher’s not coming.
We’re going to need to make space for ourselves. As a kid we’d say, “can you move up?”, when approaching a bench that didn’t have enough room. Despite being late to the party, we had no doubt in our minds of our worthiness to not only be there, but to be there comfortably.
As I embark on this journey, I want to resist the urge to be ‘one thing’. It’s tempting to market myself as a photographer and take good photos, safe photos, and sleep well at night. But I sense that the invitation is bigger than that. The invitation is for us to be trailblazers. To be expansive, fluid, forge paths, be bigger, do larger, to like ourselves to infinity and admire the waves we create.
More to come x
