The Accidental Freelancer.
Nobody plans it this way.
I was employed, working in London, and one evening I was sitting in the Albion at Marble Arch when someone at the table mentioned they were looking for photographers to teach kids on a local estate in Hackney. The work sounded interesting. The catch? You had to be freelance. I said yes before I'd thought it through, registered as self-employed the following week, and that was that. What I didn't know yet was that two months later I'd find out I was pregnant.
Freelance wasn't the plan. It just became the only plan that made sense.
What I discovered quickly was that I'd accidentally landed in exactly the right shape of life for the way my brain works. When something isn't working I don't get scared, I relish the task of solving it. There's something that kicks in when a project goes sideways or a brief turns out to be the wrong brief entirely, a kind of focus that I've come to recognise as one of the most useful things I bring to my work. Freelance rewards that. There's no structure holding you up, no manager absorbing the difficult calls, no team to defer to. It's just you, the client, and the problem in front of you. That suits me. It always has. What took longer to understand was that this wasn't a personality quirk. It was a skill, and it was the thing clients were actually hiring me for, long before either of us had a word for it.
Nearly 17 years on, across two countries and somewhere between uncountable projects and a lot of very different rooms, I still think about that pub conversation. Not because it was a pivotal moment I recognised at the time, but because I didn't. It was just a Tuesday evening and someone needed photographers. What I understand now that I didn't then is that a true core skill of freelance life, whatever the industry, is trusting the process. It requires a certain type of person. Someone who doesn't need the monthly paycheck to feel safe, who gets a genuine thrill from flexibility, who loves the start of building something again. Someone who pivots when the work throws curveballs, rolls with the criticism, and moves forward to end up with a better solution than the one they started with. Not everyone is wired that way. I didn't know I was until a stranger in a pub gave me no other option.