The biggest lies I tell myself as a freelancer

Freelancers have the worst bosses. When you are the one holding you accountable for everything every day, denial and self-deception often run rampant. In an effort to hold my own feet to the fire, here is my confession. This is how I lie to myself.

• I’ll remember that idea. I am writing this blog today with many grumbles, as just a couple of days ago, while walking Lois in the woods, I was overwhelmed with a handful of blog ideas. Multiple ideas! So many of them! And they were all so good, I couldn’t possibly forget them!

I forgot them. So I’m writing this instead.

• 

  I will email them as soon as the story runs Sources are always asking me to email them as soon as their story runs. And I do. Sometimes. On bigger stories I care about the most. Or people who will definitely share and benefit the story. Er…let’s just stick with sometimes. To be full-time freelancer writer, you have to put out a ton of content. Some of it just goes out there and you just can’t check in on it or follow up with it in any way. I’m sorry world. I really mean it when I say I’ll do it.

• I will work on my creative writing as soon as I finish all of this stuff. When and if “all of this stuff” is done, I’m not going to want to do shit. I’m going to watch SVU reruns and sauté some asparagus. If I don’t schedule it in and do it before closing time, it just doesn’t happen.

• I will stand up and walk around in a minute. If I dedicated half the time I spend worrying about deep vein thrombosis to actually taking a break and walking around for a minute, I’d never have to worry about it again.

• I’m doing great on Twitter Sometimes I’m doing fine on Twitter, but I’m never doing great. I tweet out, but rarely engage with others. I plead Midwestern/non-confrontational/shy/busy, but the truth is, I think it’s a control thing. Unlike Facebook or my blog, there’s a sense of chaos and judgement there that I find intimidating. I need to get over it. I’m going to get over it. So I say. All the time.

• I am maintaining pretty good work/life balance. It’s not that I never chill out. It’s that when I do chill out, I really struggle to get back to work. I’m either working all day, every day, or I take a break and cannot unbreak. It is exhausting. Balance for me is a constant struggle between one extreme and the next. I’ve found that one of the toughest things about finding middle ground is that I can’t say “no” — to deadlines I can’t beat without killing myself, or to myself when I have a minute of free time and turn it into an hour. No, Natalie. Bad Natalie.

• I’m too tired to work. Okay. Sometimes I am too tired to work. But most of the time I’m too tired to do some work. Creative work is actually best done when tired, says science, so that creative writing I have a hard time fitting in should really be done when sleepy anyway. Look at this, I just lied four points up on this page. What a liar.