Rebecca Sperry

One year ago, ok a little over one year ago, everything changed for me. Yes, I know that I’m not the only person that watched as their world was turned upside down in the wake of the COVID pandemic last spring. However, it took me a year to finally set up an office space (with a real desk, not a folding table), complete with a lamp, office chair, and a series of bookshelves so that my books no longer have to reside on the floor of my already overfilled closet. One year later and I have finally decided it’s time to learn how to manage my free time so that I don’t spend all of it floating, feeling completely lost and unsure what to do with the empty space that used to be taken up by a full time job.

But first, let me backup. One year ago, I was one of the lucky public school educators that was forced to learn how to do their job from home. I was also in the process of switching careers, ending my seven year stint as a special educator, stepping back into the world of full time graduate school, with the hopes of becoming a “real” writer. My plans were thrown out the window when I was diagnosed with breast cancer a week before starting school and for the past seven months the majority of my free time has been spent going to chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and doctor’s appointments. 

Given the circumstances, perhaps it’s ok that it took me a year to finally settle down and set up a workspace where I can now spend hours typing away in the hopes of achieving my dream of becoming a writer. But now that the desk is set up and the books housed on shelves instead of collecting dust on my closet floor, I have to tackle an even more difficult task; how to be productive and work when there is no time clock to punch in and out of, no deadlines except the ones that I set for myself, and no expectations to do anything beyond what is due for class this week. How do you be self-employed when you don’t have anything driving you to do the work, except your own desire to make a living as a “freelance writer”, something that I am now learning is one of the hardest careers out there, something that I have zero experience doing.

Having no deadlines, no “real” job, and no real title is hard. I have one friend that I look to for advice and support with navigating this strange world, my dear friend Maggie Slepian, and she feels quite the same way I do about being a freelancer - it’s hard and it can be very isolating. I try to force myself to stay focused on doing “work” during the “workday” but I’d be lying if I said that I don’t spend way too much time doing chores around the house (or hiking) than being a writer. The fact that I don’t need to work in order to maintain my lifestyle (thank you retirement fund for supplementing my lack of income) only makes me less motivated to “produce.” 

Regardless of whether or not I write, pitch to websites, or work on the memoir that I’ve said I would write for the last five years (the one that is still not even started), the bills still get paid and if worse comes to worse I could always go back to teaching. Perhaps that’s what makes it so hard for me to throw myself fully into this new career path; that there is always the option of jumping back into the classroom hovering on the sidelines, just waiting for me to tag it back into the game. It’s as though I don’t see this as my real job. That I have spent the last year treading water, relying on my savings to get me to the fall, when I will be able to start graduate school full time, and finally be able to pursue a career as a writer “for real.”

I want to be a writer, but I also want to be able to help people. That is what the past year of floating has taught me. I left education because I couldn’t stand feeling like I was putting on a show all day, lying to parents, and pretending to help students when all I was really doing was being someone that they could talk to and actually would listen. I left education because I hated that having a public social media platform meant that I was risking my job, heaven forbid a student or parent stumble upon my account and find something I did or said inappropriate. I left education because I was sick of feeling like I was being used by my students, not heard or supported by administration, and treated like I was in charge of being the parent to kids that were not my own. Now, if I’m honest, I can’t help but look back at my former career with rose colored glasses and long for the days when I was collaborating with fellow teachers, advocating for my student’s rights, and crafting Individual Education Plans with the hopes that someone would actually read and follow the document. 

Being a freelance writer is hard. It’s harder than being a teacher. There are no expectations but the ones you set for yourself and there is nobody to mentor you except the random people you meet mainly through social media that are also trying to make money writing. What is most frightening to me, though is there is no guarantee that you will still have a job in a month, a year, ten years, or that you will ever be able to retire. But, as scary as the sense of uncertainty is, being a freelance writer forces you to focus on the present, something that tends to be clouded over in more stable careers where you float through the day, and work for the weekend. Perhaps trying to be a writer is just a phase that I’m going through. But setting up my desk, reaching out to and writing for two websites instead of zero, and beginning the memoir that I have put off for five years, are signs that I don’t want this to be temporary. I left a stable job for a dream, but I forgot that dreams are cloudy and hard to understand when you’re awake. Today I took the first step in making my dream a reality and all it took was a real workspace and an essay about how to try and be a writer.