I Quit My Job Three Years Ago; These 5 Habits Keep Me Afloat As A Freelancer

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Hello, friends.

Three years ago, in July 2022, I quit my job to follow my heart. My broken heart. As I wrote last year:

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I was obsessed with the climate crisis and what kind of future we were leaving for our children. I couldn’t fit my feelings solely through the filter of traditional objective journalism anymore. Or more accurately, I didn’t want to.

To announce the change, I posted this selfie taken in my daughter’s school garden.

It wasn’t easy to walk away from a six-figure job on a national broadcast network. I still miss my colleagues at NPR, especially when I hear their reporting. I gave up some identity, some status, some income and economic security, all of which is especially hard in your 40s.

My husband’s work is a backstop for us financially, and I acknowledge that privilege, although he took a layoff in February of this year to embark on his own climate career transition, so things may be shifting.

My new career is a portfolio of writing, speaking, presentations, consulting, advising, and other editorial projects.

It can feel exhausting to switch gears so often. Plus, I have to manage my own small business behind the scenes (soliciting the work; invoicing for the work; sometimes fundraising and writing grants).

In 2025, it’s gotten harder. With Trump’s dismantling of the country, nonprofits are struggling and so is media. One of my funded columns ended in April. Then I got a (much smaller) grant from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

I sold my sixth nonfiction book, about the emotional landscape of the polycrisis, in May, after working on the proposal for over a year. I am over the moon, and it also means in the next twelve months I’ll need to block out lots of time to research and write, time that I can’t spend on my other work and career development.

To celebrate the second anniversary of this newsletter, and help support my book writing, I’m offering a limited time discount: 20% off when you subscribe or upgrade by the end of September!

What I Gained By Taking This Leap

• I don’t feel alone with the horrible truth any more.

• I learn new things almost every day that help me make sense of what’s happening.

• I am learning from and connecting with people around the world who are applying their best efforts to help humanity cope, practically, spiritually and emotionally, with the maelstrom composed of the ill winds of climate, conflict, disease, democratic decline, displacement, disinformation, known by some as the polycrisis.

• Even though things are sacry, my kids can see that I am trying to face into this storm as best I can, and leave the world a little better for them.

Two years ago, to share what I was learning, and to try to help convene a community around it, I launched this newsletter.

In the first year, subscribers doubled; in the second year, they nearly doubled again, now at 11,000 and change. My goal is to double again in the third year, so please tell a friend!

I want to thank each of you so, so much for coming along on this journey with me. I didn’t know if there was going to be any audience for my musings on thriving, and raising thriving kids, in a rapidly changing, often terrifying world. This isn’t fitness tips or food or some other immediately appealing topic. And I didn’t get here through growth hacking; it happened through word of mouth, showing up week after week, and being as honest with you as I could.

Keeping this weekly appointment with you has kept me flowing as a writer. Starting my weekly news roundups this January has often kept me sane.

And the money makes a real difference. When I get yet another pitch or grant rejection (or just as often, an editor doesn’t even bother to write back), I think of the nearly 300 of you who pay for this newsletter each month, as well as the thousands who open it every week, and I feel a little compensatory glow. You are basically my UBI.

To celebrate the second anniversary of this newsletter, I’m offering a limited time discount: 20% off when you subscribe by the end of September!

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As promised, here are

Five Habits That Keep Me Sane As A Freelancer

1. I host a Monday morning 10am accountability Zoom with several INCREDIBLE writers (A rotating cast; usually at least three of us are on the call). We share what we’re working on and our goals for the week and gas each other up to stay focused and get our due. GODSEND.

2. I have a spreadsheet called “Billables” where I record all my assignments in all stages, from pitch to paid. It helps me remember when I’ve gotten paid.

3. I try to always have pieces in every stage at a given moment, from pitch to reporting to final edits. I also like to submit at least one grant application a month.

4. When I’m writing I do pomodoros: a 25 minute timer on my phone followed by a 5 minute break.

5. I pay someone a few hours a month to help with promotion, social media, and setting Substack goals. I hate self-promotion, so paying someone forces me to do it.

Living The Questions Now

I know that I’m not alone in searching for a way to remake my career and life in light of what we’re facing as a civilization. There are many people for whom the collective existential crisis is also experienced as a personal existential crisis.

That’s more or less what Jess Serrante confronts with Joanna Macy, her mentor, in the ninth episode of We Are The Great Turning, the podcast I produced last year.

(Joanna is currently in hospice; read Jess’s tribute.)

In the Work that Reconnects, the beginning of the spiral is about your inner work—grounding in gratitude, honoring your pain, letting it transform your outlook and expand your empathy.

In the outer part of the spiral, we come to “going forth”—the part that is about your work in the world. How can you act on your feelings and become part of “The Great Turning,” lending your best efforts to a more just, life-sustaining future for humanity?

Jess pushes Joanna for a prescription. Joanna isn’t content to prescribe.

Our world, the world as we know it, sounds like it might die on us. Okay? How are we supposed to—we've never lost a planet. We don't have any experience in the source of life drying up. There's no preparation for this. We don't even know how to imagine it. We're trying to pin down and have answers for something that is, by its nature, of spontaneity and, and cannot be ordered.

As Jess and I were playing back the tape of that conversation, trying to fit the pieces together, she realized that along the way, she has acquired some of the wisdom to go forward on her own.

“I want to sit down for once and be like, Joanna, tell me the answer, and for you to be like, here it is, Jess, here. You need to play, you need to feel your grief, you need to act and remember how much you love the earth, and that's how we're gonna make it through.”

This was one of the biggest aha moments of our entire time working together—when we realized that Jess had already put her “prescription” into her own words.

She also realizes that her mentor can’t come any further with her. Even, or especially, someone as wise as Joanna Macy can’t tell her exactly what to do. Joanna leaves her with these words from Rilke.

Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway because you will not be able to live them.

For everything is to be lived.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you then may, gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.