An evening in Port Kembla

An ode to bobbing, weaving, dunking, delighting, and the slow buds of optimism.

Yesterday was a mixed bag. I started the day hearing an all too familiar story about another bright, diligent person was pushed to self-employed by a toxic workplace to thrive in freelancing and freelance advocacy. Next, I taught the first of a series of three workshops to a wonderfully warm, funny, and clever journalist as I waited to find out what exactly life-ending illness my beloved elderly dog has.

As I typed up the notes from that workshop, inspired and buoyed by all I’d heard, my body reminded me that I am in a state of enforced change and to resist the urge to get too carried away too completely. Then, I diligently packed the business cards I never handed out for a networking opportunity that didn’t bring leads but offered a deep sense of connection and community among openhearted people doing wonderfully interesting things.

This is the bittersweet curiosity and uncertainty of freelancing.

Increasingly, I read in bed with my morning coffee from books that I neglected for far too long that speak of challenges we faced (circa 2010) when I first started freelancing. The books speak earnestly of triumphing as though those challenges were somehow tough and meaningful.

Oh hindsight, you are such a beguiling thing!

When I first started freelancing, the challenges were getting people to understand what freelancing was. Now, it appears the challenge largely revolves around stating what it isn’t.

It isn’t:

·       An excuse to underpay, overwork, or treat people poorly

·       A lifestyle one course or book away from being a millionaire

·       What people do when they’ve not nothing else to do

·       Easy to replace with AI

Beyond that, I find myself reflecting on issues that everyone else seems to be able to accept with far greater aplomb than I -

·       The enshittification of the internet

·       Capitalism swallowing us alive while simultaneously imploding

·       That freelancers now must be influencers to survive

My window of tolerance has reduced to a mail slot on a door closed to a lot of things, it seems.

Is this my creative unravelling?  

I’ve begun referring to my phone as “that sticky little box”. That mercilessly pointless yet addictive thing that only hackers and scammers seem to ring.

Deep inside the apps, I’m enthralled by conversations that lead nowhere, content that does nothing, and tiny little digital awards from platforms that shopkeepers stubbornly refuse to accept as currency. Even as my arm wails in overuse and misery, sending signals of thrumming unhappiness to my neck and ear, I can’t stop looking.

As the distance between myself and my former flirtation (marketing) grows, my unceasing love for putting stuff online remains unabated. The words and observations continue to flow. Here, I feel like I am actually doing…something.

Meanwhile, adulting must continue. The neatly scribed pen in my productivity journal looks up from the page, egging me on, begging me to stop, and mocking me with futility with almost giddying regularity.

Yet, it only takes spending an evening with people who have pushed aside their cashflow issues, sat on their anxiety, and who long for the couch but still make an appearance to make me realise that, despite swirling inside a washing machine of conflicting messages, there is indeed wonder on the outside.

Of my phone. Of my head. Of so many things.  Even if it’s fleeting.

In a room I could barely hear a word, staring with unbreaking eye contact to catch words as they tumbled from dark red lips, in a space I had no real place being except for random invitations, curiosity, and a weird little beacon that always pulls me towards Port Kembla when I feel my most unglued, those lips asked me, “what do you want to do?”

What a dangerous bit of freedom to grant a person who feels as though they have nothing left to lose!

Is it OK to answer what you want to do is sit on your arse and write?

Failing that, save the world?

That you’d like to make the world a better place one meaningful conversation and musing at a time? Even if it means talking to yourself while staring at a page or biting down on social anxiety to speak, wishing the critical voices didn’t blare inside your head prematurely?

Is it self-indulgence or the internalised capitalism talking when you can’t say you ache to be free from less meaningful exchanges and that you dream of pulling at the threads that bind until the threads exist no more?

That when you want this time and space – and maybe this physical place – to validate some of what you are saying and give you permission to play?

Not when there is a (modest) mortgage to pay. Or bills from dogs and disability floating in. Not when you can’t offer much hope to people who are doing their best, marching forward, playing the game, and doing whatever the heck this always on, always strutting culture demands.

How do you explain you’d fight, but you’re unsure there’s enough marrow left in bones wearied by a lifetime of trauma and not fitting in? Or the sharpness of the post-pandemic, continuous natural disaster, sharpness of inflation seeping in?

Instead, I sip water, become quietly hopeful, and listen to where this conversation takes me.

Within the magic chalk circle drawn around people in this room, celebrating all and every thing, the attractiveness of creativity, community, and gathering, I must admit I begin to feel that all-familiar pang called optimism again.

There is something delightful about dissolving the pressure and believing in people outside the viciousness of capitalism.

Even if only to be certain change is possible for one tiny little evening.