I Quit Freelancing After 10 Years and Have Never Felt So Free

When something becomes your identity, it might be holding you back

Kitiara Pascoe
5 min readFeb 12, 2023

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Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

In the summer of 2022, I found myself increasingly dwelling on the reality of what my freelance business had become. I was working with a fantastic new client — a household name — and whilst the work was fun, I kept getting flashforwards. Y’know, the futuristic sibling of the flashback.

I could see this project ending, and then a new one would crop up and I’d do that, then another, and another, and another. It left me feeling not empty per se, but a little horrified. Isn’t this what I’d worked for? Weren’t these types of clients, ones that came to me, exactly what I had always wanted?

Everything can become a trap if you let it

The idea of quitting freelance life was hardly new to me. After all, most freelancers I know often dream of the ‘security’ of the full-time job. The grass is always greener, right?

And sure, I’d thought about it plenty of times in the past decade, even occasionally gone and got myself one, although it was always short-lived when I realised those jobs were never for me. But the main reason why I would never have gone back to the full-time employee life was simple: I was a…

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Kitiara Pascoe

Outdoor Adventure Writer | Author of In Bed with the Atlantic (Fernhurst, 2018) | New book coming 2024 | kitiarapascoe.com | Youtube: https://bit.ly/3uQPWh3