I've been building this dream for a while now. Here's the part nobody talks about.

I waited to feel something liberating. I didn't...

Ive been building my dream of going freelance full-time for some time now. It’s strange how some dreams get put off because you need money to fund the life you’re trying to escape — using that income [the 9-5] to build the dream, so the dream can eventually be the life. Every year that passes, you tell yourself: soon. And then you’re still there.

Then one morning I wasn’t.

I sat there and waited to feel something liberating. I didn’t. I read and hear all these stories online about people leaving their comfortable 9-5s, pouring their life savings and risking everything they built for themselves for the last 5+ years, only to leave and want something else.

I won’t lie, I subscribed to that notion. On the other side of all the perfect things on paper, beyond the resume, paychecks and accolades, there was another life where I work on my own terms. I have full autonomy and creativity to direct and take charge of this other life I’ve been dreaming of.

That morning, my last day at work when I closed my laptop and hoped for something amazing to happen. Would I feel extreme excitement? Did I feel the freedom I longed for all these years?

I didn’t. The home was the same. My office light was the same. I made coffee, slightly too strong, like how I always like it, and stood at the bench not knowing what to do with the fact that I had finally made space for the thing Id been putting off for years. With this comes another set of trials and hardships I anticipated.

But at the same time, I think I expected relief. A door closing, a weight lifting, that feeling you get at the end of a long-haul flight when the wheels finally touch down. What I got was a low hum I didn’t have a name for...Not that it was entirely terrible. But there was an added layer of silence in my day I cant seem to label yet...

For the next three days, at 9am, I kept opening my laptop out of habit. Just because 9am felt like it had rules and I didn’t know how to be in it without them. A shift in identity that I unknowingly subscribed to. This felt like the part everyone brushes under the rug.

Everyone shares the leaving. The “I finally did it” post. The office plants. The comments saying you’re so brave. Nobody describes what happens to your body when the alarm you set for years stops being necessary. How you reach for the shape of the old day and it isn’t there.

I’d been good at my job. Reliably useful. The kind of useful that gets noticed. Without it, I kept catching myself looking for something to point at.

I think busyness works like that. Not as a state you’re in — but as proof you’re showing. I was always ‘busy’, therefore I was worth something. The career wasn’t the thing I was building. I realised it was the ‘distraction’ for not asking what I actually wanted to build. And I have been choosing something else for so long because I felt it was the ‘safe’ option.

Over the years, I have trialled many ventures. I felt that I kept trying my hands at many things, hoping to find the answer in all of them. After my 9-5, my side hustle freelance business, running e-commerce shops, writing blogs. I guess I was not accepting one similarity that came with all these projects. That no matter what project, they all come with their stresses and challenges. They say the path you choose is also the path you will stress about.

The duality of life hey? Maybe my mind was pushing it aside because we all want to be comfortable. Years later, I finally came to accept this.

So what’s next? It is exactly the reason why I started this newsletter. And this time, promising to commit this to myself.

For my future self.

— katie