Silent January is Doing its Worst

Freelance life can be a rollercoaster of frenetic activity followed by eerie lulls. Especially during the first four weeks of the calander...

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Whether you run your own business or work freelance, if you define yourself as self-employed, starting the year can be one of the most challenging, confidence draining moments of the whole ‘going it alone’ set up. Everyone is grateful for the end of the barage of emails on 24th December and relishes recuperating from the year’s toil with friends, family and festivities. Slamming that laptop closed for maybe the only guaranteed break of the year is beyond a relief. But when 17th January comes around and the inbox is still absolutely crickets, the deafening silence can start to feel fucking terrifying.

Amongst my many freelance friends who work across creative and media fields, silent January is a well-established phenomenon. Some of them go to pieces with worry every year as the tumbleweed blows through town, others go to Bali to bliss out and ignore the feeling of being no-mates Nancy. But whatever you do, it’s almost impossible to remain untouched by the sense you’ve failed to launch into the new year.

For nine consecutive Januarys I earnt under £500. Some years I billed precisely zero pounds in the first month of the calendar. After nearly a decade of watching financially dry Januarys go by, I feel no sting sharing this. But in times past, I found it both embarrassing and massively stress-inducing. Every year, I would wind myself up into paroxysms of anxiety, spinning in the wee hours convinced that my early year drought was a portent of the END OF MY CAREER. Budgets must have changed, the market must have shrunk, maybe I’d said or done something before the break to make myself a less appealing asset? I would convince myself that I was going to have to retrain as a…well who the f knows. Now I’ve had kids, Teach First no longer seems a viable option.