“Why is it,” I asked, “that even with a good education, a talent for writing, a strong work ethic, some decent credits, and years spent paying my dues, I’m back to barely making enough to pay my bills? I’m living in a studio apartment, driving a jeep with no doors (they were stolen and I had a high insurance deductible), and I see no new opportunities on the horizon? The situation is making me sick. I’m an anxious mess all the time.”
“What are you anxious about?” Robert asked as if my list wasn’t angst-worthy enough.
Acutely aware that the clock was ticking, I skipped over the fact that Hollywood is about youth and if you don’t make it by your mid-thirties—or at least look like you still might—doors start to close. Some for good. Some forever. Instead, I went for the more dramatic, Dickensian bottom line.
“I don’t have a husband, alimony, a daddy—regular or sugar—a trust fund, or a nest egg. I feel like I’m up there on the high-wire with no safety net.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You are. So what?”
“So what? So I could fall.”
“Yeah, you could,” he agreed.
“I could get hurt.”
“Yeah, you could.”
At this point, I’m thinking, Maybe I should have gone to one of those shrinks who lies but at least temporarily builds your self-esteem and optimism. Too late for that now. The money in my pocket was already spent, so I dug in and tried again.
“Well that’s disturbing. It would make anyone anxious.”
I knew I wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t heard before. He’d probably seen plenty of patients/whiners, many of them freelancers just like me, and heard this same lament. The details might change person to person, but the core issue was still the same. I guessed that this repetition is what inspired the polite smirk that crossed his face, as if to say, Here we go again.
“Look,” he said. “You know that safety net you think you want? That other people have? It’s barbed wire.”
He said it without great emphasis. No drum roll to a big proclamation. But he didn’t need one. I knew what he just said was not only true, but it really got to the heart of my matter.
You’re probably thinking that what Lorenz called “barbed wire” sounds pretty good to you. Having a husband, alimony, a daddy—regular or sugar—a trust fund, or a nest egg has its appeal. As do doors on a jeep.
Okay, I give you that. I wouldn’t turn any of that down. But I can’t dismiss Lorenz’s point that there’s a downside to having a safety net—or thinking you do. And he isn’t the only guy sounding that alarm.
In 2012, David McCullough, Jr.—a teacher at Wellesley High in Connecticut—gave a commencement address that broke with tradition to deliver what could be called his version of the “there is no safety net” speech. Unlike most high school commencement addresses, McCullough didn’t stroke the graduating students’ egos by praising their grand potential and talent. He didn’t reassure them with promises that the right choices and a little luck would deliver them to their grand destiny. Instead, he started off by telling them that, contrary to what their sports trophies and report cards suggested, “You’re not special.”
His intention wasn’t to depress the graduates in his audience to the point where they’d need a Xanax to go along with their diploma. His point was that the assumption that a special life awaits you because you’re exceptional and have an exceptional support system could decrease the odds of actually becoming exceptional. Overconfidence and a sense of entitlement can lead to weakened survival skills.
Yes, but wait a minute. No matter how correct Lorenz and McCullough might be, their wisdom bumps up against another element key to a career as a freelancer, artist, or entrepreneur. Don’t you have to believe you have what it takes to be up on the high-wire in the first place? Don’t you have to believe you’re exceptional in order to face the “blank page”? Isn’t this especially true in a place like Los Angeles, which isn’t a city that can get you going the way New York City does? In order to self-start, don’t you have to wake up feeling special? Isn’t a certain amount of pumping up of the ego required? Isn’t a certain amount of ambition-inflation necessary? Because, I’ll tell you, a daily dose of a double espresso isn’t going to provide the stimulation needed to go out in the world and make something happen.
So is the mixed message here to be positive but not too positive? Whatever happened to “fake it until you make it,” which was once considered practically a Hollywood axiom and a popular slogan across the country back in the “greed is good” 1980s? Is it all about being confident without being delusional? I can take a look around Los Angeles and see plenty of examples of those who failed to get that balance right.
There’s an old boyfriend of mine—once an aspiring Hollywood player who, at twenty-two, was waiting for his inheritance, both financially and professionally. His dad was a big producer, and he felt it was his birthright to eventually score an Oscar. At thirty-two, he was still waiting and had accomplished nothing in the previous decade except that he got quite good at borrowing money from his family and popping open champagne bottles paid for by other people. The Prince of Potential had turned into the King of Slackers.
Then there’s the Hollywood agent whose people skills and charm were so formidable that he was on an early roll in his career, landing a couple of important up-and-coming clients. I’d see him around town holding court at the best restaurants, acting as if he’d soon be able to afford a mansion on Mulholland. Until those clients dumped him for more powerful and prestigious “handlers” and he had trouble adapting to his suddenly silent phone.
Adding this all up, you could say that at a famine point of my freelance career, I had no safety net, possibly suffered from ambition inflation, and had just spent $125 that I couldn’t afford to be told what I should have already known.
The takeaway from this is that if some bible for freelancers is ever written, the first chapter should be about the importance of clarity and memory. You have to be clear about the fact that it’s a mistake to base all your confidence on whatever safety net you have—or think you have. And it’s a bigger mistake to keep forgetting that mistake. Your only goal should be to become the best trapeze artist up on that high-wire that you can possibly be. Focus on that and the rewards will come—or they won’t. What will definitely come is a greater sense of your own strength and a whole lot less misery.
Ka...ching!
Money is often the bête noire for freelancers even when they have a job. Let’s say you write an article for a magazine in June. You do the research, the interviews, transcribe the interviews (which takes forever), write it all up and do a second, possibly a third, draft or more. This sometimes means re-writing the entire piece because the editor who signed off on the original angle had a mercurial change of heart. Suddenly the piece about a celebrity’s English rose garden becomes a piece about their collection of mid-century modern American furniture. Already the ratio of time spent versus fee to be paid means you’re working for lower than minimum wage and the editor never offers to kick in a few more bucks for her incessant second thoughts. Yet, without complaining, you do all the work required and meet your deadline—which the magazine treats as so crucial it’s as if the consequences of not doing so will be cataclysmic for the entire planet.
Then you send in an invoice, and you wait. And wait. Days, weeks pass. Finally, you email and you’re informed that they don’t pay invoices for articles until the issue you wrote for is on