The Problem With Validation.

Starting 2022 the way I’d like it to go on – which means on my part, writing a lot more and getting a stretch into my fingers once again. I don’t think I ever really wrote about my unexpected career change about a quarter into last year. With that change came a lot of up’s and a lot of down’s and all in all I learned a lot – the main thing being the eternal problem with validation. 

Last year was a hodgepodge of heaviness, general weariness and far too much change. In February / April time, I had a meeting with my then manager at work. It was a one on one so I thought nothing of it, but in the meeting my manager made a disparaging comment about the singular mental health I had taken that year. Bear in mind this was after a funeral and after a diagnosis for an auto immune disease I did not realise I had until it came to the surface by way of vision loss. After the meeting I immediately messaged my friend who is head of HR at a prestigious architecture practice in Clerkenwell. Her messages came through in a flurry, a mixture of expletives and fury, “That is absolutely inappropriate – especially considering the last few weeks. Challenge it immediately and go to HR”, and so I pushed back via e-mail, looped in senior members of staff and…. nothing. A generic apology. A few weeks later, I was called into a meeting and after I heard the words ‘PIP’, I folded inwardly with a sadness I could not describe. My HR friend had told me to watch out for this, and so as they were mentioning ‘lower performance’ and ‘not hitting KPI’s’, I started writing up my e-mail departure from the company, joining one of the thousands who quit their jobs in the great Covid-19 resignation. Whilst, I loved my job and the people I worked with, at the age of 29 – I understood that this would no longer be the environment I wanted my career to grow and  flourish in. Two weeks later I handed in my resignation to my teams dismay, and a month later I walked out of the building with a weight off of my chest and into freelance life.

I’m not quite sure what I expected when I quit and started my plan on working for myself, but I jumped into it. Somehow I was extraordinarily lucky and didn’t have to do much pitching for work. E-mails came thick and fast and I even felt a little overwhelmed by it all – Is this what everyones inbox looks like?, I thought to myself one day. I was unable to keep up with the flow of responses and neither was my management at the time. So whilst on the surface I was churning out a lot of paid projects, underneath with each project going live I began to feel less and less like myself and more and more like a robot. Some projects were seamless and highly enjoyable to do (shout out to brands who let you lead), but a lot were very difficult with endless reshoots, rigid direction and a lack of creativity and I think it showed.

So what did I learn? Well for starters, it was that I realised that working full time freelance for yourself can get incredibly lonely and I don’t think I ever really properly prepared from having worked with over eighty people at once to working at home alone, just me, myself and my laptop. And whilst I suppose I did have co-workers in the form of my online mutuals it just isn’t the same as work relationships when you’re working full time and I found I missed small things such as just being able to chat at someones desk, have lunch with others and even just being able to let off steam and go for work drinks – I wholly underestimated the social aspect. I also learned that when you work for yourself, weekends no longer exist, and I suppose this is different for everybody and how many hours they need to work to make ends meet, but I found myself replying to WhatsApp messages and emails on holidays and days off which I started to resent and I missed the (mostly) clear cut off for weekends that a usual 9-5 provided. After a particularly stressful experience with a brand and my management not really stepping in as they had too many projects on themselves, I took control of the last of my projects, sat my agency down and gently explained that I was leaving and in this I understood the importance of getting management that truly understands how you work, your long term goals, your short term goals and more.

What I didn’t expect to have gained during the sprint was a nasty sense of low self esteem in regards to the content I put out. I became obsessed with checking my story analytics and panicking if I hadn’t hit 1000 story views before the twenty four hour mark. I found myself crying when my paid content flopped and had less than 500 likes, I worried people thought I had bought my following (Black square summer really messed our engagement up eh!). I became inconsolable and quite frankly a little bit ridiculous. And whilst it made sense – considering my online presence and numbers were what was paying the bills, I’d want each piece of content to do well, but when I sat down and thought about it, I realised I needed a huge rehaul of how and why I was producing content, and the first place to start was to abandon the idea of ‘producing’ and get back into doing what I liked for fun regardless of the follows or unfollows or the dip in engagement rates.

Chasing validation via likes, shares and comments online had majorly affected my creativity and instead of shooting or creating things that I liked, I was trying to create content for others more than myself. So lately I’ve fallen back into taking my camera with me when I go out, snapping away at things I love, writing about my favourite books and perfumes (my vices) and generally just having a bit of fun again. The problem with validation is that it stops feeling like validation after a while and it feels much more like a set of rules one has to adhere to – so here’s my official pledge to break free of numbers and just ~exist~ online, knowing that I may not be for everyone, and that is perfectly okay.