Is it Time to Recharge Your Batteries?

If you’re a freelancer, you face the risk of burnout. How you handle it can make or break your career. Here’s how I recharged my freelancing batteries.

Late in the long, hot, and slow summer of 2006, I was ready to give up on my freelance graphic design career. I’d hit a wall in terms of bringing in new business, and my longtime clients weren’t calling the way they used to.

I’d just finished 14 months of construction courses at the local community college. Which may lead you to wonder what a gal like me was doing in a program like that. The answer was quite simple: I bought a 48-year-old house in November 2004, and I needed to learn how to fix it up.

Shortly after I moved into This Middle Aged House, a neighbor mentioned that she was taking construction classes at the community college. She seemed to be having a great time, and, better yet, the campus was only a mile away.

So, Yours Truly became one of the oldest students – and one of just a handful of women – in Pima Community College’s Building and Construction Technologies program during 2005-2006. Now, this may be the part of the story where you’re thinking I’ll talk about all the difficulties I experienced as a woman in a male-dominated program. Well, sorry, but I don’t have any sordid tales to tell.

I was pleasantly surprised by how welcoming the BCT faculty was. And that includes Tim, the guy who supervised the construction skills lab. Whenever I failed to follow proper safety procedures, he’d treat me just like one of the guys and holler loud enough for everyone else in the lab to hear. They take safety very seriously at Pima.

I finished my Pima courses at the beginning of August 2006. Things were slow enough around my business that I considered closing it and going into the building trades. In addition to my Pima coursework, I’d been volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. So, I thought I had a pretty good set of handy-skills.

I also thought that my design experience could be of use to the construction industry. I’d been to quite a few construction company websites, and let me put this as politely as possible: A lot of those sites needed professional help.

So, I decided to give a local construction industry networking group a try. I attended their mid-August ‘06 meeting, thinking that it might be a good source of prospective clients. It wasn’t.

But I decided to stay for the guest speaker’s presentation on post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in Mississippi. This guy owned a local construction company, and he’d been shuttling back and forth between Tucson and D’Iberville, Mississippi, where he was assisting with local rebuilding efforts.

Now, the business gurus say that you should project an upbeat, confident image when you’re networking. But this presentation reduced me and a lot of other people to tears. I left as soon as it was over.

Outside the meeting, I unlocked my bike and pedaled home. Nowadays, bicycling is how I get around town. But, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I was a long-distance cyclist. My two-wheeled travels took me through all 50 of the United States and included many areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

The memories of those travels – combined with the devastation I’d seen in the guest speaker’s video of the Gulf Coast – jolted me awake at 3 a.m. the following morning. An internal debate started raging inside my head.

One voice was screaming at me to go to the Gulf and do something to help those people rebuild! Another voice was asking where the money for that journey would come from. I mean, if the state of my business had a smell, it would be skunk. Things were so bad that I was wondering how I’d make the September mortgage payment.

This debate kept me tossing and turning until my usual wake-up hour of 6 a.m. After breakfast, I walked into my studio and began another day of the design career I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in. Oh, was I sick of sitting in front of that computer!

And it was a day in which the memories of my youthful bicycle travels predominated. While on the road, I traveled on a shoestring, relying on the generosity of strangers for food and shelter. This was especially true in the Deep South, where hospitality wasn’t just a lovely experience. Southern hospitality kept me alive and pedaling. It was high time to return the favor.

So, after the work day was done, I started searching the Internet for construction volunteer opportunities on the Gulf Coast.

My search turned up San Diego-based International Relief Teams (IRT), which needed members for its November 2006 construction crew. Although IRT charged a $100 participation fee, airfare to and from Mississippi was covered by the organization.

Now, that was doable!

I filled out IRT’s lengthy application, which included a request for character references. One of my references told me that IRT called and interviewed her. In late September, I received word that my application was accepted, and on November 5, 2006, I was on a plane, headed for Gulfport, Mississippi.

My 19-member IRT crew included an accountant, several carpenters, a preacher, a plumber, an electrician, a smokejumper, a Marine, and retirees from various military and civilian careers. We did everything from electrical wiring to installing drywall, hanging doors to replacing bathroom fixtures, and framing walls to roof repairs.

We worked for homeowners who were living in cramped FEMA trailers, coping with the loss of most, if not all, of their possessions. I worked for a man who sat on his porch and stared into space for hours. You could try as hard as you could to think that this is just another construction job, but it’s really hard to install drywall or pull electric wire while you’re fighting back tears.

I quickly learned that my construction skills weren’t as polished as I thought. There were three seasoned professionals leading the crew, and they could work circles around me. Since I wasn’t very skilled, I got the jobs that would normally go to apprentices. I also did a lot of cleanup. After a day or two of this, I was B-O-R-E-D.

So much for that career change idea. I found myself appreciating my computer-centric design studio in ways that I never had before. And I started caring about its survival. Maybe it wasn’t time to give up as much as it was time to start viewing my little business in a different way.

The impetus for this re-examination came courtesy of a friend. She’s the kind of friend who likes to spot talent in others, and I guess she saw a budding photographer in me. So, before I left for Mississippi, she loaned me a digital camera.

Once I was in Mississippi, I found that the camera was a very useful coping mechanism. It enabled me to get a grip on my composure and pretend that I was a photojournalist, even if it was just for a few minutes.
During my off-hours, I would go through my pictures, and you know what? Some of them looked pretty good. I offered them to IRT, and they were delighted.

It was good to experience that, because I sure wasn’t feeling the same love from my design clients. I mean, they seemed satisfied with my work and they paid me for it, but that’s as far as things went. Or so I thought. Mississippi showed me that, when it came to accepting thanks, I had work to do.

Despite their personal tragedies, the people we worked for were very grateful for our efforts. In fact, I stopped at one house where the homeowners insisted on hugging me, even though I wasn’t working their job. Another lady insisted on coming out to the church where we were staying so she could help serve our farewell dinner on November 11. But the church wouldn’t let her. Instead, they made her the guest of honor and the emcee recognized her from the podium.

I’ve gone on two more post-Katrina reconstruction trips with IRT, and I’ve ceased borrowing my friend’s camera. I now have my own digital camera.

Branching out into photography has made me a much better designer. There’s something about spending all that time dealing with composition, use of light and color, and creating a story with your pictures. Sometimes, I even get an opportunity to incorporate photography into my designs – talk about being fully engaged in your work!

These days, I specialize in design for university-based STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. As much as I would have liked to have construction industry clients, the economy said, “No way.” Besides, I’ve had one STEM client or the other since 2000, so might as well stick with what I know.

I’m also working on incorporating photography into my revenue stream. It’s taking a lot longer than I expected. Much of this is due to the fact that I’m still learning about the photo business.

As for This Middle Aged House, I’m still here, paying the mortgage, doing the repairs, and ever so slowly fixing the place up. If I need to hire outside help, I know enough about construction to see that the work is being done properly. Sometimes I join the work crew.

And that’s my Battery Recharge story. What’s yours?