make great money doing stuff I love (but not selling my ass)

I found out recently that I’m going to be made redundant from one of my jobs – the casual one – at the end of November. The funding has been cut and the entire service will close. Fucking horrible Tory cunts. So it’s back to the job search for me.

I could really do with a break in life.

I just have Wednesday afternoons off, and I’m using them to prepare my workshops and to do a bit of freelance work.

The pay is awful, particularly considering the stressful situations I am working in (people self-harming, emotional instability, getting verbally abused, hearing horrific stories of terrible childhoods etc). I’m not making much more than minimum wage in either of them. I could make more money working in a call centre or waitressing, both of which are jobs requiring skills, but which aren’t as stressful or impactful in the long run on people’s mental health and lives. I find this pretty shocking. And neither of my jobs are secure – one is casual, about 14 hours a week (they upped my hours and there’s more available if I want it and can fit it in), and the other is the maternity leave job (though my contract actually runs only until the end of August, pending funding).

But I absolutely LOVE both my jobs. They are so satisfying, and the colleagues and clients I’m working with are absolutely fantastic. It’s so great to be at work all day with the words “I love my job” thundering through my head. Every so often I’ll get a mad rush of blood to my heart and feel so so lucky and grateful that after six years of struggling to get into doing something where I can make a difference, I’m finally on the ladder.

Although I’m clearly not fulfilling the “great money” part of this goal, I am tempted to tick it off, since it’s bringing great richness to my life in other ways.

..back in November that miraculously led to me being offered a casual post?

Well, I went to a meeting there this morning to see about when they wanted me to start. I expected a few hours here and there. But my casual post has been upgraded – I have been offered a one-year 18.5-hour/week contract to cover one of the support worker’s maternity leave period!

Hooray!

So with my ten hours at my other casual job that makes 28.5 hours a week, plus any freelancing work I can fit in. Goodness.

..so I am not checking this off just yet, but the good news is that I am really enjoying my new job. Hooray!

I only did a couple of hours, and it was induction, adminny stuff rather than what I’m actually going to be doing, but the team seems nice and they told me more about what form the job will take. I’m slated for ten hours a week, which is great for now. I’m not going to write too much about work because the nature of my job requires a high degree of confidentiality, but I think I’m going to find it very satisfying.

I am anxious about a multitude of things – will I like it? will they like me? will I be good at it? will I be able to fit the rest of life in with a job (it’s been so long since I’ve had one)? will I get on with my colleagues? will I remember that it’s not OK to burp in front of people I work with (I’m used to it being me and the cat)?

Even so – EXCITING! It has taken me six years, nearly, to get to this point.

Someone from my other casual job-to-be got in touch this morning to let me know that they’re still waiting to hear from one of my referees, so I have him an alternative referee. Once she’s replied (which should be quick cos she’s a good mate now and wants me to do well) I can get started with them too.

I got a text yesterday saying that my CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check is now in progress for one of the new positions and to allow…. 4-6 weeks! Holy moly, this is taking forever. And now one of my references is held up – says the form is too long to fill in and she doesn’t know me well enough, despite us having worked together for over two years, albeit remotely. I am going to have to work on her to get her to fill it in, or get someone else to do a reference for me. Gah! This had better not eff up my job, I have worked too bloody hard for this for someone else to mess it up now.

Three weeks ago I had the worst job interview, for a mental health support worker in a supported housing project. It was so bad that every time I have thought about it since my stomach has squished with embarrassment and I’ve audibly groaned. So when their HR woman rang me today I was expecting another rejection, and when she began a sentence with “I’m sorry…” I braced myself internally.

I wasn’t expecting the sentence to continue like this. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long for us to get back to you. We’ve been restructuring and weren’t able to appoint someone until now. But we can now, and we would like you to accept a post as one of our casual workers.”

What the…?! Two job offers in one week, both in my sphere of choice, after almost six years of rejection?! Granted, they are both casual positions, I am not guaranteed work, and I have no idea of the pay, but yowser! The fact that they are both casual means that, as far as I know, I can take them both, and accept or turn down hours from them as I wish, so I’ll be able to continue doing my copywriting/SEO work for my friend for now too.

This second position looks more promising than the first – I’ve been told there’ll be lots of training, and as I have transport I might be sent to work in various different sites around the region, which will be a great foot in the door and hopefully lead to more work.

I am absolutely perplexed about this sudden influx of opportunity. But happy.

Today I rang for feedback from a failed job interview. I’ve been chasing them for over a month and was expecting the usual unhelpful, diplomatic “someone else was a better fit” guff.

What I got instead was the recruiting manager telling me that it had been hard to choose between everyone, as we were all much of a muchness. I had interviewed well and had, if she remembered correctly, placed fourth out of seven – it was for two positions, making me third, kind of.

However, she swiftly moved on from feedback (which wasn’t much cop, truth be told) and told me that they are going to be recruiting for some more positions soon, and would prefer to recruit from their bank of relief workers. There would also be some relief hours coming up in the next couple of weeks. With that in mind, would I like to go onto their relief support worker list? Why, yes, I would! It wouldn’t be necessary, she said, for me to interview again as she has already interviewed me once.

So apparently someone is going to call me over the next couple of days and have me over for induction, then I’ll hopefully have some hours in the next few weeks, after which I may – may – be recruited for a more permanent position.

I am a little bit in shock, and not a little nonplussed. I feel strangely not happy – not unhappy, just not over-the-moon happy. Almost suspicious. It seems that after about five years of trying to break into this line of work, just at the point where I start thinking that maybe it’s not for me and I should move onto something else, I have been offered an opportunity to get my foot in the door.

WTF? It’s just like what Sting says – if you love something, give up on it. Or something.

I hope I like it. If I hate it after all these years of banging my head against doors I’m gonna feel like a right twat.

..and I never saw it coming. My good friend M runs a web development company and about three weeks ago he asked me if I wanted to do some freelance work for him for a few months… writing! So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing 16 hours a week for him writing articles and copy about various things for his websites, including new phones, scrap cars and second-hand clothes shops. Most of the work is for SEO, which means cramming as many keywords in as I can to get the websites to rise up the Google rankings. I enjoy this, it’s quite a challenge to get the word “scrap yard” into a 700-word article 28 times without starting to look crazy. I seem pretty good at it too.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t know how much to charge him, and he didn’t know how much to offer. I know a freelance copywriter so I asked her about daily rates. She told me she charges £300-350 a day.

Yes. £300-350 a day. Minimum £250, she says.

Now obviously that’s not what I’m charging M (far from it) but if I could charge that and could get the clients, I could work a couple of days a week, at my leisure, and that would be plenty. I could fit it around (fingers crossed) childcare, too. And if (god forbid) the path of motherhood doesn’t open to me, writing could be a career path into which I could throw myself.

this whole experience has certainly got me thinking. I’ve been thinking for a few months now that perhaps I was flogging a dead horse with the career I’ve been trying to get into, but I felt utterly at a loss as to what to replace it with. I might have found a possibility here. People have been telling me for years that I should write for a living but I’ve never thought about how that might actually happen. Perhaps I could be a freelance copywriter.

Although the idea of chasing clients terrifies me – how do I make myself and potential clients believe that I am a professional when I feel like a 14-year-old girl most of the time? – I love the idea of writing for money. In fact, when M asked me if I would like to do this for him, my whole body went YES! in a way that none of the jobs I’ve applied for in the last couple of years have really pinged me.

What I’m doing at the moment is easy – it’s primarily for SEO so the quality of the writing matters less than cramming keywords in. I do feel a bit anxious about trying to write good copy for money, because writing on cue is something I find difficult, hence the reason I’ve let my “write the guest post” goal slide for so many months. But I have done it before – at school I studied English Language right to A-level, and I wrote on cue and to a variety of prescribed styles every day for years and years. I’m motivated, too, by the idea of others being pleased with my writing. I’ve always been motivated by grades and being judged good at something.

I need to give this some thought. I don’t really know how to go about this but I have a strong feeling that, if this is the right path for me, it might actually happen by accident. It has so far.