for a long time i took that as evidence i’d done it wrong. like there was a correct version of this where you hit the number and the feeling arrives on schedule, and mine had gone missing in the post.

then it got quieter. not gone, i’m not a robot. quiet enough that i could hear myself think, which i hadn’t managed in years. and underneath all of it was a person i’d stopped checking in on. things i used to like. opinions about stuff that has nothing to do with work. a sense of humour that isn’t just being quick.

some days i actually recognise her.

nobody puts this on a slide. the goals don’t come with the feeling attached. you hit the number, and then you find out what it cost to get there, and the invoice always arrives late.

building a business while you’re also trying to undo the thing that built the business is genuinely confusing. work, life, the people you love, and underneath all of it this slow project of convincing your own body that it’s allowed to stop. it knocks you around. it also shows you what’s actually in there.

so if you’re hitting your numbers and everyone is delighted for you and you feel oddly lost about it: you’re not failing at this. you’re finding out that surviving and living are two different skills, and nobody taught you the second one.

no trophy for it either. just the day, and then the next one.

i’m still in it. that might be the whole point.

eda x

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isn’t this the part where it’s supposed to get easier? didn’t i earn some slow mornings and deep trust after all the hustling and the heartbreak and the gut-it-out years? you’d think i’d be sleeping in and drinking coffee slowly in barcelona by now. instead there’s still that old drumbeat going, the one that says if you let up, something slips away.

it’s honestly wild. i worked so hard to crawl out of survival mode, and some days it’s like my body is stuck in a group chat with my past self and she will not stop texting. keep going. don’t stop. faster. the chaos is gone and the urgency stayed behind anyway, just in case, like a smoke alarm that still goes off when you make toast.

i’m not going to romanticise it. choosing rest is still a leap of faith most days. the urge to hustle, to prove, to outwork every what-if is alive and well at 9am and at 2am and basically any time i sit still long enough to notice it.

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but something is shifting, slowly and not very gracefully. i’m learning to pause for no reason. not because i’ve earned it or ticked enough things off, just because i want to.

i used to think healing meant never feeling anxious again. that one day i’d wake up as someone who doesn’t flinch at a free afternoon. that’s not what it is. what it actually looks like is giving that hustler part of me a seat at the table, letting her talk, and then gently telling her we’re building something different now. i notice the urge to sprint. i thank it for getting me this far. and on a good day i slow down by a bit. not a lot. a bit.

nothing bad happens if i chill for a minute. i have to say that to myself out loud sometimes, which tells you roughly how much i believe it.

i’m proud of the girl who survived and built the foundation. she is the reason i’m here, genuinely. but i am tired of living like panic is the price of admission. i don’t want to hand that to anyone else as advice. and i don’t want to still be running from a city i left years ago.

so i’m figuring it out. there are days i nap and feel weirdly brave about it. days i can’t sit still at all. days where the only thing i’m sure of is that showing up, aware and grateful and a bit of a mess, counts for something.

today that’s enough. if you’re in the same middle bit, i’m in it too.

eda x

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not a specific tuesday. just the general condition of tuesday. middle of the week, nothing in the calendar, nobody expecting you anywhere, the flat very quiet, and this low hum underneath it all going: is this working? is this actually working?

and you can’t ask anyone. your friends with jobs think you’re living the dream. your clients are not your friends. your mum thinks you should get something stable. and your bank balance is a genuinely terrible therapist, because it tells you something completely different every three weeks.

i want to explain how i got here first, because it makes the rest of it make sense.

i studied in paris. then i went back to turkey, and i was never really okay there again. that’s the thing nobody warns you about leaving: once you have lived somewhere else, the place you came from changes shape. it doesn’t fit anymore. and you can’t explain that to anyone still living inside it without sounding ungrateful.

i knew i had to get back to europe. and getting back was not a decision, it was a campaign. years of it. no money, no paperwork, no obvious route, just an extremely stubborn certainty that i was supposed to be somewhere else.

then i got here. barcelona. the thing i had wanted so badly i had reorganised my entire life around it.

and i was ALONE.

that’s what i wasn’t ready for. i had spent so long fighting to arrive that i never once thought about what arriving would actually feel like. i knew nobody. i was working for myself, in a city where i didn’t yet have the kind of friendships where you can say the humiliating thing out loud.

so i started her move club. and i want to be honest about the motive, because it gets retold as an entrepreneurial decision and it wasn’t one. it was not a growth play. it was me needing somewhere to put the tuesday feeling.

5-6 women came to the first co-working sessions. i had fully convinced myself nobody would.

it’s around 100+ women community around the world now. founders, freelancers, creatives, women in the middle of quitting something. and the single most common sentence i hear, across all of them, in every conversation, is some version of:

i thought it was just me.

it is NEVER just you. it is structurally never just you. but working alone is designed in a way that makes that almost impossible to know.

3 things i actually believe now.

1. isolation gets misdiagnosed as failure. when you’re alone all week, a slow month doesn’t feel like a slow month. it feels like EVIDENCE. like information about who you are as a person. that same slow month inside a company is just a slow month, because eleven other people are having it too and someone makes a joke about it in the kitchen. you don’t need other people for networking. you need them for CALIBRATION.

2. the ones who last are not the most talented. they’re the ones with somewhere to put the tuesday feeling. a group chat. a coworking table. a weekly call. a partner who gets it. every long-term freelancer i know has one. every single one. it looks like a nice-to-have and it is actually load-bearing.

3. you have to build it BEFORE you need it. nobody has the energy to make new friends during a bad quarter. i built her move club at the point where i had a lot to give, which is the only reason it existed by the time i really needed it.

i’m writing this newsletter for more or less the same reason i started the club. not to sell anything. because there’s a version of this work that is very quiet and very lonely, and i’ve decided i’d rather do it out loud.

if you’re reading this on a tuesday and it’s too quiet where you are: hi. hello. it’s not just you.

eda x

not the romantic kind you see on threads about location independence. i'm talking locked in your room, grinding just to survive, the kind you do when there is no plan b and you know it. social media management, for whoever would pay me, at whatever they'd pay. that year just about broke me. survival mode every damn day, i worked until there was nothing left, sleep was not really part of the plan, and i pushed in ways i would never tell another woman to push. it was the only shot i had.

the whole thing was building a freelance income from zero, enough to try for a digital nomad visa, which is close to a miracle when you're applying from turkey. the process took most of a year. every month it felt like the dream was slipping. every month i doubled down anyway. i'm PROUD AS HELL of that girl. i also ache for her a bit, because she shouldn't have had to do all of that just to get somewhere safe.

so no, i didn't arrive in barcelona and find myself. freelancing was the lifeline. it was the only reason i got on the plane.

and here's the part that still turns my stomach a little. i prepaid 6 months of rent on a flat i had never seen. every euro i had saved, sitting in my wise account, gone in a single transfer to an agency in a city i had never lived in, for an apartment i knew from photos. i remember sending it and then just sitting there thinking, if this is a scam then that's it, there is no version of this where i come back from it. i'd had no plan b for a year and now i had no money either.

the flat was real, in the end. with a beautiful view. but i landed and it didn't feel like a new chapter at all. it felt like walking into the middle of someone else's story. i was beat. hollowed out. still hopeful in a stubborn way but scared like i'd never been. no friends, no safety net, only me and a city that had no idea i existed. it wasn't glamorous and it wasn't freeing, it was mostly just lonely, and that kind of quiet forces you to look at everything you've been outrunning, all at once, with nothing else to do.

then slowly, and i mean slowly, something shifted. barcelona didn't fix anything. what it did was stop me from having to fight my own environment just to exist. i wasn't living inside someone else's chaos anymore. i started living on my own clock. and only then did the rest of it start to make sense: the desperation, the reinvention, the community i ended up building for women, the woman i am now and the one i'm still turning into.

barcelona didn't save me. i DID that part. barcelona just gave me room to breathe, and it turns out breathing is the whole thing.

i still carry the old habits. i overwork. i slip back into burnout because it's the setting i know best. i'm unlearning it slowly and badly. i'm softer than i was. and i'm never going to stop being grateful to the version of me who did what she had to when it felt like everything was closing in.

so if you're in your own in-between right now, where it all feels impossible and you have genuinely no idea whether it gets better: i've been there. the you who gets through this season might be the exact one who builds the life you keep imagining. you're not behind. you're just rebuilding.

i'm still in it too, figuring it out as i go.

eda x

domains. email hosting. a brand i've been paying for its domain that hasn't shipped an order in 3 years. three websites. three inboxes. three logos i paid someone to design. three brands i was VERY sure about at the time.

the total comes to about $500 a year. not enough money to matter. just enough to notice every month, and just enough to make me feel slightly ridiculous every time the charge came through.

but that's not really why i'm closing them.

i'm closing them because i finally said the thing out loud: i've been maintaining three businesses and only one of them is actually me.

so. the graveyard.

nomad kloud was the first agency. organic social media management. a team of ten, ten clients, all of it running through me. i was 28 and i genuinely believed the point was to get BIGGER. more clients, more people, more logos on the homepage. and it worked, for a while, right up until the morning i woke up and realised i had built myself a job i would never in my life apply for.

queerlish was the e-commerce brand. i was like 23. this was the one i was having the hardest time with. a client project ending is just a project ending. but a thing you invented and named and photographed yourself?

hyln hub was the creative studio. the newest one. and the one i built so i could niche down and rebuild the team better. more on that in two weeks, because it deserves its own post.

three brands. one girl. me, in a flat in barcelona, doing all of it.

here's the part i genuinely didn't expect to be complicated: none of them failed.

nomad kloud paid my rent for YEARS. queerlish taught me more about how people actually buy things than any campaign i've ever run for a client. hyln hub got me top rated plus on upwork.

they didn't fail. i outgrew them. which is a much weirder feeling, because there's no moment where you're allowed to be sad about it. nobody sends you a card when you close a business that was doing perfectly fine.

so i've been doing it slowly, like a freak. screenshotting homepages before i take them down. saving the good work into a folder called "archive" that i will absolutely never open again. reading old client emails i should have deleted in 2021.

saying goodbye PROPERLY. which is an extremely unserious thing to admit about a stupid subscription and i am going to admit it anyway.

so why am i here. and why now.

because after all that, i don't want to build a fourth brand. i want to write under my own name.

i've spent 10 years making other people's brands sound like they know exactly what they're doing. luxury fashion in paris. then e-commerce. then the agency. then my coaching business. now paid social creative strategy for health and wellness brands, as one person, with no team and no one to hide behind.

i have written thousands of hooks and scripts and angles for companies i don't own.

i have written almost NOTHING for myself.

this is me fixing that.

what this is going to be: letters about working alone. the money. the loneliness. the pricing conversations that make you want to throw your laptop into the sea. the days you don't open it at all. clients who ghost. the very specific grief of closing things that were fine. what it's like to build a life in a city you weren't born in.

life first, work woven in. this is not a marketing newsletter. there are ten thousand of those and most of them are written by people who have never once had to look at their own bank account on a sunday night.

if you're building something on your own, freelance, solo, one woman studio, whatever you're calling it this month, you're who i'm writing to.

as consistent as i can be. mostly unfiltered. occasionally about ads. usually not.

come with me. it's going to be a strange year.

eda x