the thing nobody warns you about freelancing isn’t the money. it’s TUESDAY :)
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