Late one night on a holiday, with work starting again the next morning, I lie in bed trying to sleep, holding down the anger bubbling somewhere inside my chest. But the longer I lie there, the more I realize it is not just anger. Worry and irritation seem to be stuck to my heart and lungs as well, making the difficult voyage toward sleep even harder. A meeting at exactly nine in the morning. Work that keep slightly creeping outside the boundaries of what I am actually supposed to do. Just thinking about it makes my chest feel tight, so I take a deep breath.
It is not that I am angry because I want more time to lounge around. What bothers me is the feeling that the hours I have to spend for someone other than myself are sitting in the middle of my life like a huge rock, blocking the way. Everyone else seems to do this. So why am I the one who finds it so hard to bear? Why do I seem to react more sensitively than other people, and why does it stress me out so much?
“You have to put up with things you don’t like. You can’t live your whole life doing only what you want.”
It is completely true. Which is why I spent years trying, somehow, to hold on to a life where a paycheck arrived every month. Whenever a good opportunity came along, I tried to accept it with gratitude and jump in, even when it was something I knew very little about. Being inside a place where an organization and its systems are actually running always teaches you something, whether the lesson is good or bad.
Companies and organizations are strange that way. They give you a fair amount of stress and, at the same time, the reassurance of a steady income. I imagine countless workers around the world have been living with this terrible dilemma since our parents’ generation, and probably for much longer than that.
After getting married, I started a new everyday life in Germany. Moving abroad became the push I needed to bring seven years and seven months of office life in South Korea to an end and take my first real step into freelance work. I started finding translation jobs through freelance platforms, and that was when I realized something: there really is every kind of person needed for every kind of thing. I was never going to make a huge amount of money all at once, but if I was willing to put in the time, it seemed possible to earn enough to get by.
As I completed one job after another, good reviews began to pile up, along with a 100 percent job success rate. And those numbers kept bringing more work. The arrangement itself was simple. I just had to finish the translation as quickly as I could, within the time I had available, and send it back. I came to think that this was about the most time I could reasonably give away to other people.
But I also learned that freelance work can take many different forms.
At the place I worked with until recently, I was in a position that felt like being “not an employee, but somehow still an employee.” Translation was no longer the only thing I had to do, the way it had been with other jobs. I had to join a video meeting every Monday, and when necessary, more meetings would be added on other days too. If something strange showed up in the software, I would end up contacting a developer directly, testing templates myself, and helping figure out what was wrong. Whenever the software was updated, I had to go back and review work I had already finished. Nothing ever seemed to reach a clean ending. I had not expected this kind of continuous work stress at all. Little by little, it was beginning to feel uncomfortably close to the office life I thought I had left behind.
The harder I tried, unable to hide my very Korean instinct to be diligent, the more complicated work seemed to find its way to me. The problem was that my colleagues were genuinely good people. I was especially fond of P, who ran the company, for the ease with which he communicated and the warmth he brought to his work. And because this was a job with a German company that I had found entirely on my own, without my German husband’s help, I felt even more attached to it. At first, I tried to say no when the workload started to grow. But when the requests came again, I eventually told myself to stay positive and do what I could.
And so, two years passed. I found myself back in a state that felt far too familiar: half a sense of achievement, half extreme stress.
On a Sunday afternoon, trying to calm the anxiety and frustration that had build up around my freelance life, which had slowly turned into something resembling office life again, I meditated for the first time in a long while. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that meditation simply began. It felt as though something might go seriously wrong if I did not empty my head, even for a moment.
As my breathing deepened, I entered a dark cave where all those tangled emotions seemed to be waiting. Once my mind found a point of focus, my thoughts began to concentrate, drop by drop, like espresso being pulled. It was not a long time, but for a while I lost all sense of it. When I came out again, one thought had become completely clear.
⏤ Now, finally, it is time to focus on my own work.
On Monday morning, before the weekly meeting began, I told the company that I wanted to wrap up my work with them. Because I was working as a freelancer, things could be settled more quickly than I had expected. It also helped that my husband and I had decided to finally take the honeymoon we had kept putting off because of work, and to leave that winter. I finished the meeting with a smile, took care of a few remaining tasks, and closed my MacBook.
Eleven in the morning. It felt as if the fog inside me had suddenly cleared. I had always wished I could exercise while the sun was still out, so I decided to start that very day. My husband, who had also been pushing himself hard for the past two years, had just finished one of his major projects. We got on our bikes together and headed for one of our favorite routes.
We rode through a landscape turning yellow and red, taking in the full brilliance of autumn. After thirty-six kilometers, we came home and put on a load of laundry. Then, at last, I sat down and began to look carefully at the work of my own that I had barely been able to touch properly for so long.
What I felt that bright Monday afternoon is perhaps best said in the voices of Ariel and the spirits in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, in Bayard Taylor’s translation.
Ariel
When sleep has made him strong to meet the day.
Perform, ye Elves, your fairest rite:
Restore him to the holy Light!
Chorus
When around the green-girt meadow
Balm the tepid winds exhale,
Then in fragrance and in shadow
Twilight spreads her misty veil:
Whispers peace in accents cheery,
Rocks the heart in childhood’s play,
And upon these eyelids weary
Shuts the golden gates of Day.