‘I Quit My Job A Week Before The Pandemic’: How Covid Upset My Career Plans

Just over a year ago, I gave notice to quit my staff job as senior fashion editor at a broadsheet newspaper to launch a career as a freelance journalist. A week later, I started working from home, expecting to be back in the office after a week or two.

Three months later, I said my goodbyes over Zoom, eating the traditional M&S spread (which colleagues had posted to my home) alone, and started my freelance career just as the first lockdown was beginning to ease up.

I’d been thinking about resigning since I’d co-founded The Wingwoman newsletter and podcast a year earlier. I spent every weekend working on it, and was hoping for a better work/life balance.

The thought of giving up the title I’d been working towards since university was hard, and I felt a bit of imposter syndrome, wondering if anyone would actually commission me. But the main sticking point was money. I live alone in a rented one-bed flat in London and, with rent and household bills taking 80% of my income, I’d never been able to save. Freelance peers sometimes waited months for their invoices to be paid – how would I pay my rent?

I finally worked up the nerve just after my 32nd birthday, repeating the phrase ‘leap and the net will appear’ over and over in my head. Instead, the net caught fire. When lockdown was first announced, fashion journalism all but disappeared. Newspaper fashion pages were replaced with coronavirus coverage. Freelance friends saw commissions cancelled; friends with staff jobs were furloughed.

When my boss joked that it wasn’t too late for me to change my mind, a small part of me wanted to beg HR to tape my contract back together. My three months’ notice felt like a test of bravery, and I lost sleep worrying about money.

But, all things considered, my timing wasn’t that bad. A week into freelance life, the first social bubbles were announced and non-essential shops reopened, welcome distractions on days that were suddenly entirely empty of Zoom meetings. A month in, pubs and bars reopened, and I started taking my laptop to coffee shops to work, like the freelancers I’d always looked at with envy while I grabbed something to go on my lunch break.

I was freelance for less than three months before something came along that I just couldn’t turn down – a year’s maternity cover at a national paper that I’d always hoped to write for, where I’m able to write on the broader scope of topics that I’d dreamt of. And as The Wingwoman grows, we’ve been able to hire a freelance podcast producer to lighten our workload, giving me that balance I was looking for (though admittedly not much of a social life yet, thanks to lockdown).

This isn’t what I had planned when I resigned – yet, despite a few hairy moments, it’s better. When I go back to freelancing life in September, it will be with more experience and far more faith in myself. And with things more stable, that chapter might pan out as expected – although I rather hope not…