A few DM's, a Zine, and Lots of Courage

Proof.

Back in August of 2019, I started a conversation (on Twitter, of all things!) that would lead me to where I am today. I didn't fully know it, but I had a hunch it would pay off.

I volunteered to make an entire zine, on my own, for an event taking place the coming January. The goal of the zine was to create a physical artifact showcasing people who had created their own unique careers in Philadelphia, outside of the traditional employer-employee model.  I called it "Career Control: Professional Work in Progress."

I interviewed performers, consultants, independent web developers, small business owners, designers, and more. I transcribed the interviews, wrote editorial stories from those interviews, and then designed and laid out the entire thing in Adobe InDesign over the course of 6 days leading up to our printer’s deadline.

Yes, that’s right. In the last 6 days before the deadline.

Why on Earth would I do that to myself? Well, I didn’t actually know how to use Adobe InDesign.

And here I was with 10,000 words to publish. It really was 10,000 words— I know because I just ran a word-count script on the document in InDesign! I knew I needed to use InDesign to manage that much content, so I grabbed a guy from IndyHall who knew the software pretty well, and asked him to suffer through one hour watching me try to lay out a spread and helping me conquer the problems that I just could not figure out.

So I got a quick and dirty InDesign crash course, and went home and didn’t leave my room until it was done. Six whole days. I missed nearly a week of work. Calling out of work “sick” is very un-Hannah like behavior, and the dishonesty of the matter bothered me tremendously. But people were depending on me to finish this zine for the event.

All in all I spent about 100 hours over 4 months making this thing. For free.

You might want to know what would possess me to volunteer so much of myself, when at the time I was working a full time job in sales. My boyfriend sure wanted to know.

So here’s the deal. The event was the Philly Freelance Festival. Even though I had a full time job, I had started thinking about how to advance in my career, and I knew I needed to gain technical skills to make that happen. So I started hanging out at IndyHall and getting to know the members there. I figured that by contributing a project to the community and asking nothing in return, I would make good connections and build goodwill within an industry/community that I hoped to someday work in.

My boyfriend didn’t really see the value in it at the time, nor did my therapist, but I kept at it anyway. I knew this was how people take control of their lives when they want to change course.

The zine turned out really well, and people were unbelievably excited to hold a real little thing in their hands to read. It was something they could take home, or pass on to a friend, or leave in a cafe. And the interviews and advice in the interviews really resonated with people, too. I saw several posts from total strangers on Instagram, highlighting their favorite parts and using the #CareerControl hashtag.

After the event, Technically Philly wrote up a review of it here. 
Photos from the event can be viewed here: Philly Freelance Festival on Flickr.

What happened next

After the event, I was riding the high of having done something creative for the first time in what felt like ages, and having picked up a new skill that was both marketable and specialized.

And after talking to that many interesting people who had created their own jobs and rules…I was a bit envious! I have a motto that applied to this exact feeling:

Don’t get jealous, get to work!

And I did just that. I started practicing Adobe on nights and weekends, and building up a roster of clients. Once I had a pipeline of work lined up spanning 6 months, I quit my full time job and went freelance.

Fast forward 8 months and I’m building out my own little corner of the web here, doing freelance work, and starting work on another issue of Career Control!

Stay tuned for more blog posts about the projects I work on, my own journey as a new freelancer, and more.