Funk Off

Sometimes you get into such a funk you don't even know you're in one.  You're buried so deep inside the funk's core it's like a massive wall of hollow meaningless nothing has enveloped you. Sometimes a new funk starts and this new funk gets stuck inside the original funk so even when you manage to claw your way out of this newer funk - after a lot of effort and positivity - you're greeted with more nothingness. You're disappointed and feeling less inspired than ever before and you think "Huh? All that effort. Is this all there is?". You don't realise there were multi-payers of funky nothingness going on. A Russian Doll of funk, if you will.

From 1998 to 2010/11 I was self-employed as a freelance graphic designer/typesetter. I didn't earn a fortune but I earned enough and I worked damn hard. I never made any big momentous decision to become self employed. It sort of just happened as we were made redundant en masse from a publishing company. I found one client, then another and it grew from there. And I was busy. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings etc. etc. Whatever had to be done. Then came the recession and it all sort of trickled away at such a slow rate I didn't see it as a big problem. Oh one magazine contract is gone? Well, not to worry, I have plenty more. Too much, in fact, so the loss of one is probably a good thing. Oh, they can't afford to have that newsletter done? Hmmm, alright, I can replace that with something else. And so on until one day I was walking through town, having just had a call from a client to say they could no longer afford  to publish a newsletter they'd had going for years. I finished the call, got a funny feeling over me and suddenly thought "jesus I think I'm unemployed".

I wanted headlines in the newspaper, newsflashes, sympathy, going away parties, a gold watch, tears, hugs, drama! But when you're a freelancing sole trader, well, it's just you, you carry the good and the bad alone. There wasn't a moment where I could ring a friend and say "I have bad news, I just got laid off" or "the company I work for has gone bust". It was too gradual for it to have any serious meaning to anyone else. A rough few months followed of financial chaos. During this time we were also reeling from my brother's sudden death in late '09. So grief, unemployment and financial stress were wrapped into one package of super humongous stinkin' shittiness. Then Diarmuid was laid off again. Oh!! So we start 2011 with an attitude of "well it can't get any worse, we'll cut way way back to the basics and surely in a few months I'll get new contracts and things will pick up". But that's not how it went. Because in a few months Diarmuid was diagnosed with cancer and then he died. So now I had unemployment, financial stress, my brother's death, Diarmuid's cancer diagnosis (nice Christmas gift that was), widowhood and 3 grieving children. Uh, hello? How did I get here?

So you see buried within the single-parenting stress funk is a grief funk and within that is a joblessness funk and within that....... you get my meaning.

Then you wake up one day and you think "hang on, I used to do a job that I was good at, a job I would've resurrected had its loss not been immediately followed by a series of crises. Did I dream it? All those skills and all those years of serious hard work?" No. Today is the day I woke up. I want to work again and use those skills. It's taken 3 years to get around to resurrecting this. But I still have the skills and the need and the ambition. So look out world. I'm back. And I'm ready to um typeset.