They say to "march to the beat of your own drum" to celebrate individualism.

While I have no qualms about this suggesting uniqueness in personality, when it comes to career as a freelancer, I'm finding that this proverbial inner-drummer is often fatigued and out of step.

Yes, I knew freelancing would be hard work. That's actually the easy part.

To be transparent, freelancing was one of the most jarring life shifts to which I could have committed, but not because of a huge shift in financial management and work ethic. I had no idea that it would also involve the new dimension of psychological and emotional upkeep. Before, when I was working in an office, I didn't have to care about internal well-being. It just wasn't that consequential. Most of the mentality centered around maintaining a positive attitude, the durability to grind on projects, and interpreting client needs and wants. If I had a hard day at work, I'd kick back a drink or two.

Life was simple and consistent. That drummer might as well have been a metronome.

But, oh, how one doesn't really know themselves until they're alone. Without the social pressure of being in an office, I very quickly started working ridiculous hours and slept rarely and unexpectedly.

This kind of drumming was sporadic blast beats followed immediately by breathers.

The thing that threw me is that if life were a drummer, why wasn't mine consistent and on-beat? I used to be a drummer myself. I even had "metal drummer hair" at one point. Oh, you don't believe me? Here:

The point of this blog post?

I've recently discovered that you really do have to partition work and play proportional to the sanity you want to keep. If you make the same initial mistake I did, which is to work every waking hour until you're worn thin, you will dive deep into an abyss of self-questioning. Even if you're not a freelancer, I imagine this is also true for anyone who has ever felt alone in a crowd.

"Play" begets inspiration, and inspiration keeps the psychological and emotional roller coaster in check. My inspiration just happens to be music. I've been writing more music lately, and while that takes away from the grind of web development, it is making the work easier to get done, and the work itself takes less time because of a refreshed focus.

I've traded my drumsticks for drum machines.

And you know what? I feel better for it.