I quit my office job to freelance after a solo trip to Algeria

Outside my window the palms were rustling and the lights were twinkling over the Bay of Algiers. The hotel was built in a Moorish Revival style in the late 19th century. I was used to more spartan sleeping arrangements, having spent much of my 30s as a freelance journalist.

For the past few years, I had been working in an office and on autopilot. It started sometime in those soft, airless pandemic years. A therapist would identify my numbness when my father’s heart suddenly stopped in 2020.

Dealing with pain while working at the office

In those times of covid-19 malaise, no one wanted to gather in groups, much less embrace teary, snotty complaints. So I never had a funeral.

I flew to California, where my father spent his last years, and gathered with my brothers, hoping to do something symbolic, like stack rocks at the beach or scream in the surf. But a Trump rally was roaring through town that day, and the sky was glowing apocalyptic-orange from wildfires. I gave up imaginary rituals of mourning. Eating fish tacos in a socially distanced circle should be enough.

But the malaise had already crept in before this stunning loss. Life had become predictable and squishy, ​​thickening around the middle like an aging waist.

Overwork had something to do with it. I had spent carefree years bouncing around Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Mexico, India and Armenia. Then, in my mid-30s, I left for a full-time office job.

“Living death”, that’s what my father, a philosopher-guitarist, called office work. No surprises. Every day felt the same. The role itself – designing photo exhibitions and documenting peace initiatives – was often fascinating and I welcomed the reprieve from financial precariousness.

But sitting under fluorescent lights all day made me feel like a panther in a cage. Or maybe a cyborg. I was not ready for the corporate culture.

A few months later, a colleague’s mother died. “Condolences,” I wrote as the subject of an Outlook email, even though I wanted to shatter our office decor and howl in indirect despair.

Then my own father died, and the colleague simply hit reply and added her own message of sympathy. How bleak our bloodless exchange felt. So would I spend the rest of my life marking traumatic milestones with Microsoft Office notifications?

The pain was overwhelming, but productivity required putting on a happy face at work. I was a joyless soldier before. Sending four dozen emails a day became a grim escape—a way not to think, a way to protect myself from new experiences and thus from further loss. To no one’s surprise, exhaustion followed.

A freelance job helped me feel free again

I had to start living again. This meant reclaiming parts of me that I had thrown away in the race to adulthood, including the itinerant writer in me. When a magazine offered me an assignment in Algeria, I jumped at the chance. This would be my first solo reporting trip in four years.

Would I still be able to navigate unfamiliar cities alone or cold call strangers? Fortunately, after a few days in Oran and Algiers, muscle memory took over.

In the name of research, I began hitting red-lit clubs where cabaret singers sang soaring Arabic verses to whiskey-swilling crowds. One night around 2am, I squinted through the smoke at the man singing into a microphone, ears ringing violently, and thought, “This is where I want to be.”

On the eve of my milestone birthday, contemplating my legs stretched out over the tiled tub in my hotel suite, I thought about how bad singers—a form of Algerian popular music – they were models of living boldly. The Rai singers had even been assassinated for making music.

I make no comparison between their incredible bravery and my own infinitely gentler risks, which soon included a return to freelance work. But when you think about women in previous generations, whose lives were bounded between marriage and motherhood, the idea of ​​living by your own intelligence starts to seem pretty radical.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a more conventional path or a less messy career. But on the brink of middle age, what I still longed for was the thrill of a blank page.