I think i'm losing my mind
The story
I have been freelancing in IT for more than 15 years, and the strange part is that until recently, work was never really the problem. Contracts came in through old clients, referrals, emergency fixes, migrations, support retainers, all the usual stuff. One company needed a VPN cleaned up, another needed servers moved to the cloud, someone else had a broken ticketing workflow or a messy backup plan, and somehow I always had enough billable hours to keep everything moving. Then my main client cut costs, ended the contract, and just like that, the stable part of my life disappeared. I knew this could happen, because freelancing always has risk, but knowing that in theory is not the same as staring at the mortgage payment, school costs, groceries, insurance, and wondering why no interesting contract is coming back. I send proposals, I do calls, I explain my stack, my experience, my rates, my availability, and then it goes quiet. Sometimes they say the budget changed. Sometimes they want someone cheaper. Sometimes they want a full-time employee for contractor flexibility, which makes no sense but is apparently normal now. The objective situation is simple: income dropped hard, expenses did not, and my family depends on me to stay calm. The emotional situation is less simple. I check job boards, refresh my inbox, update my profile, rewrite my pitch, and then I ask myself, am I actually doing something useful, or am I just clicking buttons so I dont panic? I have handled outages at 2 a.m., failed deployments, angry stakeholders, database crashes, bad documentation, impossible SLAs, and somehow this quiet period feels worse than all of it. There is no error log for this. There is no rollback button. There is just a man in his house, trying to look normal at dinner while calculating how many months are left before things become really bad. I am not helpless, and that matters. I still have skills. I can still build, troubleshoot, document, automate, secure, and explain technical problems to people who just want their systems to work. I have started contacting smaller businesses again, not only big contracts, because a few steady support agreements could be enough to stop the bleeding. I also made a basic plan: reduce non-essential spending, call the bank before things get ugly, chase overdue invoices, and treat finding work like a project with a backlog instead of a personal judgement. Still, some mornings I wake up with this heavy feeling and think, how did I go from being the reliable IT guy to someone who can barely recieve a reply? Maybe that is why the title fits. I think i'm losing my mind, but maybe I am actually just under pressure and noticing it for once. That sounds less dramatic, and probably more true. I have survived bad quarters before, even if this one feels sharper. I am trying to remember that a slow pipeline is not the same as a dead career, and silence from clients is not proof that I failed. It is just silence. Today I sent three better proposals, followed up with two old contacts, and had one decent call. Not a miracle, but not nothing either. Maybe thats how this turns around: not with one huge save, but with small boring steps until the house feels safe again.
Thanks for reading me, I just needed to put this somewhere...
