The freelancer’s curse: writing for everyone and sounding like no one

Last Tuesday, I was at my desk by 6 a.m and opening my laptop, ready to knock out another client’s piece but then I paused. 

And instead of hurrying up with my work, I just stared at the blank screen. It slowly dawned on me. 

I couldn’t recognise my voice anymore.

Step one: the compromise. 

If you had asked me seven years ago what my writing sounded like, I could tell you from the get-go. Messy, relatable, fun characters. Journal entries that read like short stories. Blog posts that had personality. 

Then came adulthood and the bills. I could no longer afford to write for fun anymore so I decided to write for brands and creators, to tell stories that appeal to customers and pay my bills. The first work was perfect. The client said he loved my unique voice. He sent a long voice message about how fresh my voice was, and something about how it appealed to their customers. He said I wrote like I could see who their average customer was in my mind’s eye and I wrote for them. 

The first check was not much but at least, it paid for phone bills and for food but I still need to make rent. 

So, I become a freelancer. And when you’re a freelancer, you’re vulnerable to the curse. 

Step two: the curse

A great review from your last client gets you more clients, each proclaiming they want to work with you because of your unique storytelling. But then, after a while, comes a round of corrections...

Client A wants the content salesy, but like, not too salesy. He says, “we want to sell to them without letting them know that we are selling.”

Client B says he wants me to script a marketing video that will appeal to Gen Zs but when I ask, “Do you want a meme or gif in the video? He starts coughing violently before whispering , “I’m sorry, what’s that?”

Client C doesn’t even bother to send a brief over. She just sends a two sentence mission statement and says, “ Just make it sound like us.” 

Who is "us"? Who knows.

But somehow, you learn to do it. You stay up all night shape-shifting and morphing until 5 am. And then, one million and one drafts later, you produce something that you can present to the clients. And they absolutely love it. But in between the 150 keywords to absolutely make sure the article ranks on Google’s first page, you stop hearing yourself. 

Step three: death by a thousand drafts

Every freelancer knows the struggle. Typical Tuesday is you pulling an all-nighter writing 5 different articles for 5 different industries, each with their own audience, tone, brand, demographic, and vision board.

One’s a wellness coach in Bali who wants every sentence to “flow with feminine energy.”Another sells cybersecurity software to mid-sized firms in Leeds. A third runs a fashion brand that thinks the word “disrupt” should be used like punctuation.

And somehow, you are supposed to be all of them. At once. Flawlessly. On deadline.

The result? Cold cups of coffee. Millions of open tabs on Google Docs. Eyes burning from too much screen time. Using “data hygiene” too many times in paragraph three.

The voice is gone but the work is done. 

That’s the curse. You become so good at adapting that you vanish. You deliver tone-perfect pieces for clients you’ll probably never speak to again. You hit KPIs. You avoid contractions because one brand hates them. You find synonyms for “innovative” because another insists it’s “too cliché,” which is hilarious, considering everything else about their business screams beige.

But it’s not even the deadlines and late nights that alarm you. It’s when you slowly realise that now you sound like everyone and no one anymore. You no longer recognise your voice. 

The voice that showed up in blog posts you wrote just because you were angry or excited or heartbroken or caffeinated. It spilled into your journal with all the drama. 

Now? Now you write about software integrations and SEO best practices for insurance firms. And AI tools. So many AI tools.

This is what they don’t tell you about freelancing. The real villain isn’t the late invoices or the ghosting clients. It’s The Curse. The Freelancer’s Curse.

At the end of the day, you’re so good at sounding like everyone else… you stop sounding like you. And when you finally get a free hour to write something for you, you just sit there blinking at the blinking cursor, wondering what your voice even sounds like anymore.

You scroll through your own blog, and it’s like reading a ghost. You reread old journal entries and get jealous of the person who wrote them. You reread that half-written novel you’ve abandoned for months now, and wonder how the hell you ever had the energy to care so much about a fictional person named Sasha. You grieve over the days when your writing didn’t require approvals, edits, or tone-of-voice PDFs.

Step four: the antidote

So, how do you combat this? The answer is actually simpler than you think. 

One paragraph. One messy, honest piece that sounds like you. No prompts, no briefs, no KPIs, just a very raw reminder to yourself that you haven’t lost that voice that wrote I hate you grandma for not giving me chocolate poems and won every essay competition in high school. 

Except that space won’t show up on your calendar. You’re an adult now and the bills will always be there. You just have to make it.

Maybe making space looks like blocking out 20 minutes a week for a personal project, no matter how chaotic the week is. Maybe it means journaling before client work. Or even publishing something under your name again, even if it ranks on the thirtieth page on Google. 

Because yes, the curse is real. But so is the choice to fight it. Even if you lose the battle some days (and I promise you that you will sometimes), what matters is that you remember to show up again. For yourself. Even if it's just a sentence. 

So you sit at your desk, but then a Slack notification beeps.

You open Slack.

You check Trello.

You check the bills on the table.

Then, you check your bank account.

And then you pour yourself another coffee and go right back to writing for someone else.

Because the deadline’s closer than the dream.

But maybe, just maybe, you save five minutes at the end of the day for one sentence that sounds like you. And that day, you did shake off the curse for all of five minutes.

Did you enjoy this as much as we did? Every other sentence is a mic-drop moment! Let Victoria Nathanial know what you thought via LinkedIn or Instagram.