AI Made Me Quit. It Didn’t Stick.

This isn’t a post about AI, but its arrival in the market was a do or die moment for me. It made me do the unthinkable after freelancing for almost eight years. It made me say, “You know what? I’ve put so much into making things work and this is what I get? I quit. I’m done.”

To be honest, this decision had been years in coming. I just didn’t see it until the beginning of 2024, when something in my center simply gave way. The issues began when first I started freelancing in September 2016. The decision to go freelance had originally been to supplement my income so I could spend enough time on publishing my own work. Instead, the business that eventually became Five Muses Creative took less than three months to become so successful that it consumed my life. We’re talking sixteen-hour work days. We’re talking: “You want me to do this impossible thing that you wouldn’t have asked me to do if not for our (ever-increasing) long-standing working relationship? Sure.” We’re talking about giving up everything that isn’t work to the point where I was perpetually burned out, but gritted my teeth to keep working because I wasn’t giving up on my business or my clients for as long as I had any value to offer.

Then AI arrived, and some of the clients that I had sweat blood for over the past eight years... just vanished. At the same time, I was struggling with not one but two contracts. I’m not going to go into detail because that would be unprofessional, but the situation with these clients added to the sense that all the work I had put into being loyal to my clients wasn’t being reciprocated. In short, I had reached the point of believing that I had put my mind, emotions, and even my physical health on the line...for nothing.

It was devastating.

I quit.

Except I couldn’t just stop working because I had clients that I had made a commitment to. Clients who didn’t deserve me letting them down. So it became a thing of: I’m going to finish out these contracts, then I’ll move on from Five Muses Creative. That’s one thing I can say for myself. My life will fall apart and the world will collapse around me, but I will do what I promised even if it kills me.

Mentally and emotionally, though, I was done with Five Muses. It was terrifying and heartbreaking at the same time. The work had consumed me, but it had given me a lot as well. It got me through some of the most difficult times in my life. But somehow, without realizing it, I had not only become Five Muses Creative, but Five Muses Creative had become me. It was my identity. There was very little of me that existed outside of my work anymore. Taking something that had basically consumed my life for almost a decade and shoving it onto the “done” pile is definitely one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. Especially when I didn’t exactly know what was next.

All I knew was that I was toast. Burnt out to the point where escape felt like the only option. To the point where the thought of entering traditional employment was about as attractive as telling the guy grilling me to turn me around because I was well-done on the side currently being cooked.

But I remembered why I started freelancing in the first place. I wanted to write and suddenly, I had nothing but time. So I cracked open a manuscript that had been languishing in editorial purgatory for as long as I’ve been freelancing. It got stuck there for many reasons. Me putting my clients before myself was one of them. Working on this book is like coming home. It represented a return to first fundamentals for me. A return to my first love, which had originally sent me on this epic journey that helped me find even more things (and I daresay people) to love. It reminded me that passion and meaning are what drive me as a person. I remembered why I love telling stories.

And because I remembered that, I remembered why I loved helping clients with storytelling. The lovely writer I’m currently editing for, one of the literal reasons why I couldn’t immediately walk away from freelancing, helped me remember too. She doesn’t know it, but her passion for her story and her love of learning the storytelling craft inspired me to keep going long enough to remember why I had become so passionate about freelancing to begin with.

Since then, I’ve been quietly battling my way back from the abyss. I unquit after about three months. Don’t tell me that’s not a word because it’s a thing we can do that deserves a name. There’s a freedom in unquitting. By quitting first, I let go of every obligation and impossible expectation that I had set for myself. I didn’t come back to work because I wasn’t picking up all the terrible stuff that made me stop in the first place. What I did was closer to starting over, but with the lessons I’ve learnt over time.

By quitting, I had given myself the distance and permission to look at all I’ve done, at where I was in my life, and say to myself, “This isn’t what I want.” I no longer felt the need to keep doing things that were bad for my health. Didn’t need to sacrifice my own output for clients because there was no pressure to keep my business going. In fact, in that brief period where I had decided to walk away, I had put into motion a plan where I wouldn’t need to keep my business at all.

I wanted to keep it, though. Walking away from it reminded me why: Storytelling is my life’s blood. If I wasn’t sure about that before, I am now. After all, I went through the arrival of this “feed an idea into a program and it will spit out a story” nonsense and went straight back to the craft. That’s the other thing I’ve learned about myself in this difficult time: my life can fall apart and the world with it, and I will still want to work on a story.

More than that, I love, love, helping others craft theirs.

But I also know that in growing Five Muses Creative, I had made several crucial mistakes. These mistakes were what made me lose my way. My hope is that, by staying aware of these, I won’t lose my way again.

The mistakes I made

1) While I adore (most of) my clients, I should never put their work ahead of myself and my work. Here, I was a victim of Five Muses Creative’s early success. Within three months of starting to freelance, I was throwing all of my creative energy into my clients’ work, leaving none for my own. Creating and publishing my own stories was only one part of the issue. I also neglected to build up the Five Muses brand outside of a small but excellent group of clients.

2) This forced me to indefinitely put on the back burner projects that could have supported me outside of working for this client base. It made me deeply reliant on these clients for my and my company’s success.

3) Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, this created a toxic environment for me, where I felt that I had to sacrifice even more time and energy than I knew was healthy to keep my clients happy. Very few of my clients were purposefully harmful or exploitative. The problem was that, over the past eight years, I had sacrificed all boundaries to keep them happy. I only had so many of them and deep down I was afraid that even one of them might decide not to come back. The harm I had done by putting everything else aside meant I had locked myself into not feeling able to say no.

4) Instead of learning from an ever-worsening situation, I doubled down by putting even more work into this small group of clients, which created a vicious cycle until I had reached the point where I was perpetually burning myself out while losing perspective on why I was doing all this in the first place. Work became about keeping clients happy so I could get more work, instead of being about what I loved: helping clients reach their potential to the best of my ability.

None of the above, as it turns out, was any of my clients’ fault. It was all me. But I think you can see why losing some clients despite all this to something as stupid as AI felt like someone had thrown freezing water into my face. In all this time, even as I was depleting my emotional and physical reserves, I never phoned it in. Each project got my focus and some of the best work I ever did. I’ll always be proud of all the work I did. It’s just that... taking this approach meant that my creative output came at too high of a personal cost.

The only person who could stop that madness is me. So I did. Turns out I did it so I could come back stronger. More on how I’m doing that next time.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you. Have you ever unquit something? (Left without the intention of coming back, only to realize you want to start again and come back better?) What lessons have you learned that allowed you to do this?

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