Film & TV can be a tough business. It’s certainly not the only one, but long hours, the precarious nature of contract work, competition for jobs, and the sacrifices required in order to develop your skills and your network, can all challenge the mental health of even the most dedicated and determined of people.
Just being an adult brings with it many challenges and responsibilities, and choosing to work in an industry which is so competitive, precarious, and in some cases downright accepting of unacceptable behaviours only adds to those burdens.
One of the best ways to look after your mental health is to be aware of the challenges you might face. Much like physical health, it is often better to enact preventative care and early diagnosis, rather than waiting until the last possible moment to tackle a problem. So in this post, I want to discuss some of the mental health challenges you will face as you attempt to build a career.
Money
The unpredictable nature of freelance work makes financial planning difficult. Unlike a salaried job, your income can vary wildly from month to month, making budgeting and saving challenging, not to mention those periods where you have no work and no income.
Not blowing your money when you’re in a busy period and instead saving it for a quiet period is obviously a sensible strategy. Budgeting in order to give yourself some sort of control over your money makes sense too. It’s easy to get into a situation where the unpredictability of a freelancer’s income adds an additional stressor onto the usual worries about finances.
Having long-term financial goals also allows you to add some more predictability to your life. Consider setting up separate accounts for separate costs and building up a chunk of money in each of these. Putting aside money for tax directly from your invoices means that this money is immediately out of bounds, assigned for tax payments rather than sitting in your main account. Keeping aside 3-6 months of rent or mortgage payments allows a buffer in case of periods out of work. You can also look to put a certain percentage of each invoice payment in a savings account, pension, or investment (check out our post on money management for freelancers for more tips).
Feast or Famine
Once you’re worked freelance for a while, you’ll realise that you rarely seem to have a good balance of work. So often you’re either snowed under with work, on an intense project, juggling multiple jobs, turning down other work that seems to have come out of nowhere, or you’re sat around wondering where everyone has gone, where the next job is coming from, and sweating that it might be a while before you can submit your next invoice.
Being busy is good as long as you know how to manage it. Not just in terms of managing the workload, but looking after yourself too, learning how to take a break and step away, learning how to switch off and spend time on non-work activities. Learning how to say “no” can also be challenging. None of us wants to turn down work, but we can’t always say yes to everything, and it’s easy to burn out when you let yourself pile up projects one after another.
You also need to find ways to manage the quiet times too. It’s easy to be stressed about your workload, and look forward to a quiet spell, or to start panicking as soon as your quiet spell starts, worrying that this may quickly stop being “time off” and become a proper period of unemployment. Time off is of no benefit to you if you’re unable to enjoy it, or at least put it to good use.
Career Envy
When you’re starting out, there are people whose work you love and admire, filmmakers you aspire to be like, and genres and projects that someday you’d like to work on. It can be frustrating feeling so far away from where you want to be, but you can also use it to drive and motivate you.
Once you get established within the industry, there are also peers and friends who you collaborate with or compete with, and when one of you gets more traction in their career, it can be awkward or difficult to deal with that person’s success. If one of your friends is now working on high profile, bigger budget work, and you’re still struggling to progress your career, struggling to get agents and production companies to return your calls, it can be easy to let resentment fester. And of course, it can work the other way round too, if you’re the one whose career takes off before everybody else’s.
As ever, it’s best to take a deep breath and a step back from the situation. Yes, your friend has moved into a higher tier of the industry, and maybe you feel inadequate at being left behind, believing this is proof that you weren’t good enough all along. Or, you can look at the positives too. If they managed to progress their career so much, then perhaps it’s just not your time yet, but who is to say your big opportunity isn’t just around the corner? If it happened for them, then why not for you?
Absence of opportunities
For the majority of your career, most of your work will come from your existing network, people who will hire you again and again, and recommend you to other people. While this is obviously a great thing, it can lead to a feeling that you’re not making progress in a way you would like to, trapped working with the same people over and over, unable to break into something new, simply because you don’t know the right people, and they don’t know you.
You can move surprisingly quickly from frustration over not having enough work and being desperate for more projects, to worrying that you’re not getting the right projects. Regardless of where you’re currently at, you should continue investing time into both networking and cold-emailing your CV, and developing relationships with your existing network.
Post-project blues
Projects often get more and more full-on and intense as you approach picture-lock, until suddenly, you’re done, the edit is locked, the film disappears off to be worked on by a whole bunch of other people, and you’re free. Free to breath. Free to take a moment. Until suddenly the lack of purpose or structure now you’re not working begins to feel odd, and you start to fixate on the fact that you don’t have a next project booked in, that those emails and meetings about other potential gigs seem to have stopped appearing and you’re really beginning to wonder where the next job is coming from.
Take a complete break from work, spend some of that money you’ve been working so hard for, see your friends and family, and it will soon be time to head back to work.
Isolation
Working as a freelancer means that by the very nature of your work, you don’t have a permanent employer, workplace, or group of colleagues. You can sometimes end up working from home for long periods, which is great when it saves time and money commuting, but not so great when you feel like you’re spending all your days home alone, wishing you had some to chat to in your breaks from the computer.
The autonomy you often get as a freelancer can be freeing, but it can also leave you feeling like you’re not part of a group or a community. Everything from Friday drinks to Christmas parties can be missing from your work life, removing the social glue that binds us to other people.
There are lots of ways to address this though. Multiple types of organizations exist, some of which are set up specifically to provide this kind of outlet to freelancers.
Groups like Blue Collar Post Collective and Shooting People arrange regular social meetups in major cities, membership to Film Independent in the US gives access to networking events, screenings, and training; while BAFTA in the UK allows membership both of the organization as a whole and of particular schemes they set up to provide access to mentorship and networking with peers.
There are also Guilds and Unions which arrange both online and in-person events for their members (such as BFE in the UK). Wherever you are in the world, there is likely to be an organization or two which will help you to connect yourself to the industry.
For answers to other questions you may have about working in the industry, check out our Advice category.