AI stole my Job (and I stole it right back).

AI stole my Job (and I stole it right back).

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A love letter to the freedom of flexibility.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately. What it feels like to exhale into it. What it feels like to try and draw breath without it. More specifically, what freelance work and business ownership has meant for my own sense of personal freedom, and why I left an objectively shiny, successful career in Law to pursue the uncertain terrain of freelance work in a creative field. A field that has, of late, been decimated by AI.

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The robots did come for my job. And yet, here I am, launching new offerings instead of crying into the sea of AI slop drowning our devices.

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If you’re interested, you can read more about my decision to leave the law and start writing in these articles on Medium and Substack. They’re pretty personal, so get ready to pull up a pew reallll close if you give them a read.

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Meanwhile, I’m writing this essay from Mexico City, where I’ve lived for nearly four years. I’ve been working for myself for nearly five. In all honesty,  a huge part of why I chose to freelance has nothing to do with a creative calling or a dream. It was simply a desire to not be tethered to a place or to a boss. I guess you could say freedom itself was my dream, and working for myself (in whatever capacity) was a means to achieving it. After a year of freelance writing, I packed up my suitcase, chucked my life into two storage units and got on a one-way flight to Mexico City, where I knew nobody and didn’t speak the language. Of course, I knew I could leave if it was too scary or too hard – this was the beauty of the plan, and of the inherent autonomy of working for myself. I could do it from anywhere. The plan allowed for no plan.

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But as I struggled through the steep curve of learning a new language, I made friends and eventually met my now husband. We had seen each other running in El Bosque de Chapultepec (the Central Park of Mexico City, if you will) and then fortuitously sat next to each other at a tiny Israeli street food restaurant. What are the odds, in a city of 26 million people? I like to think fate had a hand in it. And I also like to think that I had made room for fate to take its course.

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Because, you see, without freelancing – without freedom – I wouldn’t have had a life that allowed for falling in love with someone who lived on the other side of the world. If I'd been on a  sabbatical, or a short trip from which a workplace expected my return, he’d have been a fling rather than the future father to my children (we have a 10 month old son and another son on the way). This is just one of the many ways that the freedom of freelancing is about so much more than just what we do for work. It’s about how we live, and the hope we hold for what is possible.

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As I’ve been thinking about how to serve emerging freelancing with the tools they need to start sustainable businesses, AI has become a pretty trusty companion. I began using it to help me define Word.Haus – I trained it on my brand voice, messaging pillars, content strategy and more. As it began to create both space and momentum for my own business, I realised that the brand strategy I offered within my former copywriting and content business is not only still useful, it’s something that AI needs in order to be used effectively. And so, thanks to AI stealing my job and making me think deeply about how I could build something new, it also renewed my faith in the work that I have always offered. Only now, I offer that brand strategy alongside the training, management and hosting of custom-built content GPTs.

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So this is my long-winded way of introducing you to the two primary offerings of Word.Haus,  both of which are born from a deep desire to have, and to share, a sense of freedom: education for emerging freelancers and the Brand-Trained Brain™ for startups and service-based businesses.

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Thank you for letting me host you in my new home <3

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Tessa