Why you should never be a freelancer or a taxi driver

I will turn 27 on Sunday. It feels somehow dangerously close to 30. I've been asking myself all sorts of things, like why am I still struggling to make my income meet my outgoings, and will my job be this hard when I am 30?

At the moment I feel consumed by the fact that it is Friday and that I have earnt nothing solid since this time last week, but spent a lot of money (not) doing so. This is because I spent Monday and Tuesday being robbed of my mobile phone and trying to recouperate the number, and writing an article that I have since realised needs to be re-written, and Wednesday onwards working on a radio piece that, due to a series of 'mis-understandings' has taken up the rest of the week. It just seems unfair that I'm not paid by the hour, but by the finished product. So if someone is incompetent somewhere and I have to do extra work, I lose out.

And when accounting departments lose bits of paper, I don't get paid (although they do). So really I haven't had any money coming in for two months- it's all numbers on an Excel spreadsheet called 'incoming'. Numbers do not get very far in Dakar taxis.

It feels like a long hard slog, and to what end? I met a man in Casablanca airport recently and he asked me what my five year plan was. I thought I was organised, but I realised that I don't have one, and wonder if I should. My plan for the last three years has been to survive as a writer. In July this year, I will have been a freelance writer for three years. I feel then that I have to decide whether it's going to be make or break. Do I carry on and hope it gets easier, that stories come to me more easily, that my writing needs less re-writing, that my edits are quicker, that my editors stop cocking up and causing me more work, that accounting departments start doing the jobs they are paid for? Or do I call it quits?

My Senegalese neighbour, a 26 year old woman, keeps on asking me what I'm waiting for. She's talking about babies of course. She can't understand why anything could be more important than making a family. I hope we're not still having that same conversation when I am 30, and that I'm not still sitting at my computer on a Friday night at 9.30pm worrying about what some editor in the US thinks about my latest scoop.

There are some wonderful things about my job. Last week I went to interview a musician about whom I knew nothing. Even after researching him, I still had nothing to ask him. So I asked my taxi driver. He gave me five brilliant questions, like, 'why don't you ever sing songs for taxi drivers?' This, as it turned out, was the most pertinant question of them all. Apparently, this musician is planning a song about taxi drivers, because, in his opinion, taxi drivers are one of the most imoprtant but least valued members of society. I wonder if he will write one about journalists? Although, journalists don't take women in labour who have no money to the hospital for free.