‘Living death’ was my dad’s nickname for office work. Now I’m in my 40s — and I can see why.

A freelance job helped me feel free again

I needed to start living again. That meant salvaging parts of myself I’d jettisoned on my race to adulthood, including the itinerant writer in me. When a magazine offered me an assignment in Algeria, I jumped at the chance. This would be my first solo reporting trip in four years.

Could I still navigate unfamiliar cities alone or cold-call strangers? Luckily, after a few days in Oran and Algiers, muscle memory took over.

In the name of research, I started hitting up red-lit clubs, where cabaret singers warbled risqué Arabic lyrics to crowds sloppy with whisky. One night, around 2 a.m., I squinted through threads of smoke at the man crooning into a mic, ears ringing violently, and thought: “This is exactly where I want to be.”

On the eve of my landmark birthday, contemplating my feet splayed over the tiled tub in my hotel suite, I thought about how rai singers — a form of Algerian folk music — were paragons of living boldly. Rai singers had even been assassinated for making music.

I make no comparison between their incredible courage and my own infinitely milder risks, which soon included drifting back to freelance work. But when you consider women of earlier generations, whose lives were narrowly circumscribed between marriage and motherhood, the idea of living by one’s own wits starts to feel pretty radical.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a more conventional path or a less messy career. But on the cusp of midlife, what I still craved was the thrill of a blank page.