The Silent Freelance Years (2004–2013) and the Beginning of My Assigned Page
RESOUNDPORTFOLIO
What were the “silent freelance years,” and why do they now feel like an “assigned page” in my life? They were the years between 2004 and 2013 when I worked alone, learned by trial and error, and built a freelance translation practice while caring for my mother who was ill with cervical cancer. At the time, I thought I was simply surviving work and caregiving side by side. Looking back, I see something else: a sustained period of writing, labor, and attention that quietly shaped my voice. Those years, recorded in fragmented blog posts, now read like a chapter I did not know I was already writing, an “assigned page” where my life and language were being formed, though I wasn’t aware of it.
The Silent Freelance Years (2004–2013) and the Beginning of My Assigned Page
It just occurred to me that my blogs from 2004 to 2013 could be compiled into a memoir. I wasn’t consciously building an archive when I blogged irregularly at the time. Blogging was simply my way of coping during that transition. My mother was ill with cervical cancer. I chose to live with her and quit my job as a book editor in 2000. Shifting into freelancing, I eventually registered a small freelance translation service with the DTI and BIR under the name english-to-tagalog.com.
Around that time, I discovered an active global market for technical and medical translation work. I began joining bids on international platforms with zero knowledge of how freelance systems worked. Each time I “won” a bid, I had to quickly learn new, emerging machine tools that were already reshaping the field of translation work.
Blogging My Way Anyway, Despite SEO
With all my naïveté and technical limitations, I tried to maintain a website built through Sitesell, a hosting platform that gave me access to tools but required me to build everything myself. I struggled a lot, with most of my time spent learning through trial and error. But I believed I should promote the Tagalog language, at least how it is used by native speakers. I even invited fellow writers to contribute articles on context and culture, and I paid small stipends when I published their work on the site.
In hindsight, much of it was projection rather than depth, more marketing than advocacy. At the time, SEO taught me that the goal was to land within the first ten results on Google, and my writing gradually became stiff and formulaic as I tried to meet that demand. Despite my efforts, the keyword English-to-Tagalog was highly competitive, and the website rarely converted visitors into translation clients.
I blogged away anyway, beyond that SEO pressure. Reading back through my silent encounters during this period at writerconfidante.blogspot.com, I realize that those years are a defining time: my assigned page. Life was quiet and often unremarkable, yet from my mother’s house I ended up writing about the most ordinary and most meaningful images of my midlife.
How the Retrieval Began
The return to those years began with a simple download. I went to Google Takeout and retrieved all my entries from writerconfidante.blogspot.com. Within an hour, I received a zipped file containing my posts, complete with HTML code wrapped around the text.
If I had received this in 2000, it would have overwhelmed me. But now, I know how to work with it. I understand how to clean the code, where to paste it, and how to strip it away inside a document file.
My editing practice has taught me that what editors read in publishing are rarely final drafts. So as I retrieve my entries, I find myself deciding whether to compile them chronologically as they are, or to return to each one, revise it, and then assemble a more structured version of the blogs.
My Assigned Page
My silent freelance decade is the memory I intend to record for legacy. Every entry I recover now will become a doorway into various tones of my assigned page. Reading my entries from 2005 onwards, I discover the funny and warm moments at the time I was coping with the threat of my mother’s cancer. Some blogs are practical how-tos, others are mere lists of tasks, how I completed or not completed a translation. But every entry lingers around this truth of my mother’s presence, her strength balancing my insecurities in those freelance years, and her fighting hope firming me up.
During those years, I believed I was simply working. But the blogs reveal that my mother’s house was shaping the rhythm of my attention, her movement around me was teaching me the beauty of interruptions. I wasn’t yet writing a memoir, but that time with her was clearly my assigned page.
Reading My Mother While I Wrote Freelance
There are long entries and there are short ones, but in both I glean my desire to name exactly how I felt at the time. I think what mattered in my recording was the event itself, what happened more than why. I was not trying to imagine or proclaim meaning in every blog I wrote, but rather to articulate myself to an other, though that other was imaginary. I was not yet fully acknowledging that every one of those days was the Lord’s, and that He had placed me fully present in those days, as though assigning me a page.
My reflections vary in their sharpness. Sometimes they arrive in the form of a poem. I wrote many Tagalog poems during this decade of living with my mother. Now, as this memoir begins retrieving traces of my freelance life, her image comes more clearly into the foreground of my recollection.
I was never able to fully thank her while she was alive. With this memoir now also reading her presence alongside mine, I hope I can begin to name something of her essence, and the way she shaped those years.
Retrieving Our Memories Together
Something about us feels scattered or unfinished right now, the mere record of it may already be its structure. More than memory, each entry we recover can become a doorway back into becoming. How about you begin the retrieval by:
Subscribing to PAWRNEWS for reflection and prompts on writing
Turning your personal blogs, journals, or drafts into structure with guidance from the WordHouse team
Submitting a personal essay through Tulak Sulat, a WordFellow Shop
My Silent Freelance Years Were Never Silent After All
My blogs from 2004 to 2013 were full of labor and attention, not at all quiet and uneventful. When everything was formless, unshaped, and incoherent, I moved through work and caregiving, surviving in that voice and language I was not yet insisting. But now I see my blog’s resonance more clearly.
My “assigned page” is not a romantic framing of the past, but my way of recognizing how my common life can hold meaning without announcing itself. What I recorded were not exceptional moments or events, but deeply formative experiences. I did not yet know how to read those while I was writing them. But now, I know that those common days are weighty and consequential. What once felt like random entries now surfaces a narrative already forming through those years of blogging. In retrieving the blogs of this decade, a memoir begins.
