This was also where I first encountered the writings of Karan Barad, and other prominent contemporary thinkers across disciplines. I was paid significantly more than I had been paid for my writing work. 

From 2010, when I moved from Mumbai to Delhi as a working professional, until I left, in 2020, for Italy, for familial reasons, I survived financially as a freelance writer. This was a hustle unlike any other I have known. I was fortunate enough to have worked for at least a year at Time Out Mumbai, until they fired me for not performing to their standards. It meant that I had a byline. My first job in Delhi was in children’s publishing, but I tried my best to seek out networks and pitch and get published. My most notable byline at the time was for a magazine now revered for its long-form essays. I was commissioned to write about art, a subject around which, as a literature student, I wouldn’t have dreamed of touching, had it not been for the fact that from 2009 onwards, I had been editing the art criticism of an art critic with a literature background—Richard Bartholomew. Moonlighting as a freelance writer meant constantly hustling, always trying to prove to yourself and to others that you are capable, that you are worthy, that you need to be paid on time, that you need to be paid at all. For a while, having a full-time job on the side in either marketing or sales helped take the pressure off my own personal writing, allowing me space to think, dream, imagine.

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I am so content to be at a place where I can reflect on that decade and consider it a chapter in my life. I was going to write ‘closed’ chapter, but it is incredibly evident how my current sense of security is tied into those years; how the full-time editorial position I have at the moment is the result of the networks I built at that time, just as my editorial aptitude is a direct consequence of all the years I served as an art critic. 

My introspection into this professional aspect of my life was triggered by a recent incident when a curator whose texts I had edited seemed irked by my interventions. My superior, a wonderful person, was clear that I had done a great job, and that the reservations were stemming from something external. As I was wrestling with how to respond kindly and professionally, I still found myself suddenly full of self-doubt. I had to remind myself that I had indeed worked in service of the text, and that my edits were grounded in scholarly and intellectual rigour. After all these years, I had to find ways of holding myself by validating myself. I suppose self-doubt is like this pall shadow that insists on following you. Except, in the last few years I’ve gotten so much better at exorcising it soon after sensing its presence. 

Maybe, as an editor, I have learned to recognise that even the most brilliant academics, artists and curators harbour deep insecurities. Freelance writing and editing have shown me what humility and grace look like.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.