At various times during my freelance career, thing were so bad that I dusted off my resume and went out to try and find something permanent ... I never could.
A mixture of dealing very badly with recruiters (whom I consider to be pure satan spawn) and good luck of finding another freelance gig "just in time" has always kept me off full time payrolls.
On the one hand it would have been way easier to be earning a great salary while I saved up and then finally "cut loose" to launch my own company, but being forced (somewhat) into freelancing has had beneficial side effects; mostly that I now run a business that actually has some promise of turning into a saleable asset and allows me to live where and how I want to.
I also made things harder for myself by being too obsessed with the particulars of the technology I used and a heavy dose of NIH (not invented here) so I wasted a shit tonne of time writing code that was never really used.
If I had my time over again I would probably have focussed on flipping wordpress sites at a margin sufficient to give me time to work on other stuff. That type of consulting is also pretty easy to systemise, meaning you can hire people to do lots of the work for you once you've figured out how to get customers.
You probably have a lot to offer as a "consultant" because you have a general understanding of how shit works, you can communicate well with business people and you can put together a team who can achieve a specific goal.
The challenge, of course, is that no-one will give you that job. Fortunately it's not impossible to just go out there and create that job for yourself.