“How’s the writing going?” Jacki says to me.
I give a shrug. “Haven’t opened my novel for six months,” I say with a laugh.
“Ah,” she says.
“I don’t do guilt about it, now,” I say.
“Oh yes,” she says, “I’m like that about my blog. Now I just do it if I want to.”
“Exactly.”
“I think I kind of ran with it, to be honest,” I say. “I’ve always, always written, in some form… So I thought it was like my destiny or something.”
“It’s a funny thing, Following Your Dreams,” Jacki says, sipping her giant mug of tea and understanding what I mean immediately, as ever.
I think back to last summer. I had a lot of time on my hands, was only working 10 hours a week at Birmingham Airport (in one of the weirdest temp jobs I’ve had), to earn a bit, test the working-regularly boundaries. I was well and at liberty to try out lots of things I might like. I started a beauty blog. I (disasterously) tried painting. I meditated. I walked. I took myself to National Trust properties alone. I wrote – oh, how I wrote; reams of guest posts and freelance articles, a hundred thousand novel words.
And I was totally miserable.
I remember those days now – those strange, small days, where I never had to do anything I didn’t want to do, and yet also struggled to find things I did want to do – with a twisted smile. Life, then, was like a bouncing castle; unstructured with no substance. The slightest thing would make it deflate; a cancelled plan, a chance remark. Now, it’s like a climbing frame; sturdy and strong, and, even if I do hang my happiness on a lunch date, or the sun coming out, or buying a lovely pair of jeans, if it doesn’t happen, the whole thing doesn’t fall down.
“Really, I had found something to fit my unwell life,” I say, remembering vividly thinking that an author was an ideal career for me because I could do it lying down. Spot the limiting thinking pattern. “And because it was creative, and being a lawyer isn’t, I kind of thought it was what I was supposed to do, even though I didn’t really enjoy it sometimes.”
“I was exactly the same,” Jacki says. “And anyway – who has one dream?”
I get excited, the way I do when somebody is saying things I’ve never really thought about, but things which are exactly on my wavelength.
“I know,” I say. “I want to be a successful lawyer, but I also want to have a lovely blog, marry MindReader, have nice plants in the garden, maybe write a novel – if I want to – and grow old…”
And somehow, along the line, I was persuaded that being creative was Good and having a real job with real expectations, stresses, demands, and, let’s face it, money, was Bad. I thought that my old lifestyle lead to me becoming ill, and perhaps some of it it did – perhaps I am kinder to myself now, perhaps I examine my thoughts more for rationality – but, more than that, I became convinced I had to change who I was, in order to recover. But that’s not true. Now, I know I have to go back, to before the illness, to be the most me I can be, including all the things I elimitated – being late, rushing around, taking on too much.
And anyway, I think, life’s gentle momentum is comprised of doing things you do want to do, like reading a book in the bath, and working hard, and doing things you don’t want to do, like an 8am meeting, and doing things you have no real feelings about, like food shopping.
“Me too,” she says. “I want to marry Badger and have kiddlywinks and I like writing a bit so I’ve entered the Bristol Short Story competition, and if I ever get paid to write a bit that’d be good…”
I realise that, for two people who were in pretty miserable places last summer, we sound pretty rational. Normal. Not expecting the world. Accepting that we’re conventional, not free-thinking artistes but people who want normal jobs and normal marriages.
I think I will probably always blog; I can see the archives stretching right from 2004 to 2050. I’ll probably always dabble in writing. I might finish my novel, pitch to an agent, and get a five-book deal with a £100,000 advance. Or, I might remain carried away with my other career and never open my novel again.
And that’s okay.
