publishing the ghosts: after the finish line

In 2015, when we were still living in the UK and The Latte Years was a few months away from being a real live book, I was thrilled to have an article accepted by a publication that I loved. It was a magazine about how to make both a living and a life, full of empowering, inspiring stories of interesting people and how they got to where they are.

After my story was submitted, I got a strange but breezy email back saying that things were up in the air and they’d let me know - by the end of the year, the magazine had sadly disappeared. The words I wrote never saw the light of day.

I’ve been looking through some old folders and hard drives over the past few days, and I found the article. After The Latte Years, it was the second thing I ever wrote on my MacBook Air, in Pages! It’s very much of the mindset I had when I wrote it, almost like a little time machine. It was never edited, and most definitely could have done with a going-over. In the intervening years I have become painfully aware of my natural tendency towards long sentences!

But what the hell - as one of my writing goals for 2022 was to “publish all the ghosts”, rather than find an alternative home for it or rework it significantly with seven years hindsight, I thought I would honour the hopeful, forward-looking me that wrote it and share it here.

After the finish line

What's next? is a question I’ve been trying to answer for as long as I can remember.

I was a straight A student at school and university, so it seemed there was always another hoop to jump through, another pat on the head I was waiting for. While I was very driven (good) I was very dependent on external validation to feel good about myself (not good). To say the real world hit me hard after graduation is something of an understatement. I went through a period of major stagnation in my early twenties where my physical health deteriorated and my lifelong ambition of being a writer was all but shelved. 

I took up endurance sport nearly ten years ago to shift a few pounds and negotiate the aftermath of a painful divorce at the fairly young age of 25.  When I crossed the finish line of the London Marathon in 2011, I had never been so proud of myself. My thighs were taut with muscle, my heart soared with joy as I had surely conquered the ultimate physical feat. I didn’t know if I wanted to ever run another marathon - the training had taken over my life and I’d had no time to write.

But what on earth would I do next? As a born overachiever, the fact I didn’t have an answer to this question didn't sit well. 

A year after the marathon, I was now a full time writer after a well-timed redundancy, but despite having taken the biggest leap of faith of my life, things were not going well. I had come dead last in a trail half marathon (a race harder than the marathon had ever been), money was running low and it looked like my biggest dream, publishing a book, was never going to happen as my hopeful queries to agents and publishers were met with rejection after rejection. 

 On New Year’s Eve 2012, with my confidence in tatters, I did a manifestation exercise where I wrote a letter to myself from my 2015 self. What would she say? What was life like now? What words of encouragement could I give myself, based on where I hoped I would be in three years time?

I found the letter the other day. It’s so accurate it’s frightening. 

2015 has been a big year for me, possibly the biggest of my life. Since my agent rang me with the news in March, I’ve surfed a giant wave of publisher deadlines, edits, cover designs, fitting in writing a 100,000 word book around a full time job within three months, not to mention the fear of exposure that comes with having a book that contains such a raw personal story out there in the world. But my heart is soaring. Fear is a luxury I daren’t indulge in.  My memoir The Latte Years will be published in January 2016. 

 Just like when I finished the marathon, I’m pondering the same question. What am I going to do now? What do you do once you realise your biggest dream in life? The similarities between writers and athletes never fail to amaze and amuse me, and so I have been negotiating this time for my work and creative practice the same way I approached the aftermath of completing a marathon.

I have had to find ways to get “goal hungry” again both after success and after failure. Both scenarios require gentleness and asking questions and setting intentions from a place of love rather than fear. 

This is what has helped me so far:

Put your feet up

 A wonderful running coach, Martin Yelling, told me to “put your slippers on and have a well deserved rest” after the marathon. He’s a wise man - often the best thing we can do after achieving something massive is let the dust settle, take stock and, for heaven’s sake, RELAX. 

Detach

 This has been key to my personal growth as well as my creative work. Keeping my self belief while detaching from desired outcomes and expectations is trickier than it sounds but it can be done. Sometimes you need to detach from an old identity too. Many of us cling to old personas that don’t always reflect who we are now. It’s very tempting to call myself a marathon runner forever more but while that achievement can never be taken away from me, I can’t keep measuring myself against it either.  It reminds me that achievements come and go in the fullness of time, but life goes on. Nothing you leave behind will ever be truly lost if it is relevant to your future. Trust that. 

Manifest (or visualise)

An essential technique for successful athletes is visualising their moment of glory. Not just what they can see, but how do they feel?  I’ve found doing the same thing immensely helpful for my creative goals. The great paradox about the creative life is that you cannot ever possibly know what the outcome of your efforts will be - and I truly believe that’s a good thing - but writing down what I wanted to achieve in the voice of a future self who had already achieved it was a powerful exercise. It helped me visualise where I wanted to be, work out my priorities and feel gratitude for how far I’d come. It also gave me some clues as to how I was going to get there from that moment in time, dejected and wondering if I should just throw in the towel.

 If you’re struggling to figure out what’s next for you, really recommend trying it. I’m not saying all you have to do is write down what you want and it will happen like magic. We all know life doesn’t work that way. But what does work is getting really clear about who you are and what you want (and who you’re not and what you don’t) and then taking some action. A little imagination doesn’t hurt either. 

Trust

 It’s easy to fret our lives away, looking for our next achievement. The current culture of social media does little to reassure us that everything doesn’t have to be instagrammable, and if you can’t apply the #blessed hashtag to your life then you’re doing something wrong. 

In those near three years, I didn’t look at what I’d written in that letter from my future self once, but I did remember how authentic the voice sounded. Future Me was on to something, I decided. I would trust that all would be well. I would put my faith in the universe to deliver. Even if it meant I had nothing to instagram but my breakfast in the meantime.  

Take action

 I think this is the step many of us have trouble with - I certainly did for the first half of my life. It’s easy to want - it’s the doing that’s the hard bit. You have to keep your end of the bargain. Everything is a choice, including doing nothing. 

 For me, action was a conscious act of surrender and letting go. I decided to stop for a while and listen, take notice, instead of pushing so hard all the time. I no longer had any grandiose ideas, no project I thought would be my “game changer”. But every day, I got up and committed myself to my practice, just as a runner puts on her shoes and runs every day. Even if it was just Morning Pages, I was “in training”. I was a marathon writer. 

Be true to yourself

 For me, the question “what next?” has to be answered by examining your own motives. I’m a goal-oriented person by nature and while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it was crucial for me to get a balance between goals that were truly authentic and goals I was pursuing because I thought I “should” or that would earn me admiration from others.  

Experience has taught me that things get clearer, or solutions present themselves, when you stop and enjoy the view for a while. In fact, that is the only reason to climb the mountain. Don’t worry about whether others can see you on top of it – do it for the fun of the climb and, above all, let yourself enjoy the view once you get there.  The next mountain can wait, just for now.

what if we recharged ourselves as often as we did our phones?

What if we recharged ourselves as often as we did our phones? 

I like to keep busy. I’m not great at sitting still. Given a choice I’d rather be doing something than nothing. Give me a week off and I’ll fill it with day trips and walks and visits to pubs and galleries. And I love it. I love stimulation. But that’s not always what you need, is it? 

An unexpected flare up of an old wound saw me track down my old osteopath at her new digs at Kuu London for an hour of muscle manipulation and massage yesterday. I cried on the table, and it was much needed. Maybe keeping busy had distracted me. Maybe it has always distracted me.

And while I keep myself occupied and always find things to do...I’m not always very kind to myself. I tell myself I don’t need a massage, or quiet time. I meditate every morning...and it’s only recently I’ve stopped doing the guided ones and started sitting there in silence with only my breath for company. It’s uncomfortable. Lying there, having sore parts prodded and touched, was uncomfortable. No wonder I cried. I’ve forgotten how to do uncomfortable. 

Shoulder loosened and no longer in pain, I took my time going home. It was a sunny day and east London is full of beauty, characters and things to see. I found a new journal at Erbert (and got great tips on how to unclog my old fountain pen! Cheers Paul!) and treated myself to a brownie and iced tea at the Violet bakery.

I picked a table by the kitchen window so I could breathe in the heavenly smell of baking. I had nowhere else to be and for a change I felt calm, unhurried, unpressured. As a result, I lingered.

I took an obligatory photo or two then put the phone away. I wrote. I savoured every sweet, nutty, salty bite of my halva tahini brownie. I looked around. There were more dogs than cars in this quiet street, trotting alongside their owners. It was sunny, and with the warm cake-infused air I might have almost believed it was still summer.

As I ate the last crumb of brownie and walked to the train, I felt lighter. Battery not quite full, but recharged nonetheless. 

We so often wait for a wake up call before we’ll prioritise looking after ourselves, before we listen to our aching bodies and souls. Saturday was a good reminder to me to not put off self care until the pain is unbearable. But also, I don’t have to be in pain to be worthy of kindness and small treats. Those are the things that make life sweeter.

So this week, I’m going to try and treat myself more like my phone - and hopefully get my battery sufficiently recharged.

reclaiming loud

The opening pages - the altar, if you will - of my current journal, where my ritual is to make a collage before I start writing in its pages. I don't think it was an accident that those words somehow found each other.

“It’s not a woman’s job to get smaller and smaller and take up less and less space until she disappears so the world can be more comfortable.”

— Glennon Doyle, Love Warrior

Sas Petherick wrote recently about reclaiming the word 'bossy' for herself - a word that had negative connotations for her since childhood,  which subsequently affected how she saw herself and how she interacted with the world from a place of fear rather than worthiness. How she went through life doing everything she could to avoid being called 'bossy' because it made her feel so small.

Sas says:

Usually, there is a word.
Some phrase or sentence that when uttered, has the power to leave us feeling small and powerless. Diminished. Childlike.
I wonder what is it for you?

I’ve been trying to reclaim the word loud.

When I was younger, being called ‘loud’ - too loud, more often than not - left me feeling diminished and cut down. It felt like a rejection of my most essential self - an excitable, enthusiastic, outgoing little girl who was the first to put her hand up in class if she knew the answer; who loved to talk to people, tell stories and share things with others; who loved making up games, performing and making people laugh; who was fascinated by the world and the people in it. 

When people told me I was 'loud', that sent me the message that I needed to shut up. That I was too much. That what I had to say wasn't important, no one was interested. That making too much noise - taking up too much space - was not a good thing and I would be more acceptable, and more likeable, if I were quieter. Funnily enough, I don't recall the boys I knew being told they were too loud (but that's another story).

As I wasn't one of the 'pretty' or 'popular' girls either, the label of 'loud' made me even more self-conscious of my failings and flaws. As I became a teenager I found myself retreating inwards - I was only loud with people I felt I could be myself around (mostly my three sisters). Yet I still loved performing and acting, often winning the lead roles in school plays, so 'withdrawn' was probably not a word people would have used to describe me! And I noticed that people tended to like me more, or didn't mind how 'loud' I was, when I was entertaining them.

But what people didn’t realise - and nor did I, until I went to therapy as an adult - was that acting was a place of safety for me. All that gregariousness, enthusiasm and fun that I felt I couldn't express as myself went into playing parts, pretending to be someone else, instead. This eventually seeped through to the rest of my life and as a result, I no longer knew who I really was. 

About 12 years ago, in my mid-twenties, I tried to reclaim that word 'loud'. I became that confident young girl again - who liked who she was and let the world know it. Who put her hand up. Who enjoyed sharing her stories and experiences with people, and sharing in theirs too.  Who was vivacious, full of energy and, for the first time in her life, dropped her people-pleasing tendencies and put her own needs first. She was also a bit broken, and very naive, but was determined to rediscover her true self and purpose, and proud of how far she'd come in the process.

But then came the familiar cries of ‘too loud’ and it all unravelled. 

What hurts the most when I think about that time is not that I was betrayed and torn down by people I thought were friends, because they were insecure, unhappy people and what they did wasn't about me at all (sidenote: when people bully you, it's never about you). What hurts the most is that I betrayed myself, my true self. I didn't fight back or confront them about how much they had hurt me. I didn't use the voice I thought I had found to stand up to them.

Instead, I just did what I thought I had to do, and what I had always done, when I showed people the real me and they didn't like it - I pressed the mute button and shut down. And when you are complicit in your own betrayal, that is a wound that takes years, perhaps a lifetime, to recover from.

It took me ten years (and writing a book!) to really understand what that time was about, what the lessons were. The confidence I'd worked so hard for had slipped away so easily, which made me realise I still had work to do.  It has taken until now to feel brave enough to try being that excited, enthusiastic, loud person again.  

But this time, I feel less afraid of the smackdown, because it's probably about time I accepted that I will always be too much for some people. Choosing to live my life with the volume dial turned right up will likely trigger someone else's insecurities at some point, but I'm finally in a place where I know that isn't my problem. 

Because now I get to choose what 'loud' means.

Loud doesn’t mean annoying or full of yourself. It is not code for 'shut up, go away, no one is interested'. Loud is not a demand for attention. 

Loud is just a desire to be heard, and to be seen, for who I really am. 

Loud means using my voice, however I want to use it. I owe that not only to myself, but to the women who came before me and didn’t have a voice. And to all the women in the world who still don’t have one. 

Loud means being brave enough to speak the truth in my heart, trusting that it is safe for me to do that, and not waiting to be invited on to the stage. 

Loud means standing up for myself, and for others. 

Loud means knowing what is important to say and then saying it, backing myself all the way. Thinking before I speak, of course, but breaking out of this pattern I've been in for the last few years where I overthink everything so much that I lose my nerve, the moment passes and I end up saying nothing. 

Loud, ironically, means listening to that small voice inside me that just wants to be free. That just wants to show up in the world without fear, without agenda, just with love and the desire to be useful and joyful.

Loud is a strength, not a flaw.

Loud is bubbly, bright, alive and grateful.

Loud is me.

Maybe loud is you too.

It’s OK to be loud.