Let’s start with a cliché: If someone had told me at the start of 2023 that I’d be in this photo – taken in New York City (!) on 15 December 2023 – I’d have scrunched up my face ‘WTAF’-style, and assumed that someone was on some kind of hallucinogenic medication:
And yet, there I am at 4 o’clock, my face alight with contentment and belonging, looking right at the camera without any of the self-consciousness I know I would have been lugging around in previous Decembers. So how the hell did I get there?
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I’m sure I’m not the only person who, for most of 2020 (and much of 2021), felt utterly untethered. For me, as I bobbed around in the stratosphere of dread and overwhelm, without even a frayed length of string fluttering beneath me for someone to grasp, it truly felt as if I’d never find my way back down to myself.
I’ve shared before how writing my first novel and securing a literary agent was what began to pull me earthwards back then. However, what I didn't anticipate was that the landing strip I felt most drawn to was on a craggy little isle I’d never even seen before, let alone landed on safely.
Since then, I’ve been circling this unfamiliar outcrop of land with cautious intrigue, my altitude gradually dropping until the island’s alluring yet unchartered landmarks began to emerge from low-lying clouds.
And, one by one this year, I began to make these beacons a reality:
Creative connections with my children
This was the year I noticed just how much I have in common with my two, completely different children. I’m so crap at traditional ‘play’, but if they give me a musical instrument or a blank Word document I’m in my element. And, when I’m having fun, so are they…on the whole. My children are growing into themselves while I do the same. Discovering each other anew through creativity has been incredible.
Finding my people
I have a small group of amazing friends who I know will be in my life forever. But this was the year that new pals etched themselves on my soul. I intend to write separately about how I came to meet the brilliant group of people photographed above (spoiler: it was a READING RETREAT [!] and you can read more about it in Emily’s wonderful essay here). This was the year I came to accept how meaningful friendships and connections can absolutely begin and flourish online. If you’re reading this and wondering if you’re such a person, then you absolutely are. And I can’t wait to keep being weird with you – and even meeting some of you – in 2024. You are amazing and you have made my year.
Work I adore
Working in-house as a marketing and PR specialist for the best part of 20 years always felt like a safe and reliable career choice. But working for a creative agency – where I spend my days alongside inspiring and talented people and switch between tons of exciting, important and unexpected copy projects every day – makes me feel alive and invigorated. My work doesn’t feel like work, it feels like play. And I got to write for some incredible brands and projects this year. How lucky am I?!
Writing my second novel
I still don’t have a book deal! And I don’t mind! For now, experimenting with stories and creative writing is enough, and I’m so proud of the two manuscripts I have to my name. There’s been a mini flurry of interest in one of them in recent weeks, which may lead to something – who knows? My life is so rich and fun right now that I’m no longer dependent on literary success for creative fulfillment.
Drumming!
And one such thing that’s been filling my life with fun is falling back in love with drumming. Back in 2009 / 2010 I was in a band and we played quite a few gigs in London. As these things tend to do, it fizzled out, and up until this year I hadn’t picked up a pair of drumsticks for the best part of a decade. But the discovery of a wonderful rehearsal space five minutes down the road has given my strange ability to hit things with uncharacteristic coordination a new lease of life.
A life without quite so much alcohol
Again, something I’ll probably write more about soon, but I conducted various booze-related scientific experiments on myself this year and came to the startling conclusion that I don’t need alcohol to have fun? I can have a brilliant time without it? And save money? And sleep better and reduce my anxiety? The wonderful Anna Sudbury has helped me discover this about myself and I am so grateful to have this knowledge.
Rekindling my love of music
And, underpinning all of this, was 🎵 music 🎵. Music has always lit up my brain. Yet, until this year, I'd completely fallen out of the habit of listening to it, let alone discovering new stuff. It baffles and distresses me that I somehow made it through 18 months of mental turmoil during the pandemic *barely listening to music*. No wonder the pain felt so acute and brutal back then – I wasn't soothing my mind with the thing it was craving. And that alone speaks volumes for how much I'd lost touch with the very essence of what makes me me up until that point in my life.
I realise now that the combination of melodies and rhythm and harmonies and words and layers upon layers of complementary sounds are like a balm for my brain. When I listen to music, the world suddenly makes sense. All the planet’s uncertainties, horrors and human anguish still exist, but they swirl into a containable pattern of aural meaning and beauty – a pattern we can replay again and again (and again³) if it makes us feel particularly good.
Or particularly safe.
And, this year, there was a specific moment when this knowledge clicked into place. It was a gig I went to in February for nostalgic purposes. The band was We Are Scientists and the show marked the very start of a tour for their latest album. I was there for the old songs, but the new songs were just as good. More significantly, the love and zaniness that emanated from the stage that night was infectious, and I enthusiastically signed up to the band's Substack newsletter that very night.
And thus it began. My first proper foray into fandom, as an anxiety-riddled 41-year-old mum of two. Because everything this band had given to the world while my attention had been elsewhere was out there, waiting to be discovered. And discover it I did.
In the almost two-decades I’d been completely consumed with trying to navigate the social maze of relationships, arm myself against an unexpectedly successful (and incredibly stressful) media career, and grapple with the strange new identity of motherhood, this duo of creative humans had been consistently making excellent music, producing joyfully ridiculous videos, writing about whatever the hell they wanted to write about and generally being their weird, authentic and multifaceted selves.
And, as I devoured it, their varied but consistent artistic output helped me to understand that, at last, I was in a position to make equivalent creative choices for myself. Listening to their music – which naturally led to the discovery of even more – opened up a new navigational channel in my brain that finally seemed to connect all the disparate dots that had been whizzing around aimlessly up until that point on randomised flight paths – flight paths that, sometimes, catastrophically collided.
And, once those connections had been made, I finally became acutely aware of something: whilst I’d been getting closer and closer to earth in recent years, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d actually touched down. I’d spent my entire adolescence and adult life in autopilot mode, forever circling above the ground in an externally-dictated formation.
That holding pattern had been helpful and reassuring up to a point. But that point had passed, and now I had the self-confidence – and self-compassion – to take over the controls and land with assertiveness on the Odd Little Island of Me. And, once I’d disembarked, the landmarks I’ve mentioned in this post were all there, waiting for me, the fog having fully lifted.
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And that’s how I ended up in New York City at the end of the year, watching my favourite band play the final gig of the tour I saw begin back in February. Being in that room with fellow fans felt like the right place for me to be at that moment of my life; an acknowledgment of all that had changed for me since I first clicked ‘subscribe’ on that wacky little newsletter.
It’s not my place to speculate which path my creative heroes have chosen, but from an outsider’s perspective it does seem to be one that prioritises joy above everything else.
In turn, this has made me ponder what kind of creative life I want to lead. One that launches me up to a much higher altitude, but where I’m back in a holding pattern, beholden to the whims of others? Or one that enables me to be grounded wholly in myself, to play, to be silly, to connect with others who truly get what I’m trying to say and create work that microscopically rewires even just a few neural pathways?
My own pathways have been well and truly switched onto brand new tracks this year. And I’m so excited to discover where they’ll take me.
If you’ve made it this far: thank you. And I hope you have a fulfilling 2024 in which you, too, feel as much like yourself as you possibly can.
P.S. This Substacker is against Nazis (obviously!). Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read this, and join me in encouraging the well-meaning but naïve Substack leadership team to alter their wishy-washy position.
What a lovely read. "Landing on the Island of Me" is just such a beautiful way to describe the process of returning to yourself.
I love this so much and I think that photo of the last 6 years you shared on Instagram really showed the spark that is back in your eyes. Excited for what 2024 has in store for you x