Playing at Being a Grown-Up

I feel conflicted, I feel torn, not knowing where my focus of energy should be. I see a pebble on the beach that’s just out of reach, it’s glinting in the sunlight as the waves lap over it. Proving too elusive to grasp, staying tantalisingly just out of reach, this pebble is symbolic of my desire to write. To write for a purpose beyond the familiarity of my comfort zone: my blogging, script writing and the odd poem when the mood takes me.

I don’t know how to answer when people ask me what I am doing. Officially I suppose the answer is taking a career break, though currently it feels that this may have no end as thoughts of returning to the rat race of a work environment trigger an inner panic, a rising unease whenever I attempt to confront the idea, so it would seem that I am not yet in the right place to move forward with this. 

I have made a decision to write, though telling anyone that I am being a writer seems wrong. What is it that prevents me from doing so? I’m certainly not in a position to be earning money from my writing and so is that the crux of it? Do I see the term writer as only appropriate for a commercially viable option? Having spent years nurturing my children into the belief that the creative process is what’s important and not the outcome - why is it that I cannot accept this for myself?

Perhaps the career path I had was so driven by targets that I feel at sea to be ungoverned by these, to be adrift in a world where I may or may not write and may or may not achieve a written product, is as unnerving as it is liberating. My husband heard me telling my son that I feel there’s an expectation that I will write something and I suppose by that, I mean I will write some sort of book. His response was that I don’t have to write anything, I don’t have to do anything, I need to focus on recovering. A statement that was simultaneously endearing and a little shocking, for it jolted a realisation of his perception of my current position. He is right though. I am recovering the segments of my self-esteem, my confidence, my belief in my own abilities and attempting to fit them back into a whole picture- it’s just that right now, I don’t know what the image will be.

These past few weeks have been a process of adjustment, not only in what I am doing and how I am organising my days, but also in what I am feeling and how I manage my expectations and those of people around me. When I am asked “So, how is it being a lady of leisure?” or “What are you doing then?” or “How is it not working then, it must be good?” - how should I respond? I am very grateful that we are able to make adjustments financially to enable me to keep on this route for now. I am grateful that I had this option when to remain in work, in my circumstances, would have led to some very dark places. I am grateful that I have options but as yet, I don’t feel I have answers.

The process of writing is in itself taking a lens to magnify the minutiae- it’s all in the description, the ability to capture a place, an object, a person, with some aptly chosen phrases. So within that, it is no doubt natural that the writer becomes the over-thinker. An observer of life in order to tell a story through the ink on the page, is by nature surely going to notice a feeling and may be more prone to catastrophising over it. I discovered that word this week, when chatting with a friend. I love it as a word, not as a quality, for it encapsulates the struggles of a mind that can leap from 0 to 60 in a blink of an eye, spiralling around all of the possible outcomes that a situation may have. It seems that she and I both share an ability of late to catastrophise.

It can be added to the long list of things that we share then. This friend and I go back to High School days and we have compared notes on life’s milestones ever since: university days, jobs, boyfriends, weddings - being bridesmaids for each other, our babies who are now either grown up or fast heading that way. Along the way though, we have also shared the small stuff, for it is those details that keep the whole thing going, this ‘adult’ thing. When chatting this week, we spoke of our lives with reference to the details and the wider lens view and both agreed that since school we have been waiting for the day when we actually feel like we’ve become adults and that we know what we’re doing, that we have some control. Having both now hit 50, we had to concede that perhaps that day never comes and all the adults that we looked up to as children were also playing the game that we now participate in. The game where you project an image of calm and knowing exactly what to do next, when actually you have no real clue.

So I should return to that pebble on the beach, the elusive one, with its glinting promise and tactile allure. It is perhaps my very adult and grown-up approach that is holding me back from reaching it? I should think of what I would have done to get to such a pebble back in my childhood days and throw caution to the wind, jump over a few waves and grab it. And once I have my pebble, examine it daily and treasure it forever.