Following your life’s dream can be the most exhilarating and liberating thing you’ll ever do. But it can also be the hardest, most devastating and exhausting experience of your existence. Is it all worth it? Stay tuned to find out.
My daughter’s birthday doesn’t just signify her most joyous arrival on this earth. Sure, as my first-born, she’ll always be that little miracle I’d never thought I’d hold in my arms. But it also reminds me that, shortly after I became a mother, I also made one of the most poignant decisions of my life: Namely that I would no longer dream of another life where I was a writer, but that I would make this dream a reality.
I remember sitting at a friend’s sofa, rocking my little girl as her two dogs curiously sniffed her and then settled at our feet. She encouraged me to follow my inner voice and trust my instinct that wanted me to do what I’d always loved most: writing. She also gave me a book by Julia Cameron “The Artist’s Way”, which I started devouring during countless breastfeeding sessions, the only times my daughter would sleep and give me some rest during the day. As I started writing my morning pages religiously, my hunger for a creative life grew, as did my frustration. How could I take myself on artist dates when I could barely go to the toilet by myself? How could I carve out some creative time for inspiration when a little person was reliant on me 24/7?
My diary entries of those first few months of having made my life-changing decision aren’t pretty to read. They are full of self-doubt, wallowing in self-pity and panicking why it’s taken me nearly three decades to realise what I was meant to do all my life. But as my daughter grew, as did my reserve, my patience and strength, and soon I was using every spare minute I was granted during my maternity leave to write. When my baby was sleeping on me, I contorted myself to type on the laptop. When she was drinking from me, I placed her so I could brain dump my thoughts onto the laptop. And soon, page after page, a story unfolded, raw and rough around the edges, full of inconsistencies and flaws, but the draft of my book I always wanted to write, had come to life.
Since I typed the last words of the first draft of my story all those years ago, I haven’t stopped writing; but it took the birth of my son nearly three years later until I started my blog, ready to send my words into a public space. And then still, I found new jobs, a post-graduate degree – totally unrelated to writing – and a new career in teaching, to keep me occupied, telling myself that it would all be part of the grand master plan to become a full-time writer. Of course, the more other things I distracted myself with, the less I could fail in realising my dream.
The pandemic certainly had its downs, but it was also transformative for me in more than one way. I started pushing myself, become braver, share my writing and earned my first small income from writing for other people. The road hasn’t always been easy and there have been lots of setbacks, doubts, failures and rejections since. But what’s most important is that, after all those years, I’m still writing, I’m still putting myself out there and I’m holding my head high when I tell people that what I do is write.
And whilst I’m really proud of all my past blogs and all those ideas, those first words I tentatively sent out there, I now want to write here about what it’s really like to follow your dream to become a full-time creative, the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations artists face every day to live a life that is most authentic to them and what they’re passionate about. Spoiler-alert: It’s tough. It’s ruthless, it’s disheartening, it’s heart-breaking and at times you just want to give up on yourself and your dream.
Is it worth it? In the words of my idol Candace Bushnell: Abso-fucking-lutely!
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Chameleon in High Heels 