Pivooooot
When I was younger I believed in magic. Cool, so did everyone. I don’t mean when I was four, I mean when I was fourteen. I had this belief that good things would come if I believed in them. Now they call it manifesting, but back then it was magic, and luck.
As I got older and the cohort of people doing the same thing as me got smaller, I stopped doing things I loved so much. I had to get a job to earn money, and in that one move a lot of the magic turned to dust.
My dreams of working in a publishing house, or at a food magazine, or painting sets, writing stories, making costumes or the next stop frame animation mega hit were over. The job ad for ‘operations assistant,’ with all its promise of practical, back room, low-responsibility, high-reward activity’, was gone with the interview. At the stroke of 9am on my first day it turned into a pumpkin, AKA an Account Manager.
My time would not, as I thought, be spent licking stamps; organising bookshelves; recommending recipes or posting brown paper packages tied up with string. Instead, I’d be managing client relationships, shepherding work through the studio, raising POs, missing deadlines, pretending to check things and generally letting people down at every turn. (Though I maintain that if the work did reach them the disappointment would be the same).
Investor presentations, blue websites, glass awards and email footers shot noiselessly in and out of my inbox, slowly degrading my sense of accomplishment and mental faculties. The working world, rather than being wooden, functional, tactile, intelligent and full of colour, turned out to be virtual, vinyl and violently boring. I should have realised this in my job interview, when I mentioned that I liked traditional signwriting and the director showed me all the office wayfinding signage they’d just done: pages and pages of cutout numbers.
Rather than materials with which to create work, we had laptops, second screens and something called ‘assets’. We weren’t even pencil pushers. The feeling of betrayal was monumental - like, ombudsman-worthy.
Ever since that fateful wrong turn towards a graduate recruitment agency, I have felt pretty lost career-wise. It seemed like I went into the woods instead of up the mountain, and I’ve only had odd glimpses of the mountain through the trees since: a festival here, a creative writing course there, a burst of sewing so addictive and mess-inducing that it knackers me out and I have to stow the machine for another three months after.
When this happened, I imagined I would grind away at my corporate job for a few years, fermenting slowly into an artist and then one day I’d break: telling first my client and then my boss that they’re arseholes and quit on the spot.
And so would begin my career as an award winning, genre-defying, polymathematic, multi-hyphenate… something and I’d never look back. Except when a) I needed more material or b) I wanted to thank my boss for placing the final straw. This being the time he insisted that a quote from brainyquote.com was from one of ‘Jane Austen’s plays’ and the only reason I wasn’t seeing it in my searches was because of my browser cookies confirming what I believed. I assume it’s still on the wall at Barclays head office.
But there was no straw; no epiphany or ‘I quit’ moment, and hating it didn’t make it any less true. There were just days when I could bear it and days when I couldn’t. If one of the latter had coincided with someone offering me a job, I would have taken it, and one day it did.
I got a new job in the same role, and while this job didn’t relight my fire, the people did and I was no longer made to feel like an unwitting contestant on a reality contest called ‘How low can she go.’
They’ve supported me a lot: letting me have time off, host the Traitors at work, host creative workshops and write silly articles. But the creative itch is still there and I still don’t feel like I have enough time for it.
So, the request for a four day week is in, the Substack is underway and I’m here to manifest/magic up the rest. I know I’m going to be famous and I know it won’t be all it’s cracked up to be, but I can see the colours and feel the wood and cloth beneath my fingers. I can smell the country air of the cottage from the Holiday that I’ll live in (yes, I know it was a set), and I can *almost* make out what it is I’ll actually be doing. But consider this my spell:
I am going to be happy
I am going to write things
I’m going to make things
And I’m going to be good at it.
I already am!
Until then I’ll keep feeling around in the dark until something lights the way.