Dustcloth, anyone?
I quit my job three weeks ago.
As I write this, I am sat on the back porch of my parents' house in small town British Columbia, listening to the birds chirp and the neighbour's sprinkler rhythmically water their lawn, two weeks into a five week trip made possible because I have no job. How often in life does one have both means and opportunity, I asked myself when booking the ticket here, eyeballing my savings with unpracticed flippancy.
It has been a good eight years, all in all, since I last wrote in this blog. I won some awards and had my heart crushed to a meaty pulp. I lost my mom to Lewy Body Dementia and accepted the resulting financial leg up to put a deposit on my first home. I celebrated Christmas in Baghdad and wept in Petra, took up and retired from performing burlesque, made friends and lost friends and learned I can inverted leg press 292.5kg thanks to my twinkly-eyed PT who doesn't take "I can't!" for an answer. I also built up a career that I love in project management, with mighty mighty ambitions to move further into strategic programme management.
What didn't happen was any form of creative creation. I can draft a monthly budget v progress report that will bring the senior partner of a lawfirm to his knees, but my free time has been too often laid at the altar of Netflix and/or knitting and/or sleep to even consider trying to form an unnecessary sentence in the name of self-expression. "I just LOVE your way with words!" exclaimed a [now ex-] colleague after some unnecessarily-dramatic sprinkling of adjectives, but 8pm rolls around and I start eyeballing the clock wondering if it's not too early to go to bed.
Enough!
This February, I took the feverish decision to take part in a challenge to write 28 plays in 28 days, part of Theatre Delicatessen's #28PlaysLater. Eight years since I'd last written here, and seventeen - SEVENTEEN! - since I'd last written a play, it felt a bit like trying to use my high school French again: rusty, so rusty, but very maybe possibly still there just even a little? And over the next four weeks I sputtered out 28 pieces of new creative writing - a couple I'm quite proud of, at least one that shall never be mentioned again, and most positively middling.
One month later, I resigned.
Now, I'm not going to go sell pukka shell necklaces in Thailand: I have merely quit the safety, reliability and monotony of a permanent job to move into contracting, a) because it is the best way for me to make the leap into programme management, and b) because it will allow me to work my tail off for x number of months, and then take two months off. to write a novel, a play, a whatever.
Anything, so long as I'm writing and creating and enjoying that rush of rolling words around in my brain to find the right combination and in the right order like so many mental marbles of happiness.
Work/life balance.
Words. Words. Words.
I've missed you.
As I write this, I am sat on the back porch of my parents' house in small town British Columbia, listening to the birds chirp and the neighbour's sprinkler rhythmically water their lawn, two weeks into a five week trip made possible because I have no job. How often in life does one have both means and opportunity, I asked myself when booking the ticket here, eyeballing my savings with unpracticed flippancy.
It has been a good eight years, all in all, since I last wrote in this blog. I won some awards and had my heart crushed to a meaty pulp. I lost my mom to Lewy Body Dementia and accepted the resulting financial leg up to put a deposit on my first home. I celebrated Christmas in Baghdad and wept in Petra, took up and retired from performing burlesque, made friends and lost friends and learned I can inverted leg press 292.5kg thanks to my twinkly-eyed PT who doesn't take "I can't!" for an answer. I also built up a career that I love in project management, with mighty mighty ambitions to move further into strategic programme management.
What didn't happen was any form of creative creation. I can draft a monthly budget v progress report that will bring the senior partner of a lawfirm to his knees, but my free time has been too often laid at the altar of Netflix and/or knitting and/or sleep to even consider trying to form an unnecessary sentence in the name of self-expression. "I just LOVE your way with words!" exclaimed a [now ex-] colleague after some unnecessarily-dramatic sprinkling of adjectives, but 8pm rolls around and I start eyeballing the clock wondering if it's not too early to go to bed.
Enough!
This February, I took the feverish decision to take part in a challenge to write 28 plays in 28 days, part of Theatre Delicatessen's #28PlaysLater. Eight years since I'd last written here, and seventeen - SEVENTEEN! - since I'd last written a play, it felt a bit like trying to use my high school French again: rusty, so rusty, but very maybe possibly still there just even a little? And over the next four weeks I sputtered out 28 pieces of new creative writing - a couple I'm quite proud of, at least one that shall never be mentioned again, and most positively middling.
One month later, I resigned.
Now, I'm not going to go sell pukka shell necklaces in Thailand: I have merely quit the safety, reliability and monotony of a permanent job to move into contracting, a) because it is the best way for me to make the leap into programme management, and b) because it will allow me to work my tail off for x number of months, and then take two months off. to write a novel, a play, a whatever.
Anything, so long as I'm writing and creating and enjoying that rush of rolling words around in my brain to find the right combination and in the right order like so many mental marbles of happiness.
Work/life balance.
Words. Words. Words.
I've missed you.
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