On Closing Tabs
The start of an academic year and the end of an era
I did a big thing today - I quit my side hustle. From now on, all I’m going to be doing is doing writing and teaching writing. No tutoring GCSE English on the side, no marketing job, no Etsy shop… nothing. And this is huge for me. I think I was nine years old the first time I designed some flyers on the family computer and tried to start a dog walking service (there were no takers). I won’t have been much older than that the first time Dad paid me to do the filing, or the ironing (20p per shirt, not bad). I babysat at 13, worked retail at 16, and by the time I was doing my A levels I was working three separate jobs alongside. I’ve always been like this. BUSY. But I’ve done so much time of a million different jobs, a constant juggle of priorities, and places I have to be, and always with writing humming in the background, and I feel like I want to flip things around. Let writing hum in the foreground, and let a load of the balls I’ve been juggling finally fall.
Look, I’m not trying to tell you to quit your job and buy a smallholding in the Hebrides and spend your days like some kind of writing monk. You know that option’s on the table (I mean… kinda). I have been told in the past past that I should aim to get a job in a bar and write all day. I know that won’t work for me, actually. Maybe it will work for you, I don’t know. But also, when my child turned one and I was faced with a stark choice of giving up my marketing job, giving up my two days per week with her, or giving up writing, I knew exactly what I was going to choose. I could only bear to lose one of those things. And so I spent three years freelancing, and I’m so glad I did to be honest - the confidence and time management skills are invaluable. But I’ve taken a permanent contract teaching writing at the university now - I can finally afford to just do writing and teach writing - and it’s time to STOP. There are too many tabs open in my brain. Some of them I can’t or don’t want to close - who is picking the kid up from nursery today and when was my proposal for next year’s courses meant to be in and have we got a present for the party this weekend and when does that book need blurbing by again and the meeting is on Tuesday remember. That’s fine. But where I stand right now, the juggle is just CONSTANT. There’s an appointment every day, a reason to stop writing and do something else every couple of hours. And the nature of the work I’ve been doing is that I just always have to be ON. And I wanted to, just occasionally, turn OFF.
There are things I want to do with the space and time and bandwidth, and I will be honest with you - they are not grand things. Right now, I really want to reshelve my books. They are all jumbled and higgledy piggledy and there’s no system and I don’t know what I have. This is the kind of task that is actually great for the creative mind. The exercise of taking every book I own, of dusting it, looking at the cover, thinking about whether I’ve read it or not, and why, or why not, of making connections, of doing an inventory of my literary tastes - that sounds pretty BLOODY useful, doesn’t it? To a writer currently doing some big thinking about genre (which I am)? But I haven’t done it - I haven’t given myself permission. Too busy always hustling, always with a client or a deadline. But with more structure, with weekends and evenings to myself, I can reintroduce a bit of… pottering time. Precious precious pottering time! How am I meant to think about my own work when I am always thinking about the GCSE curriculum? I need to go on more WALKS.
I have to wonder if part of why I haven’t stepped back earlier is a simple one - that I don’t trust myself enough. I think that there’s a part of me, deep down, that believes that I’m lazy, and that given the chance, I will slack off work and go and hang around a pub drinking Diet Coke and flirting with the bar staff. So I fill my days up right to the top to convince myself I’m being productive. But what if I CAN trust myself? What if I need more time to read, to wander the canal paths, hell, just to answer my emails in an unhurried way? What if I just work my hours, write my pages and live my life? What if I don’t always have to be grasping at more?
It can be very hard to fully commit to one thing, not just because life is busy and we need to pay the rent (although those things are also true). There’s sometimes a hesitancy that comes with wanting something so badly. What if I make this my main thing and then it doesn’t work? What if I fuck it up and I don’t have anything to fall back on? These fears can be paralysing. There have certainly been times when they’ve stopped me doing any writing at all, or had me doing ridiculous things like opening a small web design company instead of working on a novel. Because I don’t care about web design, so it doesn’t really matter if I fail at that. But you know what? I’d rather fail at something that I really love. So from now on, that’s all that I’ll try to do.