When I dream of summer, the weather is always perfect - clear sky mornings that evolve into sun drenched days which melt into late evenings where it’s still light and the skies are vivid, pink and orange. I think about myself at parties, festivals, and parks, in good company - the best. Even the idea of wandering around London becomes idealised, as the city never feels more like itself or more full of possibility than in the summer months. Crucially, in this fantasy, I have no problems or worries. If I do, they are minor and they don’t consume my thoughts. I am wildly present! I do not have a laborious list of tasks that I am struggling to accomplish, I do not have bad moods that linger, things don’t change, stress feels far away and my crises, if I have any, are not existential - they are wistful. It is okay to be sentimental in the Summer, but in a romantic way, of course. You may think of an old friend or lover, and you smile as you think of them fondly. You do not wallow or feel lonely or resentful. New lovers stumble into your life serendipitously with ease. I am healthy, energised, at my best.
I am affronted and disappointed to report this has not been the case. The fantasy itself is not the problem, it’s more that when it inevitably fails to live up to my reality that we encounter the issue. When I feel like I have been cheated out of something. It is embarrassing to admit this. I understand it is naive, an old habit that dies hard, like the expectation of moving to the bright lights and big city that is almost immediately squashed when you arrive and acclimatize to the grit, the graft, how hard you have to be sometimes. This year, I had been feeling that way about summer. It wasn’t living up to my wildly fantastical expectations. And then last week, I came down with a virus or infection (I tested negative for COVID but who knows) and was totally wiped out. Along with the physical symptoms, which I struggled with immensely, albeit for only a few days, feeling betrayed by the body which I so often take for granted, my brain was unable to rest. If the devil makes work for an idle mind, then the devil in mine was clocking in overtime. I tend to struggle with my thoughts, which almost always go existential, when I am not well. I presume that this has a lot to do with the illness itself and also to do with the fact that I manage some of my anxious preoccupations with distraction and action. Neither of which were effective or appropriate in the state I found myself in. Maybe the extensive fantasizing is a symptom of a sometimes paralysing self-consciousness that I’ve been navigating lately. Most recently manifesting in a fear that I am somehow not doing Summer “right”, something that was exacerbated and/or illuminated by a week of illness. Why have I not planned a trip? Is it too late? Should I go alone or ask someone to come with me - everyone’s already been away so maybe a solo trip. Is that what I need? Should I be trying to do more fun things in London? It feels like time is running out! I have spent so much money already but should I just say fuck it and enjoy my life before we retire for the winter? Externalising in this way feels horrible but clarifying too, to see the neuroticism outside of myself. This kind of thinking is also present when it comes to my job, my creative practice(s), my romantic life - I could go on. There has been a quiet sense of something isn’t right; but what? Everything? Nothing but my mindset? Some of this is perhaps down to my age and where I am in life, at a crossroads of sorts as I am firmly settling into my thirties and not on a set path - still thinking and pondering what I want my life to look like in the years to come. This year has also been confronting for me, with many challenges personally and professionally, which has sometimes made grounding difficult, and perspective difficult to access. I have spent a lot of energy into practicing consistency this year (with exercise, with writing and my radio show), but the process of doing so hasn’t always been straight forward. This has made it difficult for me to gauge where I’m at. I am too busy in a hurricane of keeping going - often chaotically - to have a sense of the internal rhythm that comes with regular routine and steady progress. Still, a lesson has been that you don’t have to give up just because the circumstances aren’t perfect.
With all of that being said, I suspect a lot of my inner angst and turmoil is due to the fact that when I took the improv course earlier this year, I had a moment of reckoning. That trying to climb or succeed in the corporate world as an assistant was a losing game for me. I was/have been driving myself crazy doing so. If I was barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, it was the one that hoped a job as an assistant would fulfill all of my ambitions - ones so big they brought me to London in the first place almost 9 years ago. I didn’t quite know how I got there. I guess post lockdown and getting the job at Netflix had offered me a vision of how life could be, one I’d never before considered. I found myself overly romanticizing the safety and stability of the corporate media job. It felt safe and ‘easier’- but was it working? Was it right for me?When I felt called to take the class, I couldn’t quite tell you why, I just had an impulse and I followed it. It cracked something open in me that lit me up but also frightened me. Now what? And so, I began on what I understand as a hero’s journey, the concept in mythology that I came to know about through the work of Joseph Campbell.
The diagram above outlines the hero’s journey, where ‘a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.’ The call to adventure was taking the class, and I think I am firmly in the challenges and temptations chapter of this journey. This framework has been hugely helpful to me. If you take things too literally, you could discard the desire to take a class as simply a random hobby, and pay it little mind beyond that, despite what it may stir deep within you. These past few months, challenges and temptations have been plentiful; the challenge of keeping going creatively (despite the aforementioned difficulties), the temptation to ‘give it up’ (so rare for me to think about but definitely present recently), the challenge of pushing myself to try new things (in my case, trying TikTok & standup), the temptation to avoid doing what I need to do (give into my fear of being seen). Without this symbolic framing, the literal (which I guess here is easily interchangeable with corporate) tactic would say: stop, it’s not working. Instead, the perspective that this mythological template provides is illuminating, reframing these struggles as an unavoidable part of the process. This changes the texture of how I experience it all. I’m struck by the frequent mention of mentor(s) and helpers, who have absolutely appeared and presented themselves to me in recent months and I am so deeply grateful for. As someone who used to struggle asking for or letting myself have help, this is still hugely significant to me. I’m equally floored by my inability to see that something is holding me back right now (I’m supposed to text a few people asking for some advice). Literally, as I wrote this, I realised that it may well be a challenge that’s a final stepping stone to the next chapter. And to top it all off, if I’m headed for a death & rebirth, a revelation, is it any wonder I feel self conscious? Unsure? Uncertain? Suddenly those feelings, which I might have self-diagnosed as neurotic or low self esteem, land a little differently. It helps, it’s helping, to consider the predicaments I find myself in (emotionally or otherwise) with more compassion.
then the voice in my head said
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE
OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT
WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
Frank Bidart
I will send the text I need to send. I will push myself to keep putting my essence out there, the line that has stuck with me like a guiding light since Laura de Barra said it to me during our conversation earlier this year. (See: a mentor!) I look forward to revisiting Summer next year, to see how I experience it then, as I suspect by the time it rolls around, I may not be so preoccupied with the anxious questions, as I fear they are more a distraction from the real task at hand. Thank you for reading and supporting me as I try and figure it out. I hope that when you feel a call to adventure, whatever that means to you, you are brave enough to answer it.
Which reminds me, the first time I did a solo theatre show (in October 2018) - it started in a similar way. An idea, a call, an impulse, that didn’t ‘make sense’….and yet. I didn’t know what I was doing, and ‘acting’ wasn’t working. I felt stuck and lost. I knew I had something to offer. I knew I had something to say. Then I had an idea to be creative and do my own thing and I followed it, pure energy and no practicality. I called it Opportunity Knocks, inspired by one of my favourite songs at the time, by rapper Noname, her lyric ‘Opportunity knockin’, it’s finally time to answer’ stirred something in me. It is only now, as I write this, that I realise that was the beginning of another hero’s journey, one which transformed me so fully. I am an entirely different person to who I was then, for the better, but something, my essence perhaps, remains the same.
A reminder: when I connect to that, when I follow it, I’ll always find my way.
x❤️❤️❤️x