I want to kick off this article with an apology to my subscribers. I have not been publishing as often as I had planned. I recently took an unexpected 4 week hiatus. It wasn’t for any sinister reason (when you have had cancer, you always need to lead with that).

To make a short story long……

On the 8th September I went into town to be part of one of the first round judging panels for the UK Effies (for those not in Advertising who may not be familiar with our many and varied awards ceremonies, the Effies are dedicated to celebrating advertising campaigns that demonstrate strong effectiveness - which is very much hinted at in the name). I chose to do an in-person judging panel, because I enjoy them (online options are available). Being a freelancer, I don’t get many opportunities to sit in a room with lots of smart people discussing the work other smart people have done. I love remote working, but sometimes I crave real world interactions. The Effies judging is when I traditionally indulge.

Anyway, I caught a cold. Probably on the Northern Line (that would be very on brand for the Northern line). A very bog standard, not particularly vicious cold. Unfortunately my immune system didn’t see it that way and I was felled by such extreme fatigue that I could barely function. I now understand why I’m on the immuno-compromised vaccine list. My body has become obnoxiously dramatic. I am still not fully recovered. But I am fighting the fatigue harder. Which is about as sensible as punching a brick wall with your bare hands, but I am bored of feeling incapacitated.

As a result, I have not been in a fit state to keep up with my writing.

Given what I know now, do I regret doing the judging in person, when there was a perfectly good remote option?

No.

Why?

Because regret is based on incomplete information. If I had stayed home, I might have been attacked by the two demon foxes that are systematically destroying my garden. Or choked to death on a pistachio nut. I am partial to a pistachio.

I made the choice I made, and I am at peace with the consequences. Even if they do feel a tad harsh.

Regret clusters around the big decisions

I lived and worked in Sydney for 4.5 years, returning to London in November 2011. I could have stayed in Sydney and become a permanent resident. It was a bit of a coin toss in terms of what choice I would make. In the end it came down to which city would offer me a new job first. London won. Mainly because of a prang I had on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which resulted in my needing to reschedule an interview on the Sydney side of the job race. That delay handed London the win. Some might call it fate, my car insurer would have called it a relief to be rid of me.

This decision landed me back in my home town in time to see it at its absolute glorious best for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. What a magical time. I’ve never seen so many Londoners smiling spontaneously in public.

Still, sometimes I’m asked if I regret my decision to return. A simple question with a complicated answer.

Several of my Aussie friends were betting that I would be a boomerang Pom. Which is ridiculous, because I’m technically French.

Boomerang Pom is a term used to describe Brits working in Australia, who go back to the UK, realise it was a horrible decision and within a year or two return to the magical land of Aus.

I haven’t set foot in Australia since I’ve moved back here. I have so many people I miss there, who will always have specks of my heart (can’t go giving it all away, I still need it). The harsh reality is that I am exceedingly unlikely to ever make it back. I’m really glad I didn’t know that when I was packing up my life and leaving for London. It is easier to grieve a place in stages, than all at once.

Conspicuously big decisions are where we focus when we want to torture ourselves with regret. Regret is an active choice, we can opt out from indulging in it, if we have the strength.

Overall, I would say I do not regret my decision, but I do miss Australia. But it is complicated, and what makes it complicated is linked to the thing I get asked most about, in terms of regret.

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Regret feeds on fantasy.

My first foray with cancer, the solution was surgical. No chemo, no radiotherapy, lots of scalpels (I’m assuming, I was asleep). I had a hysterectomy. Following the pathologist’s report, I had some interesting conversations with my gynecologists and oncologists.

Essentially, my womb was so deeply riddled with cancer that there was a small chance that some had escaped the womb. In an abundance of caution they were suggesting I have follow up surgery + brachytherapy + radiotherapy.

I chose not to do them.

I was diagnosed with recurrent and advanced endometrial cancer in 2022. An incurable diagnosis. I got to have the oxymoron that is palliative chemotherapy.

So do I regret not having the additional treatments, given what I know now?

No.

I had to think about it a lot to realise it. I have no regrets.

If I really wanted to make sure I survived my cancer and I had a time machine, my best option would have been to never move back from Australia. My GPs in Sydney were brilliant. My cancer spread because my London GPs are incompetent. I was complaining of symptoms for over 4 years before they sent me to see a gynecologist (and for those not based in the UK, GPs are the gatekeepers for specialist care, unless you can afford to go private). So if I insist on having regrets, they should focus on the car accident that delayed the Sydney job offer, and gave London the chance to steal the win.

However, if we are going to focus on the decision I made in early 2019 (which a lot of people fixate on), and try to pin the tail on the regret donkey at that point, I still do not regret it.

I would have been left horribly immuno-compromised just as we went into a global pandemic. For all we know, my decision may have extended my lifespan, not diminished it. Regret is fed by our fantasies of an imagined timeline, where we chose differently. We can never really be certain that the choices we made, even if the results sucked, were for the worst. So why torture ourselves?

People say that hindsight is 20/20, but I would argue that it actually wears rose-tinted glasses.

Thank you

Thank you for reading to the end. As is my habit, I would like to give a little finishing gift. I thought you might enjoy this poignant poem by Charlotte Bronte.

This piece won’t be focusing on the active treatment phase of having cancer. There is already ample content about that and the many forms it takes. This article is about living in the space between active treatment and recurrence. The “survival” stage, but adapted for those of us who have been told we can not be cured. That we are living in a reprieve. That it will be coming back.

And I want to focus on this for two reasons

1. it is the phase of life I currently find myself in

2. there is minimal representation of people living with incurable cancer in the media. It is a state that is simply too complicated to be a useful plot point. So, the outcome for cancer patients in TV shows, films, books etc tends to be either cured or dead. As a result, when you are living with incurable cancer, people find it confusing. It is not a state they understand, because it isn’t represented anywhere. This includes other cancer patients. I recently had a cancer survivor ask me how I could be in remission and incurable at the same time. The existence of this state seemed to horrify them. Bit harsh…

And to be clear, I have triple checked with my oncology team, despite the on-going remission, I am still considered incurable. It isn’t an “if” but “when” cancer starts being a problem again. I have been in remission now for just over 4 years. I finished active treatment 3 years and 9 months ago. Because active treatment often continues after remission has been achieved. Another complicated truth that doesn’t make it into simplistic media narratives about cancer, where bells are rung, tears of joy are cried and life goes back to normal.

Side note: one of the best representations I’ve seen of cancer on TV recently was “Dying for Sex”. 8 episodes of a relatable terminal cancer experience. Well, except for the sex bit, but in shock news, cancer patients have different wants and desires, just like healthy people.

Since the media too often use cancer patients as a plot device, existing to be part of the protagonists trauma journey, it is left to us and our loved ones (as is the case with Dying For Sex) to share the truth of our experiences. So this is me, telling you about what it is like to live as an Incurable. With the reminder that my priorities and dreams are my own.

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After the hair grows back

Not all cancer patients lose their hair. But I did, so I had the “cancer look”. I won’t call it cancer chic, because I’ve never been chic. I’ve always had more of a wild woman of the woods vibe going on. In one of my first proper jobs, I had a boss tell me I looked like I’d escaped from Glastonbury. I was not insulted. I think I may have thanked him.

Not all hair grows back curly (a phenomenon called Chemo Curls, cos as a species we find alliteration satisfying). Mine did, for the first few years. It finally seems to be reverting to something resembling my pre-chemo hair, which was on the wavy side of straight.

After treatment ended, for the first year or two, people took a lot of interest in my hair. I can’t lie, it got a bit weird. At one point I was considering shaving it all off again, but I didn’t want to deal with the pitying looks of strangers on the street . The one upside, that bald people don’t celebrate enough, is just how lovely a shower feels on a bald head. It simply isn’t as nice with hair. Still my hair is staying for now, I wouldn’t want to re-traumatise my lovely mum.

The longer it got, the more delighted people were. It was a physical sign of my moving away from the “trying not to die from cancer” phase of life.

Until eventually, the comments stopped. My hair was just hair again.

I look healthy.

The crisis has passed and I survived.

Except, on the inside everything has changed. I may look like the old me, but I don’t think or feel like the old me. And it would be weird if I did.

Kittens

I was at a party recently, at a friend’s house. I was talking about my elderly cat, Louis. He will (hopefully) turn 18 on the 1st September 2026. He is a rescue cat, and we’ve been inseparable for 17.5 years. He has various age-related health issues, and needs daily painkillers, but he is eating, purring and still exploring, so I’m hoping we have more time together, while mentally preparing myself for the fact that it won’t be a whole heap of time.

A friend told me that the silver-lining following the loss of Louis would be that I could get kittens. Being the “speak first, think later” type I replied that with my life expectancy it would be irresponsible for me to get kittens.

Sigh.

Why am I like this?

Just smile and nod, you party-pooper.

I didn’t say it to be miserable, but because I was so genuinely surprised that someone thought I could make that kind of long-term commitment. It disoriented me.

And I share this example, not because it is unusual, but because it is quite common. My sense of time, life, everything, is out of sync with healthy people my age. I’m not bitter or sad about it. It is what it is. I am where I am, and they are where they are. I don’t envy them. The last time I envied someone, they died, but that is a story for another day.

I love hearing about the plans my loved ones are making, with such an innocent confidence in the future. It is as it should be. But I can’t share that perspective. Although, I am working on not blurting out things that make healthy people uncomfortable. Even if not correcting them feels like a lie. Or a jinx. I can’t help thinking that the cancer will return the minute I let my guard down. So, I keep it firmly up.

OK, I think we are just going to have to accept that I will keep saying things that make people uncomfortable. That is just who I am now.

Doorways

When I was young, my father used to yell at me for lurking in doorways. I only lurked because he had a temper, so I’d be checking to see if it was safe to go in. Bit of a vicious circle, truth be told. We were never close, and he died in 2015, so that book is closed.

So, I do find it a touch ironic that my life is now taking place in a metaphorical doorway. I am building my life in the between space. The good news is that due to cancer research developments, this may not be my final doorway. For a few years, I was told it probably was.

Existing in a liminal space is a bit mind bendy. I still have ambitions (to finish editing my blood novel, for one), but time is a major factor (the MA in creative writing I’d been dreaming of doing before my first diagnosis in 2018 - well, I can no longer even fathom doing that). The reason my novel is so hard to edit is that it is a total rewrite I did while brain-addled after I’d finished chemotherapy. And it shows. I’m not being fake humble, I am cleaning up an absolute mess of a book. I wrote it too fast because I could feel death breathing down my neck.

Those of us living with incurable cancer can still have dreams and ambitions. It can feel audacious, but I love being audacious. However, these dreams are often carefully edited and curated, based on the adapted reality of our existence.

This is not us being negative and giving up. Accepting that our deaths are coming sooner than we might have hoped, isn’t being defeatist. Everyone is going to die, but we’re the ones who have been in direct negotiations with death. The only people with an even more intimate relationship with death are those living with a terminal disease and those poor souls living in war zones.

It is why I react badly when people say “none of us knows how long we have” to me, because it is both true and unhelpful. They are living their lives, while I feel like I’ve been tied to the railway tracks to await my fate.

Living well in the “between”

I am still working out how to exist well in this between world. That is the very reason that I started writing my A Life Quixotic series. I’m hoping to work out the secret to living well with an incurable cancer. So far, I have found there are things that have definitely helped me. So here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Accept your limits - cancer and the treatments to kill cancer leave their mark. Fatigue and pain are part of my day to day life. While I am not a fan of these new limitations, you can learn to live well within their parameters. You are not a failure because your body won’t let you live the way you used to do. And true friends will understand when you have to cancel, because your body is throwing a strop (you know who you are, and I appreciate you)

• Focus on what you can do - it is so easy to fixate on everything you might feel you have lost, but if you shift your attention to the things you can still do, it is so much better for your mental health. Can I commit to a multi-year creative writing masters? No. Can I plug away at the edits and make my book as good as I am capable of? Yes.

• Prioritise your health - cancer can leave you feeling like your body has betrayed you, but revenge isn’t an option. I am a member of a gym that I can’t really afford, but I need access to a swimming pool that is close by (otherwise getting there can be a challenge on my bad pain days as I don’t have a car). Financially, it may be a crazy decision, but as someone who needs to invest in her health, it is by far the best option available to me. I also have a monthly remedial massage, that my lovely uncle pays for, because I wasn’t getting an meaningful help via the NHS (a charity was helping me, but they closed down due to lack of funding). The alternative, where I don’t have the remedial massage and regular swims, would be for me to risk becoming housebound. And no, I am not being dramatic. I have had to go the gym on crutches before, but when I get into the water of that pool, the pain lifts and I am able stretch and move. It is a magical thing.

• Have fun - some people react to living in the inbetween by trying to control everything. But we don’t have control. Don’t become obsessive about what you eat and what you do. It can lead to very disordered behaviours and anxiety. So while you need to priortise your health, don’t obsess over it. Have fun. Have drinks with friends, eat ice cream on a hot day, enjoy the little treats that life has to offer. There are some truly awful people out there who will sell you the secret to curing cancer. Don’t trust them. Look after yourself, but don’t treat cancer as a moral failing on your part and don’t give money to people who are selling false hope.

• Be hopeful - and by this I mean real, true hope. We can still hope for things, even if we might not get them. I’ve admitted that I curate my dreams, but I haven’t pruned them back to the point that there is no space for hope. Not only do I intend to fully edit my first novel, I still have hope that I will have the time to write my second novel too (not a sequel, but a story that has been patiently waiting for me to get to it). Although the sooner I edit book 1, the better the odds of finishing book 2. That’s basic logic. I’ve noticed that my arms are getting stronger from all the swimming, so I’m hoping to develop lovely muscular toned arms (stranger things have happened, even if I do have the physique of a potato). I hope to be around for the rest of Pip’s life (my 9-year old cat) while still having clear wishes in place for her care after my death. You can be both realistic and hopeful. They actually make a rather good combination (for those that missed it, I did an entire article on the subject of hope, that is still available for free on this substack).

I could go on, but this has already turned into a rather chunky piece!

Thank you for reading

To my fellow incurables and to those who love them, thank you for reading to the end. I hope that you have found something relatable or useful in this article. It is why I write them. There is so much more I could say, and that I probably will say in future articles. The challenge of living in a slightly off-kilter dimension to the healthy people in our lives is that our perspectives can differ in disorienting ways. But that is OK. I think we should all embrace being more socially awkward. At least we are still out there, engaging with the world.

As always I like to end with a little thank you gift for reading to the end. Today, it is a picture of a tween fox, one of a pair who keep vandalising my garden. I should be angry but they are just so cute.

All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.

As I am attempting to live a good life within late-stage capitalism, it would be weird not to have an article dedicated to the subject of money troubles. I want to be candid about the challenges that I am facing, but I have felt so much more embarrassed writing this article, than any I have shared before. Which made me all the more determined to complete it, even if it is a week late because I succumbed to the urge to delete earlier drafts.

The reality is that I am in the uncomfortable position of struggling with my finances. I am trying to live a good life while not being able to afford the roof over my head. Heaven forbid it springs a leak, I am in no position to get it fixed. It would join an ever-growing list of things that are falling apart.

That is shameful, right?

Not being able to earn enough money to support yourself is a reason to feel shame, right?

That is what is hammered home to us by our government’s rhetoric and actions, by the media, in the comments sections online (I know that is where nasty people go to spew their venom, but it is hard to not peek every so often), and in the throw away remarks most of us make about other people.

Is it logical to weigh a human’s worth based on whether they have money? No. But shame isn’t logical. It is an emotional reaction to the words and actions of others.

Shame on me for not being able to work full-time anymore. Shame on me for relying on my mum. Shame on me for trying to keep a home I can’t afford anymore. Shame on me for daring to keep my pets, when I now have to scrimp and save simply to pay the vet.

Shame!

Shame!

Shame!

I’m just glad that I never had children. The shame burden would be unbearable. Although I suppose with human dependents, at least you don’t have to worry about vet bills.

When I talk about feeling ashamed because of my financial situation, those who care about me are quick to reassure me that it’s not my fault. Getting cancer once is bad enough, but twice - well, that makes you deserving of grace. I would argue that anyone struggling to keep their head above water in this current climate is deserving of grace, though. And, while it might not be my fault, it is nonetheless my responsibility. And I don’t dodge my responsibilities, even those that feel like they are crushing me.

Now if only I could find that mythic money tree.

The social shutdown

The financial shame spiral is a real thing, feel free to google it (other search engines are available, I’m currently experimenting with a more ethical option called Vivaldi). Research shows that the greater the shame, the worse your future outcomes. This does not bode well for me. But to be honest, the outlook has been pretty grim for a while. A Life Quixotic is my way of regularly reminding myself of all the good things in my life. Something to do instead of staring at the doom-filled spreadsheet I created to track my finances. Much like looking at the sun during an eclipse (or ever really), too much time spent looking at the numbers that describe my life, can cause damage.

For those who like to read research papers and can’t be bothered with search engines, you can find out more here:

• Financial Shame Spirals: How shame intensifies financial hardship

• Shame in Poverty and Social Withdrawal

One of the factors identified, that increases the odds of financial hardship, is the tendency to socially withdraw.

I had to put that in bold, because wow did that hit home. Guilty as charged!

I have socially withdrawn because of my financial situation. Not completely, but a lot. But that is the reality when you are surrounded by people who exist on a different financial playing field to you. And not just any field, the one that you used to take for granted too. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and family are extremely generous, but there are only so many times you can accept being treated by a friend, before it starts to impact your mental health, particularly if you are losing hope of ever being able to reciprocate. Or maybe that is just me. I’ve always been fiercely independent.

It isn’t just the shame that can fuel the social withdrawal, it can also be driven by the mathematical calculations you have to make every time you agree to do anything. The fear of split bills or unexpected costs that could derail your financial stability for the rest of the month. We’re back to my infamous spreadsheet, that tracks every expense, down to the penny.

To anyone who is financially out-of-tune with the people in their life, because of a role redundancy, illness or some other life-altering situation - it is important to fight the urge to socially withdraw. Invite your friends to hang out on your new financial playing field. They might enjoy the novelty of free/low cost activities. If they are true friends they will be open to swapping a big day out for a walk in your local park (when times are really tight, even the cost of public transport can be out of reach), or swapping a fancy dinner for a simple meal at your house, or their house (although given travel costs in London, if you are a decent veggie cook, it can be cheaper to host).

Loss and Privilege

It is OK to grieve the life you thought you were going to have. It is a life you were working hard to build, and we are sold the myth that hard work is all it takes to be successful, so when that rug is well and truly pulled, it can feel like you have failed. The loss of the future you imagined, can be very disorienting. It is important to recognise that loss, while also acknowledging the privilege that remains to you.

What do I mean by privilege in this context?

Well in my specific case I can list my financial privileges as follows:

• I used to have a job that paid well, so I was able to get a mortgage on a house that has since increased in value. While selling up and trying to find a mortgage-free alternative would mean a major downgrade locally (think studio or shabby one-bed flat), or a move out of my expensive home town (London), at least those are options open to me. And I could make a little money, selling off my stuff when downsizing. Which will mean less stuff for people to deal with after I die. Silver-linings, I can always find them!

• I have a mum who is in a position to help me out, when I can’t pay my bills. And she does it without making me feel shit about it. And that is a huge privilege. I would be homeless by now, if it were not for her. Not everyone has parents who are willing or who can afford to help. I do feel shame but also relief to be in this position.

• I have generous friends who offer to treat me to some of the nice things I used to enjoy. Even if I am getting worse (not better) at accepting their kindness. Why am I like this?

• When I do work, I earn a decent amount per hour, so even though I struggle to work full-time, due to pain and fatigue, if I could just crack the code of the current job market, there is still hope that I could regain my financial independence. Although ageism and ableism within the advertising industry do mean that my window for making it work is narrowing.

• I own the devices I need to do my job, so that is covered. Although my mobile phone is old and starting to be a little erratic. I’m blaming the heat and hoping it hangs in there. Please send it positive vibes!

• I have maintained a relatively good credit score, mainly because of my mum’s support. If they could see the truth behind the numbers, my score would plummet. I hope the bots or people who calculate these things aren’t on substack.

• I have not had to go without food. There has been the eating of out-of-date tinned food, like baked beans, but waste not want not, there’s protein in them there beans. Plus, it clearly did not kill me. Very much still here and as annoying as ever.

And these are just some of the privileges I can think of, while sitting at my desk, in front of a fan, during a heatwave, typing on a laptop, with a large second screen that helps my short-sighted eyes better do my job.

My Quixotic life may not include a lottery win (I can’t afford the tickets right now), and I have come to terms with the fact that my financial challenges can’t simply be wished away. You can’t positive think your way out of debt, bills and taxes. Just like you can’t positive think cancer away. The strain of my financial worries is particularly bad right now, but even writing this warts and all account has helped. Maybe I just needed to check my privilege.

Thank you for reading to the end

So what treat do I have in store for you today? Well, I’m going for a bit of a throwback vibe. Since I’ve mentioned my mum several times in this piece, enjoy a photo of me and my mum at the Olympic Stadium, back in August 2012. I have such lovely memories of that summer. One my favourite moments was booing George Osborne at the Paralympics. Happy days!

_{All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.}

I’ll start at the bottom end of the “life is not a competition” pyramid…

The Trauma Olympics

In 2022, when I was either having chemo, recovering from chemo, taking a break to have surgery, recovering from surgery, restarting chemo, recovering from chemo etc, friends and relatives would often visit me, bringing kindness, conversation and gifts. I’d ask them how they were and they’d gloss over any struggles they were facing, embarrassed in the face of my bald headed, pale, appetite-less, sofa-bound fragility.

“It isn’t a competition” I’d say, on repeat. “I want to hear how you really are. Vent away.” And eventually they would. I tend to wear people down. And it was lovely to have those real conversations. When you are struggling with your own reality, it can be alienating to only get the highlights reel of the people in your life. The warts and all version is much more relatable and, let’s be honest, interesting.

To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.

Criss Jami

The “I can’t complain, other people have it worse” mentality that so many of us have ingrained in us isn’t healthy. It implies that only one person is allowed to complain at any given time and only after they’ve jumped through hoops proving that their life is worse than anyone else’s. On the entire planet. Good luck with that!

Even during chemo I wouldn’t have won that competition. What about the poor souls with cancer in war zones who can’t access decent healthcare, struggle to find food and have watched their entire family die? How dare I complain about anything, while they exist?

I had a PICC line sticking out of my arm, no nose hairs ( you don’t realise how useful nose hairs are until they are gone), constant pain, and death breathing down my neck, and I still wouldn’t have made the top 3% of people who are having a terrible time. Which is a sad indictment on the state of the world.

You are never going to win the Trauma Olympics and why on earth would you want to?

Share your worries, have a rant about something that is causing you stress, let it out. You don’t have to validate it. Call it a “first world problem” if you insist, but I’ve seen that phrasing misused far too often. A first world problem is stopping at a cafe and finding out they only do filter coffee when you are craving some frothy, sweet monstrosity. It isn’t being made redundant and having genuine worries about how you are going to support yourself and your family in the future. It isn’t being stuck in a toxic workplace that is impacting your mental health. It isn’t anything genuinely anxiety inducing.

Sucking up your fears and letting them fester isn’t going to solve the problems caused by war, global hunger or the climate emergency.

Show Off

On the other end of the spectrum we are also told not to blow our own trumpets (why would I have a trumpet and not blow it? Surely that is the very point of having a trumpet in the first place?).

As someone who is constantly plagued by the fraud police, I find it hard to share my achievements outside of my inner circle. If you’ve heard me say I’m really good at something, congratulations, you are a trusted friend. It isn’t because I’m particularly humble, I just find having a spotlight on me very uncomfortable. If you really want to watch me squirm, compliment me. I even bought a copy of “F*ck being humble” by Stefanie Sword-Williams (after an inspiring talk she did at MAD//Fest last year) but now I’m dithering about reading it. Because of course I am.

So I am being a hypocrite, telling you to show off, but if you give it a try, so will I. Because it is brilliant to talk about the things you are genuinely proud of.

You might be thinking to yourself, hang on, isn’t social media just a constant stream of humble-brags at this point (LinkedIn, I’m looking at you).

The answer to that is YES. It is full of people telling you what success looks like and how they are smashing it. A feed full of that is guaranteed to make you feel shit about yourself (which is great because people who feel shit about themselves will often throw money at the problem).

F*ck that!

You don’t have to design your life to have the same highlights everyone else does. What a boring film that would make. Which is not the point, but also, my LinkedIn feed is getting very “meh” thanks to whatever they’d done with the algorithm. The original voices I follow are getting buried. I hate that!

Anyway I digress.

My point is that you get to decide what makes you proud and you get to talk about it. Radically, that could be with real people, face-to-face. I highly recommend enjoying some real world conversations about the things that light you up. But also remember that if you are a heavy social media user, you get to define what success looks likes to you on your own social pages. Shout about what genuinely makes your soul sing? Celebrate it, you glorious weirdo.

Not everyone cares about promotions. Not everyone wants to get married. Not everyone wants kids. Life would be so dull if we were all the same. And it is brilliant if these are the things that bring you joy. I don’t understand people who mock the things that other people love. There is nothing cool about being a killjoy. Now, if you get joy from kicking puppies, I will take issue with you. But assuming that your joy isn’t coming at the expense of another living being, I am happy for you.

"Mocking someone else to make us seem deep or intelligent only proves the exact opposite."

Kasie West

If you managed to get tickets to see BTS, or beat your personal best in the gym, or read 100 books in one year, or you’re hydrangeas are thriving, or you’ve manged to keep your sourdough mother alive for more than 6-months, or did anything that feels like an achievement, I AM SO HAPPY FOR YOU!!!!!!

You get to decide what feels like success to you. Trumpet away!

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The Fear of Being Left Behind

Which all connects to this beast, the lesser talked about cousin of FOMO. Not sure why FOBLB has never caught on, given how it rolls off the tongue 😬

If we are all striving to hit the same milestones, life inevitably starts to feel like a race. We start comparing where we are, based on a to-do-list we didn’t create and it breeds resentment and anxiety. There are enough real things to be anxious about. Make your own list and be kind with the deadlines. Don’t be your own bad client.

Don’t forget to review your life list regularly. I tend to do a review every 31st December, mainly because I hate going out on New Year’s Eve, and prefer to stay home to soothe Louis, given the ginger beast’s fear of fireworks.

The brilliant thing is that if we have different ambitions, and embrace different things, life becomes a lot less like a competition. Even within the same industries.

I am 51 years old (apparently I shouldn’t talk about my age, because of ageism, but we are rule-breakers here at A Life Quixotic) and I aspire to be a published novelist. I just spent 3 days offline, working on my editing strategy. I have a huge draft that needs wrangling into shape, and I keep getting lost in the process,. I decided to switch off and focus on creating a chapter by chapter detailed editing outline (rock & roll). I got a lot done, but not as much as I’d hoped (sadly Sunday was written off by my wonky body being wonky).

The day after my editing long-weekend, I had messages from two of my writing friends checking to see how it had gone. For context, I’d only told two of my writing friends that I was doing it, and the idea to do it was inspired by them. If I’d told more, I’d have heard from more. Because writing friends are your biggest cheerleaders and allies when you are a writer. You’d think we’d consider each other competition as we have the same ambition (to publish our books) but we don’t. This is despite trying to break into an industry that is notoriously tough. We lift each other up and celebrate each others successes. We write in totally different voices and styles, but we are united by our love of storytelling and an unshakable compulsion to write (I thought I had finally shaken off that compulsion in 2022, but it was only hibernating for a while).

I am friends with many talented, published authors. I am also friends with many talented yet-to-be-published authors. As far as I am concerned, the key difference is time. They all deserve to have their works available in all good bookshops.

Find your passions. Find your tribes. Let go of the need to live you’re life according to some arbitrary timing plan. Surround yourself with people who will celebrate your successes, even if their idea of success looks different. There will be people who won’t understand you, but that is OK. Just don’t let those people define what a good life looks like for you.

It is impossible to find joy and contentment if you are following a rigid life plan that you didn’t choose for yourself.

Thank you for reading to the end

Firstly, I hope you enjoyed the coffee cup photos that I shared throughout this article. Coffee in the Wood is a much loved coffee shop in Collier’s Wood (on the high street) and they are famous for writing messages to their customers (not all the time because then it wouldn’t be special). Their messages made me and the oncology nurses laugh, it became a tradition for me to go there before I went for chemo. To the point that I became superstitious about it. It worked though, I’m still alive.

Now to the ”thank you for reading to the end” photo. I love my cats (I have two) but Pip (the younger three-legged cat) is notoriously hard to photograph. She is a pathological fidget and face puller. So I was thrilled to capture this picture of her this morning (Thursday, 23rd July 2026 - a date for the history books). It is a pretty perfect Pip portrait. Butter would not melt.

I have many happy memories from my childhood. In one, I’m lying on grass that is prickling my skin through my school uniform (not unpleasantly). The weather is warm, there is a breeze, my friends are there and we are chatting. A burble of conversation, light and effervescent. My arm is over my face and I’m squinting up at the sky, watching the clouds float by.

I don’t know how long we lay like that, probably not long, because we were at school, where time is policed by the ringing of bells. But in that moment we were resting, together and it was peaceful. It felt like we were drifting.

To this day, I’m chasing the sense of peace that permeates that memory. I’ve found it in many countries, with different people, as well as alone. That sense of being allowed to simply exist in a moment. That that is enough. My regret is that it tends to be so fleeting. That the busy-ness and need to do something, inevitably floods back in.

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"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

John Lubbock

I wish I could but..

There is something very humbling about existing in a body that randomly stops cooperating. I’m not saying this to sound dramatic, but until your body is subject to chronic pain and fatigue, you really can’t understand how limiting it is. Just this Saturday, I was due to go to my mum’s for lunch with my uncle, aunt and cousin. I was really looking forward to it. These are some of my favourite people. I had to cancel because my body decided it was going to have a bad day. The journey to the bus stop was beyond me, let alone the bus journey and walk on the other side.

I don’t cancel things because I want to. I cancel because some days the struggle to negotiate the world in my body defeats me. And it is humbling. The good days tease me with the belief that I can get back to my old self. The bad days mock me, and leave me feeling lazy.

And laziness is bad.

Lazy people are bad.

We live in a society that treats laziness like one of the worst character traits. An excuse to treat fellow humans like dirt

• You’re poor because you’re lazy

• You’re fat because you’re lazy

• Disabled people are lazy and don’t contribute to society

• Certain ethnic minorities are lazy

• Certain cultures and countries are lazy

• Artists are privileged and lazy

The list goes on.

It breaks my heart every time I read an article that reinforces these perspectives. Or even worse, look at the comments section 😱. Some people froth at the mouth at the idea that we aren’t all working ourselves to the bone both at work and in the gym. And it is both. Those of us foolishly working ourselves to the bone at a desk, without the added torture of regular gym sessions are going to be branded lazy for our flabby physiques.

These are all symptoms of humanity being reduced to cogs in a machine. You have to work and make money, or you are a drain. You also have to be fit and healthy, or you are a drain. The worse thing you can be is someone who relies on the collective resources of society.

The lack of empathy and ugliness that it exposes is often fueled by our media. If you’re not striving you’re shirking.

Such a stupid, ignorant binary.

And the only people it benefits to perpetuate that binary, are those profiting from the labour of the so-called “strivers”.

I used to be a striver. I sacrificed most of my 20s to workaholism and that is time (in a healthy body) that I’m never getting back. I was so naively conscientious. I’d love to go back in time and give myself a gentle shake. “Rest more, work less” I would have told myself. Although I probably wouldn’t have listened. I’ve always had a stubborn streak.

Boredom as a tool for creativity

The problem is that if we never stop, and we never rest, we leave ourselves with no time with our own thoughts. If we are constantly reacting and doing, how can we hope to come up with creative solutions?

“Boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering, which helps our brains create those new connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in combating global warming.”
Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

The every day worker bee human is being told they risk being replaced with AI. Now is the time to foster the creativity and critical thinking that is so unique to our species. That can’t be originated by a machine. They can only replicate.

We need to give people the space to come up with solutions to the relentless problems that we face. We need to stop rushing around, breaking things and start fixing things instead.

We need to be rested. We need to be comfortable without constant stimulation. We need to stop judging others on their “output”, particularly when that output isn’t actually benefiting anyone beyond a rich minority.

Rest is radical and necessary

The more we rest, the less we actually need.

The more we rest, the less random crap we produce.

The more we rest, the more we can think about how we could actually improve the world for our communities.

The more rested we are, the better placed we are to stand up for what we actually believe in.

The more we rest, the more we have time to work out what our beliefs are in the first place.

If you keep us busy enough, it is so much easier to tell us what to do and what to think. We need to reclaim a healthy relationship with rest and embrace the increased ability to think critically that comes with it.

"Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

A.A. Milne

I am forced to rest more than I would like. If I push myself too hard, I hit a wall. A wall it is impossible to negotiate. But that restriction in my life is making me more creative. It is also making me more mindful about where I spend my energy.

Somethings I have given up completely. It has been 4 years since I shut down my theatre blog, the invitations to review fringe shows really should have stopped coming by now. Seriously, update your mailing lists, people!

Somethings I have added. Swimming, how my aching joints appreciate you!

Somethings I have had to limit. Socialising, which I can’t afford to do as much energetically or financially these days. The number of hours I can do paid work in a given week.

Do I feel guilty that I’m not doing more?

Of course I do.

Despite knowing that I shouldn’t.

But I have been so effectively brainwashed into believing that doing more makes me virtuous. It can be hard to feel worthy when you are forced to slow down. I’m working on letting that shame go.

How to bring more rest into your life

Not everyone has a life-limiting illness forcing them to slow down. Some of you have to work at it, you poor souls (just in case this flies over your head, this is an attempt at cancer humour).

Here are some ideas on how you can bring more rest into your life, and make more room for greater creative and critical thinking.

• Avoid scheduling every moment of your day - if you have to, schedule a thirty minute SIS* meeting in your work diary (*Staring Into Space)

• Have specific windows of time when people know you check and respond to emails - don’t make yourself available 24/7

• Disconnect for an hour - no screens of any flavour. Maybe have a nice walk in nature instead.

• Go old school - put on music that you love and read a book, or draw, or knit, or play with your dog.

• Sit in a park or garden, and watch the bees and butterflies.

• Establish clear boundaries at work - no responding to after-hours emails or agreeing to regular weekend working.

• When you are on holiday, be on holiday. I don’t want to sound like an ad for a travel company, but unless lives are at stake, you should be totally unavailable during your holiday time. Trust me, the same company that is guilting you into joining meetings while on holiday, will not hesitate to make you redundant if it is more profitable to do so.

• Do physical activities you enjoy. Resting doesn’t =doing nothing. For many of us, taking time to be in our bodies can be reviving.

I love to swim. I use the time in the pool to exercise but also (if it is not too busy) to drift. I love to float, my ears in the water so sounds are distant and distorted. I stare up. There are windows in the roof. I can see the clouds floating overhead. I often feel like I am looking at a different sky. One that isn’t above a pool in a gym in South West London. My mind will drift and wonder which sky I’m seeing. On Monday, it was a slither of sky above the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. I am not sure where I will travel when I swim tonight.

Checking in with yourself and noticing how different activities make you feel, will really help you work out what rest looks likes for you. It could be pure play idleness or doing things that allow your mind to wander. Feel free to share what works for you in the comments. We need to reclaim rest, and break the dangerous productivity cycle that we are trapped in.

A thank you for reading to the end

This is a post I shared on Threads, but I know most of you don’t follow me there. It made me laugh, so I’m sharing here as my thank you. The thread post

The look on his face a good thirty minutes after the incident in question. Still absolutely fuming.

^{All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.}

Nothing captures this more clearly than the differing perspectives regarding whether access to clean, drinkable water is a human right or not. I find it hard to understand the people who wholeheartedly believe that it is not. That existence is earned and not a fundamental human right. That if we don’t risk starvation and thirst we’d stop being productive. That if we are not productive, we deserve death. Which is the logical conclusion for those who hold this position. Although most would deny it and accuse me of being dramatic. All I will say to them is, where is the hole in my logic? If your own beliefs take you down a path to somewhere ugly, maybe it is the beliefs you need to review.

I’m not here to scream into the void about the politics of worth, not specifically anyway. Politics informs everything because it defines the landscape we are trying to live well within. So to exclude it wouldn’t make sense.

But I also want to understand the psychological impact of linking self-worth to external factors. Factors which are often beyond our control. Particularly when you consider that those factors are driven by the fashions of our times, and are not an integral part of what makes us intrinsically worthy. There were times when my character traits would have resulted in my being burned as a witch. Now, they make me good at my job,a semi-decent writer and an absolute hoot at parties. Seriously, I’m a delight.

You are not what you own, what you owe or what you earn

We are currently living in times that link a human’s worth with their ability to horde money. I have seen some truly stomach curdling, arse kissing, social media tepid-takes about Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire.

Is it reassuring that spell check thinks the word “trillionaire” should not exist?

Same, spell-check, same.

I don’t look at Elon Musk and see a human I want to emulate. He is the opposite of what I would consider a “high value” human, to borrow the hideous language of his white supremacist, misogynist fans. But do I think that Elon Musk has a right to be treated with dignity? Well yes, because we all have that right. The minute we start believing that “other” people or groups are due less dignity than us, that is when the rot sets in.

But I’ve digressed, again. The fact is that having a bank account full of money, or owning a lot of valuable stocks and shares, or owning many expensive properties, these are not the things that define your self-worth. Particularly if your lust for money and power comes at the expense of the lives of others. The minute you outsource your self-worth and link it to the things you have, you are in trouble.

“In a society that judges self-worth on productivity, it’s no wonder we fall prey to the misconception that the more we do, the more we’re worth”

Ellen Stern, The Indispensable Woman

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In their paper entitled “It’s All About Money (For Some): Consequences of Financially Contingent Self-Worth” (revised Dec 2016) Park, Ward and Naragon-Gainey share their findings from four studies they conducted into the impact of having financial CSW (Contingent Self-Worth). They conclude as follows:

Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.

Benjamin Franklin

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

Arthur Schopenhauer

As suggested by these quotes, the pursuit of money may paradoxically increase the desire to attain even greater levels of financial success. Building upon previous work on the dark side of the American Dream (Dittmar et al., 2014; Kasser, 2002; Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996), the current studies suggest that the quest for money and wealth may sometimes be harmful for those who stake their self-worth on being financially successful. Indeed, the more people based their self-worth on financial success, the more they compared their financial status with others, experienced financial hassles, stress, and anxiety, and felt less autonomy—both chronically and in response to financial threats. These individuals also showed self-protective responses—in the form of disengagement from their financial problems—in the face of financial threats.

If you are interested in reading the full article you can find it here

The more we think about our self-worth being connected to what we either produce or own, the less it makes sense.

Does a child only achieve their self-worth potential once they’ve grown up to take a well-paid job in banking?

Is their potential where their self-worth lies?

At what age do we see people as no longer having potential?

What about retired people, those resting after a life that may or may not have been full of producing and owning things?

Does their self-worth dip on the day they leave the workforce, or is it OK if they have accumulated enough wealth?

Does that mean they still have worth, because they have money to put back into the system?

The minute we link self-worth to an external factor like earning capacity, it unravels.

So what is self-worth?

Self-worth is the internal sense of being good enough and worthy of love and belonging from others. Self-worth is often confused with self-esteem, which relies on external factors such as successes and achievements to define worth and can often be inconsistent leading to someone struggling with feeling worthy.

University of North Carolina Wilmington

Why is having a strong sense of intrinsic self-worth so important?

Because it isn’t impacted by things like the “cost of living” crisis. If you are a regular reader you will know how much I hate that language. The cost of living - you might as well push those who are financially struggling off a cliff and be done with it. It promotes suicidal ideation, particularly in men who have been fed the lie that they are only worthy if they can provide.

If you have a strong sense of your own self-worth, you will rest when you need to, not just when you’ve earned it. You will stand up for yourself and others, when you are being exploited. You will believe you are worthy of existing, and that that worthiness isn’t defined by other people.

It isn’t easy

I have struggled with my self-worth because of the impact of my cancer treatment. I am not able to be as productive as I used to be. I probably never will be. I am no longer financially independent. I can’t lie, I miss those days. But I am glad that I am learning (and it is a work in progress) to decouple my self-worth from these things.

Do I hate being a financial burden on others? Yes. It is challenging to go from independent to dependent.

Do I recognise that they love me and want to help me? Also, yes. And I am so lucky to have this support in my life. But I am still working on trying to find the magical formula to becoming independent again (I feel like I am one eureka moment away).

But while I am a less productive member of society in terms of my ability to make money, my belief in my self-worth should be unchanged. I need it to be unchanged for my mental health.

I’m still a complicated mix of anxious, kind, angry, conformist, rebellious, creative, funny, annoying, sulky, depressive, spontaneous, joy-filled, opinionated, conscientious, petty, friendly, loud, stubborn and shy. I am an active member of my community. I volunteer my time. I help others as much as I can. Which is not as much as I would like. I have to manage my energy as carefully as my finances.

I am also working on projects that will actively help society and my fellow humans. I may not be earning as much, but the work I am doing is so worthwhile. I am proud of it (but because of NDAs I can’t say much more about any of it until it goes live).

So why do I find it so hard to truly believe that I still have self-worth? Why do I have to work at it? As a living being, I am worthy of existence. It is baked in. Why have I been manipulated to believe otherwise?

The Intrinsic Self-Worth Revolution

We are living in times when too many people behave as if humans exist to feed the system, rather than the system existing to support humanity. This upside-down thinking explains so many of the challenges that we face today, as well as the coordinated attacks on our sense of self-worth.

The most radical thing we can do is to decouple our worth from external societal measures. Stop treating ourselves and the people around us like commodities and recognise ourselves as beings with a right to exist. Just as we are.

In fact, we should take it a step further and recognise the importance and intrinsic worth of the natural world around us, before we destroy it all feeding a system we created. The general human “we”, not us personally.

The problem is that we are bombarded with messages and stories that tell us that we have to earn or buy our worth. We are not allowed to simply exist. That doesn’t feed a hungry system. Those who profit off us, do not want a population made up of contented humans. If we are comfortable in our own skin, and we believe in our intrinsic dignity and worth, it is much harder to manipulate us. The more we need to feel worthy, the more compliant we become.

Our crisis of self-worth is having a devastating impact on the world around us and our mental health. And those external forces are not going to get any quieter. In fact, I am afraid it is going to get worse.

How do you bolster your self-worth?

Here are some practical ideas of things you can do to help feed your sense of self-worth. This is not an exhaustive list, and as I have said, this is something I also struggle with, so if there are techniques you use that help, please feel free to share them in the comments. At times like these, we need to work together to lift each other up.

• Ask three friends to tell you three things that they love about you.

• Spend time with a friendly dog.

• Laugh at the goats at your local city farm (this one might be very specific to me)

• Stop following people on social media who make you feel bad about yourself - curate the hell out of your own feeds.

• Identify a way that you can help a fellow human, and do it (this could be by volunteering or simply offering your postman a cold drink during a heatwave, pounce on opportunities for moments of shared humanity).

• Try to buy less stuff and shop more mindfully when you do (don’t get me started on my love of local markets)

• Think of something you loved doing when you were a kid, and do it. Reconnect with what you loved before it all became corrupted by ideas of image and success.

• Make something. A cake, a poem, a drawing, a herb garden… It doesn’t have to be complicated or good. It just has to be made by you, from scratch.

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Thank you for reading to the end

I really appreciate you, my A Life Quixotic readers. A big thank you, in particular, to those of you who have subscribed. It is amazing to feel that my words are connecting with others.

As my regular readers know, I always share a little thank you for reading to the end. This isn’t the best photo, but it captures one of a myriad of moments involving Louis that I cherish. When I was having treatment, he looked after me. Or, as in this picture, he looked over me. He hated leaving my side. I could tell when I was starting to improve, because he stopped being quite so clingy. I will never understand people who say that cats don’t care.

^{All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.}

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

Raymond Williams

I believe that we can learn how to activate hope, so that those who struggle to find hope in difficult situations can access it with greater ease. The worst thing we can do, in difficult times, is to let go of hope. That is when the bad guys win. There are always bad guys.

A not-exhaustive list of bad guys

• Cancer

• Chronic Illness

• An incurable or terminal diagnosis

• A brutal job market

• A toxic work environment

• A broken political system

• A rise in dangerous and divisive populist rhetoric and political figures

• An empty belly and an empty bank account

• Unchecked environmental destruction

• The rising cost of living, and the dangers of calling it the cost of “living”

• A lack of access to mental health support

• A lack of access to any health support

• War

• Terrorism

• The death of empathy

• Living in what feels like the end times (not for the first time for those of us old enough to remember the last time the world was due to end)

• The insatiable greed of the minority who are responsible for many of the aforementioned bad guys.

Hope doesn’t exist despite the bad guys. Hope exists because it is one of the most powerful tools for defeating them. Hope helps us dare to believe that we could create a world without them. I am personally very grateful for the hope of cancer researchers. Keep on keeping on, you fabulous humans.

The Pandora Debate

In the Greek myth, when Pandora opens her jar, all the evils are released into the world, but the lid is put back on before hope can also be lost to us.

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable hoke within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis- holding Zeus who gathers the clouds

Hesiod

I like to thing that we were left with hope so that we could better cope with the evils of the world, and there are many who would back that interpretation. However, there are others who believe that we were left with hope to make us suffer all the more. This is very much the stance of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Zeus did not want man to throw his life away…. to that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am very comfortable sitting in the opposing camp to Nietzsche on this (and other things), but I didn’t want to mislead you by claiming that everyone agrees that in the Pandora myth, the saving of hope was considered a universally positive thing. I can understand the opposing perspective, but I think it misunderstands the nature of hope. In fact, I think it embraces the very defeatism that is the enemy of resilience and our ability to find joy in the world.

What do I mean when I talk about hope?

I don’t believe hope is something independent of us that comes and goes as it pleases. I also don’t believe hope is blind or foolhardy, although some people exploit it in that way, using it interchangeably with the capriciousness of luck. I believe that in the best examples, hope is a combination of pragmatism and optimism.

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In the case of my cats, I think they are starting to realise that if they combine forces, I am much more likely to agree that it is, in fact, time to feed them. The more united they are, the more hopeful they are that the being with opposable thumbs will manifest a meal for them.

Despite knowing that hope is a mix of pragmatism and optimism, I still regularly buy a lotto ticket. Not because I believe I will win (not really a pragmatic financial planning solution). But because if I don’t have a ticket there is no hope that I might win (optimism). When things are feeling really heavy, and the problematic language of the cost of living crisis is whispering dangerous thoughts in my mind, that glimmer of lotto related hope provides a valuable distraction. I can’t always afford to play, so I’m strategic about it. A line or two, often enough to take a little bit of the mental load off. Gosh, put like that it sounds a lot like drug addiction.

This is very much the hope of the hopes and prayers world. Prayer leans towards an external force stepping in to make things better. It makes a strange bedfellow for hope, which in its truest form requires us to take action to make things better. So after yet another mass shooting in the USA, when social media is flooded with “hopes and prayers” - the most hopeful are those who are taking action to tackle the root cause of the massacre. Not those simply tweeting about it. In fact, the language of “hopes and prayers” feels like an aberration of hope. It is the language of those who pity those whose lives have been destroyed by the status quo. Not the language of those looking to change the status quo.

But I digress, and I don’t want American gun lobby piling on my substack (not convinced they are big substack users, possibly too much nuance on this site).

What I am trying to say is that I, like many others, have been guilty of treating hope like something outside myself and beyond my control. What the past 8 years of living with cancer have taught me (it’ll be 8 years in September to be precise), is that you create your own hope. You are responsible for nurturing it and directing it. Which is a powerful thing to realise when you are living at the mercy of things you can’t control (the bad guys).

“Fear is a liar, Hope is a muscle, and Gratitude is a lever”

Renee Crichlow

C.R Snyder’s Theory of Hope

Those who have worked with me in a professional capacity know that I am an old school thinker. I like to use paper and pencil to understand principles or explore my own thinking. Above is a sketch of the Snyder Hope Theory Model. Apologies for the handwriting.

Snyder is a psychologist and in his theory, he defines hope not as a simple emotion, but as a dynamic cognitive and motivational state. I love the work the word “dynamic” is doing in that sentence. His theory is a foundational concept in positive psychology, and, as someone who has had to improvise and change my relationship with hope for the sake of my sanity, I was grateful when I stumbled on to his model. Because it works for me.

Why is it so useful?

For me because

1. it made me focus my hopes on things I stood a chance of changing, leaving the rest to the remit of prayers, luck or the will of the universe (a space my lotto buying habit should probably be relegated to)

2. it helped me to realise that hope isn’t about one easy way, but about exploring different approaches to achieving what we hope for and adapting for obstacles.

3. it also helped me recognise that it is often my own self confidence and will power that derails me. That I need to work on Agency. There is power in knowing how you are sabotaging yourself.

Isn’t this too reductive?

When I first started thinking about hope through this lens, it could feel like I was making hope smaller than it needed to be. But, I am learning that this definition actually makes hope a more powerful and valuable word. The precision is the point (pun unintended). It was getting lost in the more abstract uses to the point that it felt more like a matter of faith than a valuable tool for improving your reality.

If you don’t go to classes, never study and know nothing about a subject but you “hope” for a good exam result, isn’t that simply delusional thinking? You can pray for the intervention of an all-powerful, invisible being. They might save you (although one can’t help thinking that, should they exist, they’d have bigger fish to fry). But you have contributed nothing to help yourself. Outside of turning up for the exam, you have done nothing to give you reason to be hopeful.

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But what about hope and scanxiety?

As someone who lives in a 6-monthly cycle of tests, oncology visits, and results that have the power to shift the axis of my world (again), I go into those appointments hoping for the best. I go there and I hope that I’ll be given another 6-months without having to go back on active treatment. I can’t control the results. The people who tell you that there are ways to guarantee the cancer won’t come back are usually con artists. I don’t buy what they are selling. So how does this fit with the hope model?

Well, my goal is to live as well as I can, for as long as I can, with incurable cancer. If my cancer is playing up again, that doesn’t change my goal. It changes my pathway. The recurrence would be an obstacle. I would speak with my oncology team to define the best ways to address that obstacle. If I have reached the point that the obstacle is insurmountable, my hope is that I am able to shift my mind to living well, instead of living long. I have thought about what that might mean for me, what dying well might look like. Ignoring obstacles doesn’t make them go away, and too many people are uncomfortable talking about death, which isn’t healthy or helpful.

Of course, I’ve already identified my personal weak spot in the hope trilogy - Agency. So that is what I’m working on. Having the will power needed to live well and die well. I swim. I meditate. I spend time with friends and family. I find the joy in the little things. I am building up my armory. I’m learning about happiness, hope, resilience. I’m sharing what I’m learning here. It is how I process things.

So hope can exist even where there seems to be an absence of control. The key is to focus it on the aspects that you can change, and not the ones you can’t. My hope is to live well. My goal is not to defeat death. What a futile ambition that would be.

Thank you for reading to the end

As I have already shared a photo of my cats the thank you for reading to the end is a poem. I was torn between several options, but in the end I couldn’t fight it. When it comes to hope, it has to be Emily Dickinson.

^{All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.}

Thank you so much for subscribing to A Life Quixotic. I hope you are finding my writings about how to live well in challenging times helpful.

When I started writing A Life Quixotic I thought an article landing weekly on a Thursday would be about the right tempo. However, as I’ve started digging into various subject matters (I’m still deep in Hope, if you can believe it), I’ve realised that I have over-extended myself.

Before the cancer recurrence, in my theatre reviewing days, I would see and review multiple shows in a week (my peak was 22 in a single week during the Camden Fringe festival as I was seeing 3+ shows a day). But the reality is that I’m not on top form energy wise, and these articles are turning out to be more brain and time intensive than I anticipated. In a good way! I am loving delving into these topics and I want to do them justice. Maybe it is the Philosophy graduate in me.

I was given good advice about building a following on substack. One of those kernels of wisdom was to show up when you say you will, and on a regular basis to build trust. I value that advice, so I am going to continue to publish on a Thursday, but I’m shifting to a fortnightly frequency. I may share shorter form content in between the articles, but from now on I will publish A Life Quixotic article every other Thursday. Starting next week, with an article (which is possibly going to suffer from too much of a build-up) called “Hope is a Muscle”.

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Some recent niceness

My knee was playing up and my bank balance was bleak so I didn’t go to my much loved local market on Saturday (they aren’t every weekend, so market weekends are precious to me). The lovely folk who run the fruit and veg stall brought me a gift of delicious fresh goodies, straight to my front door. What kindness!

I was at the Age UK Merton Volunteer Week celebration last night (my first time going, despite being a volunteer with them for over 6 years). There was a quiz, and my team won, so I came home with a big box of Ferrero Rocher. Recovering on my sofa after this bout of socialising, I checked my lotto numbers and found out I won £30.

So there have been lovely things happening It isn’t as simple as me being stuck at home missing out on things. That isn’t how I choose to think of my life. Details can be technically accurate but emotionally false.

I have the privilege to be working on a couple of charity clients which is good for my soul. They are both behaviour change campaigns that are being designed to save lives. Working in advertising, you don’t always get the chance to work on campaigns that feel like they are making a truly positive difference in the world. When you get them, it is important to savour them.

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A Big Thank you

To thank you for reading A life Quixotic, I am doing something that is making me feel queasy. I am sharing a chapter from my work in progress novel - The Hope Thief. Specifically the second chapter. It is a comedy. There is magical realism. I suppose I should let the chapter speak for itself without over explaining it.

While I am generally happy to share my short form stories, I've been very shy about sharing extracts from my novel. Only a very close group of writers have read any of this novel before (looking at you The Demon Beaters of Lumb!). My mum hasn’t even read any of it - until now, she is a subscriber.

Mum, this is dedicated to you.

The Hope Thief - Chapter Two

Pooka, Mab and their extended family live on a planet called Earth. The third planet from the sun in a small but perfectly formed solar system on the outer reaches of an otherwise boring universe. At least, they assume it is boring. They’ve never needed to complain about noisy neighbours, but the overwhelming silence is starting to get depressing. Would an invitation to tea from a neighbouring planet be too much to expect? Surely, they were not the only sentient planet out there? That felt statistically improbable, not that they were particularly interested in statistics, it was one of those strange things humans had invented to torture themselves. Maybe the other planetary beings were as tightly tied to their planets as Pooka and her siblings were. In such circumstances, it would be petty to hold it against them. Still, the silence of space was loud, and these creatures enjoyed bearing grudges.

Being the same age as a planet, having watched it change and evolve over billions of years, isn’t as fun as you might think. The build up to the dinosaurs had been tortuously slow, there is only so much fun you can have with primordial ooze. So, planet Earth’s consciousness had had to entertain itself, by developing separate personalities and fragmenting into hundreds of independent identities. An inevitable bi-product of too much time spent talking to itself. None of them could remember who the original personality belonged to, not that it mattered to most of them. Mab has opinions, but that is her way.

None of this is important for now, all you really need to know is that the deal between Mab and Pooka was made in the January of the year 2000 (years as defined by humans who have rounded down in a very, very, very, very big way), and at that time on planet Earth there was a small island nation with a very big ego, the source of much mischief around the world. On this island nation there was a city called London, and in this city, there was a train station called Waterloo. Thousands of humans hustled and bustled their way through this station each day. The trains ran both above the ground and below the ground, whisking industrious people to do essential things in different locations. Humans are addicted to a concept called ‘productivity’.

In the bowels of the station, down a corridor that demands to be ignored, there is a workplace, a home, a bubble of otherness called The Lost Property Office. This is not to be confused with a Lost Property office that deals with anything as mundane as lost things. You’d not go there to find a mislaid umbrella. In fact, you’d struggle to go there at all, it is designed to be unobtrusive. Even those who work in Waterloo station fail to notice its existence on a daily basis. Those who thinking they’ve seen something have an overwhelming urge to sit down and not think about it again. The LPO, as it prefers to be called, is a strictly under the radar type of place, and its location is known only to those who need to know.

One such person, a Mr Chin was not having the best of days. His colleague, Mr Grumble had left him to man the LPO alone for the evening as he’d been lured to the opera by that devious widow Mrs Adjoa Pew. Although if pushed Mr Chin would have admitted that Adjoa was far from devious, in fact he liked her very much, he just liked Grumble so much more and the thought of them spending quality time together made him itch with jealousy. To add insult to injury he’d been left to do the paperwork, which was not his forte. Working with memory paper always felt like too much pressure, every typo and mistake captured for prosperity at one of the Agency’s centralised Brains.

Chin was sighing over a dull but necessary form regarding a recent arrival at the LPO, an umbrella that Agent Zola Grumble, sister of his own dear Mr Grumble, had liberated from an unfortunate Normal. The umbrella made anyone who used it immediately irresistible. Which might sound tempting until you discover just how many bugs, rodents and birds there are near you at any given time. When the desired object of your affection is screaming because they are being attacked by jealous pigeons, the novelty of being quite so attractive quickly wears off.

Agent Zola was adept at tracking down and capturing these Devices. She was legendary in Agency circles, not just in London but globally. Her quick thinking had saved many a Normal’s life, most of them never realising the peril they’d been in, which is how the Agency liked it. Discretion was key. If the broader “Normal” human world were to learn about the existence of these Devices they’d try to harness their power and exploit them. The Agency knew from experience that this would not end well. Much safer to discretely capture and neutralize these devices, which for reasons Mr Chin couldn’t quite fathom, required him to fill out lots of forms. While Zola was on the front-line hunting down Devices, some more dangerous than others, Chin was doing his bit for the future of humanity by filing reports.

The words on the form were blurring so Chin closed his eyes, rubbing them with the palms of his large hands. It was tempting to take a nap, just the shortest most micro of sleeps. But he was alone with the responsibility of the LPO sitting on his broad shoulders, so napping simply would not do. He heard a noise. A wet raspberry type of noise. Not at all the type of noise that belonged in the LPO. Opening his eyes, he was startled to discover a naked human baby boy lying on the desk in front of him.

“Where on earth did you come from?” Chin jumped up from his chair, scanning the room for an explanation. Disturbed the baby scrunched up his face and screamed the piercing scream of the recently born, and none too pleased about it.

“Ouch,” Chin bellowed after bashing his head again a filing cabinet drawer he’d left open behind him. “Please don’t cry.” He quickly learned that negotiating doesn’t work with babies. The more he lumbered around begging in distress, the more piercing the baby’s cries.

Chin pulled at his hair in despair as he looked around the tidy but cluttered office for back-up he knew wasn’t there. The high-pitched baby wails seemed to be designed to make his brain overload and stop working. Synapses were firing but failing to connect as hot needles of sound obstructed them.

“Where did you come from?” Chin asked again, a rhetorical, thinking out loud kind of question. He didn’t really expect the baby to answer, well maybe he hoped a little that he might. He looked around for evidence of who left the child there, but all he saw was a self-conscious mouse who’d frozen when she realised she’d been spotted sneaking through the office on the way to the kitchen. They’d long had a problem with rodents, so the creature was far from out of place. Chin didn’t approve of them in his kitchen but otherwise had no issue with the small beings, who were after all just trying to survive.

“Did you see where he came from?” he asked the mouse. The mouse scurried off, not wanting to engage. Firstly, because humans never understood her, and secondly, and most importantly, because she didn’t think he’d believe her even if he could understand. She’d known straight away there was something suspicious about that squirrel. Turning itself into a human baby was just unacceptable behaviour. You wouldn’t catch her doing that sort of thing.

Chin sighed, resisting the urge to run away from the ear shattering screams. Babysitting Zola’s daughter had taught Chin that leaving a helpless infant alone was considered a major no-no. So, whoever had dumped this baby here could not be a good person and had clearly never babysat for Zola.

“You poor thing, being left like this by some nasty person” he said in the direction of the screaming. The baby stopped crying and hiccupped. “Yes, bad, bad people, dumping such a sweet baby. How could those bad people just leave you here, hey?”

To Chin’s delight the baby giggled, before gently drooling. Now that the baby had stopped screaming, Chin felt his senses returning to him, and there was no denying, there was something very charming about this little boy. Chin cautiously approached him, continuing to mutter insults about whoever had abandoned him here, much to the baby’s smiling approval.

“Bad, bad people left you here didn’t they,” Chin cooed while the baby gurgled in delight. “Ugly, smelly people with no friends.”

The baby grinned and Chin felt a knot of attachment form between him and this small human. An umbilical cord of affection running from belly button to belly button.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you. Not ever,” he swore with the quiet ferocity of the recently converted.

The baby looked up into Chin’s broad, handsome face with the satisfaction of a job well done before closing his eyes to sleep. Worried the naked babe might get cold, Chin carried him through to his bedroom and wrapped him in his favourite cashmere jumper.

“Try not to pee on it, there’s a good lad,” he whispered. In the rush of love, he’d already forgotten rule number one: there is no negotiating with babies.

by Stephanie K Ressort

“Well-being is not an individual achievement. It depends on how we relate to each other and to the world around us.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Welcome to my second article focusing on how to manage your mental health after your role has been made redundant. These techniques work for anyone struggling to find equilibrium in this messed up world, not just those who have experienced the rug-pull of redundancy. Other rug-pulls are available. I have chosen to write this through the lens of redundancy, because it is so rife in my industry at the moment. I have never been made redundant, but I have firsthand experience of the different components of the redundancy experience.

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My Experience

Why is it that I can understand?

Well, I’ve been a freelancer for 10 years, so I am no stranger to financial insecurity. I wish I could say that that side of things gets better, but I just think you get more adept at living with it. I frequently have to put myself out there for projects, and I have been ghosted so much that I have sometimes wondered if I have become invisible. But I chose this life, those whose roles have been redundant didn’t choose to be ousted from the deceptive security of employment.

My rug-pull came in a different form. I didn’t choose the life-altering diagnosis of incurable endometrial cancer. Suddenly my future looked very different to the one I was anticipating. Much shorter for one. It was very hard to absorb, and the process took me to some dark places. But I am sat here, typing during a heat wave, fan on and The Sundays playing in the background, while feeling at peace with my life. My recent tests came back, and my cancer remains in remission. And while my doctors still think it is a case of WHEN and not IF it comes back, I am building a gentle sort of life for myself.

Plus, while I filter a lot of what I share through the prism of my own experiences, I have learned these techniques from much smarter people than I. Unlike too many people today, I have a healthy respect for experts. And if their expertise helped me, odds are it will help you too.

No one is redundant

If you want to read last month’s article “No one is redundant” you can link straight to it here. This article is a natural partner to it, but they can be read in any order. Last month I focused on taking control of key aspects of your life and not letting a role redundancy define you.

Today, I will be looking at three different areas that fit neatly under the umbrella of connection.

The Importance of Connection

When bad things happen to us, we can be tempted to hide away and lick our wounds. And that is a valid response in the immediate aftermath. Sometimes we need to process events before others weigh in with their feelings and opinions. But it is important to avoid getting stuck in this lone wolf mentality. The truth is that we need other people and accepting help is OK. As a recovering control freak, this was a hard lesson for me to learn. I’m still working on it.

We exist in a society, which gives us the potential to do great things. It is important to release the ego that is telling us we have to find all the answers to all our problems ourselves. We are, after all, stronger together.

Coffee Catch Up (other beverages are available)

When I was starting to feel more human after I finished chemotherapy, I found I craved the normality of people living and working in the advertising industry. I wanted a glimpse into my old world, a world I felt so removed from. Beyond my closest friends who were there for me throughout, there were so many old work colleagues I was fond of, who had quite naturally been getting on with things while my life was on pause. And I had an excuse to reach out to them - my planned re-entry in to work society. After over a year of medical appointments and illness, my need to reconnect with work-world normal was strong. So, I reached out to them, including some people I hadn’t worked with in years. I didn’t worry about whether it would seem strange or if they might ignore me. Some did, but they were a tiny minority.

I wasn’t going into those coffee catch-ups with an agenda to find a project. I made it clear I wanted to know how they were doing, what they were doing and where they thought things might be going in our industry. I had some absolutely glorious conversations and drank some excellent coffee. It helped me feel human again, in a low-pressure way, so thank you to those wonderful coffee colleagues.

When your role has been made redundant, and particularly if it is taking time to find the right new opportunity, you can feel disconnected from the world of your industry. Now, assuming you want to stay in the same industry (or even if not, you can always reach out to those who successfully pivoted into something new) it is important to maintain that sense of connection.

A coffee catch-up is a beautiful, low intensity way to stay connected. And if they happen to mention that they know someone who is hiring for a role that would suit you, that would be a bonus, but the most important thing is having the human colleague time.

Embrace community

What do I mean by community?

We have our industry community – those of us who are all connected because we work in the same industry. That is one form of community.

But so many other shared interest communities are available. As is your literal local community. When a role is made redundant, those who are most resilient to it, will be those with the strongest community ties outside their old workplace. Interests and connections beyond the day job help you to remember that there is more to life.

If you aren’t already part of a community, join one. There are many low cost and free options out there. Indulge your curiosity. Every ounce of your energy doesn’t need to be devoted to the job hunt. You should not feel guilty about the time you need to invest in feeling happy. Plus, when we are happier and more engaged, we are also better at problem solving. Stress impairs the quality of the decisions that we make. So, take measures to ensure that you aren’t running on stress, which will have you defaulting to habitual but not always helpful behaviours.

Shake things up. Join new communities, meet new people and feel part of things. Since finishing treatment I’ve become a member of a book club, I’ve done various creative writing courses, and I’ve chatted extensively with every stall holder at my local market. I don’t shop anymore, I socialise. I feel like a part of my local community. I love recognising people in the street, it is comforting. They don’t care about what I do for a living or how much I earn. I can just relax and be a non-work version of myself.

And as for the work community, there are a lot of people out there building communities to support people like you. For strategists, there is the Outside Perspective, which was built by Matthew Knight with freelancers in mind, and in the face of mass industry redundancies, has expanded to provide support for those whose roles have been made redundant. Matthew Knight is a pretty special human, working to build this supportive community, but he isn’t alone. Whatever your specialism, look around, there may well be online communities designed to provide you with support.

People often underestimate the sense of community we get from a workplace; it is important to make sure you don’t find yourself without community as a result of a role redundancy. Community is important for our mental health and well-being.

Being of Service

After a major rug-pull like a role redundancy, it can be easy to listen to the vicious voices in your head telling you that you are no longer any use to anyone.

In my experience, trying to logic your way through a conversation with your inner critic, is pointless. You can’t think it away. It is much more useful to do something. The critic can be muffled by useful action.

This is where I fangirl over Dr Laurie Santos. I’ve mentioned The Science of Well-Being course that you can access for free on Coursera, in previous articles. It is so worth taking the time to do it yourself (and definitely do the homework).

She talks about how acts of kindness can create a positive feedback loop, where the giver and the receiver both experience increased happiness and well-being.

If a course format feels overwhelming, Dr Laurie Santos also hosts The Happiness Lab podcast, which is well worth a listen. There is quite an archive of shows, and you can focus on the topics that interest you most.

I have been an Age UK telephone befriender for 6 years, and an Arts Emergency Mentor for even longer. When people tell me I’m selfless, I laugh and try to explain the positive psychology of it all. Still, people like to think of volunteering as something worthy and to be suffered through. I love my volunteering. I have the best chats with both my 94 year old local lady and my 17 year old AE mentee. It has definitely helped me manage my mental health through challenging times. It has given me a very pure sense of purpose.

As someone with a history of depression, I tend to be proactive in prioritising my mental health. There are many situational conditions that can cause someone to have a depressive episode, redundancy is one of them.

A research study done by the University of Cambridge involving men 25-50 who were made involuntarily redundant in the UK found a clear increase in depression scores (almost double) in the redundant group compared to those who remained employed. Even more worryingly, the % who scored highly enough to indicate a clinical depressive illness was 3x higher (18% compared to 6% of the employed group).

I am not sharing this to make you gloomy. Quite the opposite.

Forewarned is forearmed. Feeling low after your role has been made redundant could easily spiral into something more dangerous, particularly if the new job hunt is not going well. Taking action and finding a way to be of service to others can be a very powerful way to help maintain your emotional equilibrium. Will it fix everything? No, but it can help to take the sting out of some of the nastier things your inner critic might throw at you. Worse case scenario, you do something that makes the lives of others better. Best case scenario, it can also help provide you with a renewed sense of purpose, and the emotional boost you need.

Volunteering, depending on the form, can have the added benefit of giving you access to a community. I regret that due to my general body wonkiness (it gets tired and cross very easily) I can’t join the local litter picking group. It seems such a social and satisfying activity.

Take action

My aim with A Life Quixotic is to provide practical ways you can take action to boost your mental health. So, what will you commit to doing to help improve your well-being?

• Contact an old work colleague and set up a coffee date (IRL ideally, but virtual is acceptable, I’m not going to get all ableist about it, plus geography can get in the way)

• Join a local club or group – get to know people in your local community

• Sign up to do a course about something you are passionate or curious about

• Sign up to volunteer with a cause that is important to you

• Other?

Feel free to share in the comments whatever you decide to do. It can help to tell people what you are planning, as it increases the likelihood that you will take your pledge seriously.

You are far from alone

The job market is brutal at the moment, and the amount of time it is taking to secure a job after a redundancy seems to be growing, although it can be hard to find clean data on this as many people tide themselves over with freelance work or stop-gap employment.

When you see people celebrating their new jobs on LinkedIn, bolstered by the relief they have in believing they have found solid ground (does any job truly guarantee stability anymore?), it can feel like you are falling behind, or failing while others are succeeding, but remember that most people who are struggling are doing it quietly.

Those who are being open about how tough things are, they are the brave minority who have the courage to share their vulnerability.

A thank you

Thanks for reading to the end of this article. I am hoping that it has provided some food for thought and maybe inspired you to connect with others and proactively work on improving your mental health. As always, here is a thank you picture. This photo was taken at my local city farm. If you ever stop being able to see the funny side of life, visit some goats. They are one of nature’s comedians.

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All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.

This week was an emotionally heavy one for me. I saw my oncologist on Tuesday for my latest cancer test results. The good news is that the blood marker test showed no sign of my cancer kicking off yet. It is sitting at a very healthy 6.

During treatment I remember my oncologist telling me my number had reduced to 66, which was still too high but an improvement. I asked her if my cancer was demonic. She paused, thought about it, and answered that it often felt like it might be. We laughed. I like it when my marker comes back as 6, as it reminds me of that moment of bonding. She’d been quite serious until that point, but after that we had a jokier relationship. Which is the way I like it. She has retired now. I never got to tell her how grateful I was for everything she did for me. Not just the joking, but the fighting to get me life-extending surgery. Never put off telling people when you are grateful for them.

But I digress.

Again.

Dear new subscribers, I apologise.

You will come to learn that I am the queen of tangents.

If you decide to stick around that is 😂

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Postponing hope

I had been planning to share an article about hope this week. But I struggled to focus. The fatigue, after getting my good news, hit me like a brick wall. I could get angry with myself, but instead I’m choosing grace. I have carried a lot of fear this week. It surfaces before getting test results. You’ll often hear cancer patients talking about scanxiety. Mine was extra high, because I have been having worrying symptoms. And despite the excellent blood marker results, we are following up with a CT scan, to be safe. But with my marker at 6, odds are I am fine. I appreciate the abundance of caution though, it is reassuring.

Last night, I finally had the energy to sit down to write about hope, but the subject just kept getting bigger. So many brilliant minds have focused on the topic. I was not going to do it justice if I rushed it. Plus, it is such a beautiful subject to delve into, I wanted to give myself more time with it. So I will be writing about hope in June - because next week I’ll be publishing part 2 in my living well after redundancy series.

Creative writing

Those who know me well know that I have been working on a novel for far too long. I admit that that sounds judgmental, but I really do need to just get out of my own way and finish editing it already. I know what I need to do, but it can feel overwhelming. Particularly with a brain that needs regular rest to function.

Strangely my research on hope has helped focus my mind and fueled my determination to get the editing done. And I do think that any writing, whether it is these articles, my short stories or my baggy beast of a book, is helping me develop my craft and my voice.

I am a big fan of productive procrastination. Many of my fellow writers will be familiar with this flavour of procrastination. It is when we do an excessive amount of creative writing courses or story research. Things that swirl around the edges of the job itself, writing the damn story. Creative writing courses and research are both useful things. It is when you persistently do them instead of the book writing, that it becomes problematic.

I love being in a room with other writers. We do the same writing exercises with such diverse results, it restores my faith in humanity. What glorious oddities we all are. How different but quirky our perspectives. The picture above is of Lumb Bank, the former home of Ted Hughes, and now an Arvon Foundation property. In November 2021 I was there on a gothic fiction course. Was I productively procrastinating? Possibly. Was it wonderfully inspiring? Very much so. I wrote the first draft of a short story there, that has since evolved.

Last year I signed up to do a 3 session creative writing course as part of the Wimbledon Book Festival. Sitting in my local library with fellow writers felt like a beautiful kind of therapy. I enjoyed it so much, I signed up again this year. My final session is tomorrow morning. I’ve prepared an auto-biographical piece as that was the homework, but I’m not sure I’ll share it. It carries a lot of the heaviness of this week. Fortunately, sharing is optional. Writing it was the important thing.

Taking part in the creative writing classes means we can submit short pieces for the annual Merton Writers Anthology that is sold at the festival. Although, as we discovered, it is very hard to buy if you aren’t attending the events. That Gothic piece that started life in Lumb Bank, Yorkshire in November 2021, I trimmed it down to under 1,000 words and it was published as the penultimate story in this anthology. The piece is called “In Memoriam” and as so many people I know struggled to get hold of a copy of it (so sweet that you tried), I thought I’d take the opportunity to publish it here. Enjoy.

In Memoriam

A short story by Stephanie Ressort

Cassandra scuttled through the half-moon light. Colours twisted and distorted where the ceaseless drizzle was illuminated by the cautious sweep of car headlights.

She was heading to the solitude of home, a welcome escape from the isolation of an unfriendly workplace. She knew her boss was under pressure to get rid of her. Petitions had been signed, but she was their most productive accountant. Challenged to give examples of fireable transgressions, her colleagues failed. They couldn’t identify the source of their unease. “She’s quiet and creepy” didn’t cut it, even if the head of HR was the first to complain about her down the pub.

Cassandra had always had this effect. Her school years’ brutal lessons in the loneliness of crowds. Maybe if she had made just one friend, or had had warmer parents, she would be different now, but instead she’d learned not to seek comfort in the people around her.

As she passed the war memorial, she paused, her attention drawn to a beautiful bouquet of flowers placed in tribute to the long dead men of the city. Their bones feeding foreign soil. Their dust playing in the winds of distant places. Cassandra bit her lower lip. Would it be so bad? With quick sharp short steps, she swept up the flowers before scuttling on her way.

“Oi, you can’t take those” an elderly woman’s outraged cry bounced harmlessly off Cassandra’s back. Her mind already elsewhere.

She put the flowers in her only vase, her prize possession. Curvaceous, colourful, and expensive, she’d been drawn to it, her opposite. This vase could brighten any room, and the flowers would be happier here. Flowers wanted attention, not to wither away, thirsty and neglected on a stone edifice. Their imagined gratitude was clear to Cassandra.

“You’re welcome” she told them as she popped two slices of frozen bread into the toaster to go with her cream of tomato soup.

That night as she lay in her bed, her old friend insomnia came to play. Together they’d memorized the topography of her bedroom ceiling. A map of nothing going nowhere. As the night started to thin, she had a creeping awareness of whispering downstairs punctuated by the scrape of a kitchen chair. She glanced at her reliable radio alarm clock. 04:04, an antisocial time for visitors.

She slipped her feet into her well-worn blue slippers and shrugged on her tattered grey dressing gown. Tiptoeing towards the top of the staircase the sound of whispers became more distinct.

“Where the fuck are we?” a male voice asked before being shushed by unseen companions. “Why are we whispering?” he wailed.

Clasping her dressing gown close to her chest, Cassandra crept down the stairs. Her kitchen door was ajar; she nudged it open wider. It creaked. She froze on the threshold. Soldiers filled the room. Too many for the space, they spilled out of every corner. The one closest to her had only half a face, he was watching her with his one remaining eye. The others ignored her, continuing to murmur and whisper, jostling each other with affectionate familiarity.

Clearing her throat, Cassandra said “hello.”

Silence.

All eyes turned her way.

“She can see us!” a young red head exclaimed, a void where the back of his head should be.

“No shit Sherlock” was the gruff reply from a reclining adonis, he was beauty from the waist up, pure butchery below.

“You’re in my kitchen” Cassandra explained. She stifled a shiver, but an insistent draft kept creeping up her spine. Looking behind her she realised a cheeky youth, his face twisted with concentration, was trying to stroke her back. “Stop that” she snapped. He stepped away with a smirk. He looked all of 18, it really wasn’t dignified. “I’m old enough to be your mother!”

Even as the words left her lips, she knew it was a stupid thing to say. What was age to a ghost? But she’d never been good with crowds, and the attention was making her nervous.

Silence was replaced with laughter. They started talking at once, to each other, to her. A cacophony of voices with none willing to yield space. Boisterous in their excitement at being heard by the living.

“If you could keep it down, I need to get some sleep,” Cassandra’s words barely made it through the noise to her own ears.

“I said please be quiet!” Louder but still inadequate.

She watched two soldiers pool resources to push her only photo of her parents off the mantelpiece. The sound of broken glass and a cracked frame barely audible over the general brouhaha. That was the final straw.

Cassandra fought her revulsion and waded through the gory assembly of ghosts to the flowers displayed on the kitchen table. Ignoring attempts to engage her in conversation she opened the window, throwing the glorious blooms out before firmly closing the window, bolting it shut against the cold night air.

“Shit!” she heard a soldier exclaim, as they were violently expelled from her house and onto the wet pavement outside. She could hear their grumbles of dissatisfaction, mercifully muffled by her double-glazing.

It might be considered rude to invite people over only to throw them out, but she needed to be fresh for work. She should have known better than to take flowers home on a weeknight, and the war memorial was a mistake she would not be repeating. How was she to know they would arrive so late, in such large numbers, and so attached to the brutality of their deaths? To manifest in such horrific ways was quite unnecessary.

Sighing she headed back to bed, although she doubted sleep would come. She comforted herself with the realisation it was nearing the end of the month. Old Mrs Nesbitt’s son would be visiting her grave at the weekend. It had been a while since Cassandra had had her over. She just hoped he remembered to bring flowers. Sometimes he forgot.

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A thank you gift

As is customary here in A Life Quixotic, I share a gift for those who read to the end. Usually a picture of one of my cats. Today, I thought I’d shake things up by sharing a picture of Bo, my lovely Mum’s cat. She is the sweetest, friendliest girl, unlike my aloof beasties.

All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.

We have become so impatient that we won’t wait if a site doesn’t load within 10 seconds. 10 seconds and we switch off. 10 seconds. WTAF. This study was done in Germany, but I’d be surprised if the results varied hugely across developed markets (source: DE-CIX using YouGov panel of 2,090 people interviewed between April 13 and 15 2026).

While I am concerned by this statistic, I am not surprised. Because I’m probably one of the 56%, much as I’d like to pretend that I’m not. I have noticed how irritated I get if my internet is running slowly. If something takes ages to load, I will abandon it. Unless I am utterly determined to finish whatever it is I am doing, in which case I will hang in there, turning the air blue with muttered swears.

We have become addicted to instant gratification, and this isn’t just making us grumble at the slightest inconvenience. It has the potential to destroy us as a specifies. And no, I’m not being over dramatic. But firstly, a confession.

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I am part of the problem

Having worked in advertising for years, I have helped many clients remove any friction that might stop you purchasing their products. I’ve not just seen behind the curtain, I’ve helped oil the gears of the machine. In my day job, friction is seen as the enemy. The more friction, the lower the conversion rates, and that is bad. If you have noticed how easy it is to spend your money now, I am one of many thousands of people who have helped make it easier for brands to sell to you and sell to you quickly. Before you change your minds.

But outside of the day job (and I am great at compartmentalising), I’ve long been worried about the impact that the rise in convenience is having on us as humans.

The loneliness epidemic

A recent ONS report (Jan 2026) showed that 23% of UK adults reported feeling lonely. What is particularly interesting is that when you dig into the data you discover that the loneliest groups are the under 50s:

· 27% 16-29

· 28% 30-49

· 19% 50-69

· 16% 70+

Our most connected generations are also the loneliest. This might be ironic, but it is not surprising. Those who have the most habitually friction-less lives are the ones feeling the least connected. Being able to download endless content, get a wide range of food delivered to our doors, to communicate with each other using memes and emojis, and share our opinions on social media the minute we have them– these things are not satisfying our need for true connection. In fact, it lends itself to a life that prioritizes curation over authentic interactions.

A 2024 UK study by u-switch found that 23% of 18–34-year-olds say they never answer the phone. There is a perception that a phone call will either be spam or bad news. Long gone are the long phone calls with a friend I enjoyed as a teenager, dissecting every aspect of the school day that we had both just experienced. My exasperated mum asking what on earth we could still have to talk about. Yet, we never ran out of conversation, as reflected in our parent’s phone bills (limitless minutes was not a thing in the 80s/early 90s). Our poor parents.

We are getting angrier

This rise in convenience isn’t just contributing to a lonelier life, it is making us more impatient and irritable. Ask anyone who works in retail. We are becoming less civil with each other (anyone who still uses X can attest to this). And yes, this isn’t just because of how convenient everything is. We are living in a very polarised world. People have less empathy for those who live in a different political or social or ethnic bubble to them. But I can’t help feeling that the on-going rise of convenience is throwing fuel on the fire.

If we get irritated by slow internet, if we get annoyed because a package dared to take more than 24-hours to reach us, how are we going to be equipped to manage our feelings when we face genuine challenges? If you think it isn’t that bad, take a little time out of your day to read some 1-star reviews online. Retail rage is alive and well and proliferating across the internet.

This is why I see our dependence on convenience as a potential existential threat. Because if we can’t tolerate mild inconveniences, how are we going to be able to make the adjustments needed to stop the destruction of our climate? There are people out there who are quite literally enraged about bins. Bins! They feel that recycling is demanding too much of them.

Technology continues to prioritize convenience

In the 2025 paper “Reflections on the Cloak of Convenience” the following paragraphs struck a chord with me

The harsh reality is that convenience sells, so that is where much innovation is focused. It would be more useful to shift the gaze of those at the forefront of developments in tech and AI to the very real problems we are facing as residents of planet Earth. But there’s simply not enough short-term profit to be made. Which is why our power lies in how we spend our money. Instead of throwing all our cash at those who make it easiest for us to do so, we could start spending some of it with those embracing a better way of doing business (start locally, you might be surprised what gems you might find near you, I have become a tad obsessed with my local markets).

There is a difference between mindless and mindful convenience

In my own life I am actively trying to inconvenience myself more. I’m reintroducing friction, while still relying on the benefits of a friction-less world when I need to. As someone with a chronic illness, that is more often than I might like. If everything hurts, and I only have scratch ingredients in the house (because less-in-pain shopping me was being optimistic), I have been known to order a take-away or get some ready meals delivered. I’m not thrilled about it, but those are the cards I have been dealt. Sometimes standing and cooking is just too painful. When I am in less pain, I batch cook and feel like a hero. I am far from an ableist preacher, here to make disabled people feel bad about the fact that they heavily rely on these conveniences. We are allowed to embrace the things that make our day-to-day lives significantly better.

But there is a difference between using the conveniences of the modern world to improve your life, and mindless consumption. If you always default to online shopping, can you really complain when all your local shops close down? I now only use Amazon as my fallback shop, if I can’t find what I need locally, or through small online companies. It is no longer my default. The little bookshop near me may not always have what I’m looking for in stock, but they will always offer to order it in for me. I just need to not live a last minute, impulsive life.

I am far from alone and I never claimed I was being original. Others are also choosing friction. There is the rise of the Slow Food movement. There are groups of people meeting up to knit or crochet and chat. I love the wonderful postbox toppers that are abundant in my crochet loving neighbourhood (and yes, I live in London, it isn’t the cold, scary place the trolls online would have you believe). We have a local shanty singing group, and choirs, and book clubs, and cheese tastings, and guided walks of nature spots. I am part of a vibrant writing community and often explore other creative outlets. Most recently, my attempts at painting tiles. The results were whimsical at best, but it is really fun doing something with zero pressure to be good at it. Proof provided.

Not everything has to cost money either, if you have a limited budget.

True creativity is born out of friction. It is the challenge and the pushing through that make creating worthwhile. If everything is constantly easy, how can we ever feel like we have achieved something. I’ve always admired people with beautiful gardens, as I am a terrible gardener. I try my best and I do have some beautiful flowers thriving, despite my lack of skill. But there is a reason Allotments continue to be popular (and often have waiting lists) in the UK. Growing things from seed, whether food or flowers, is the purest example of mindful friction.

Baby Steps

You may have realised, while reading this article (and thank you for your continued attention) that you are already, instinctively incorporating friction in your life. We are often drawn to things that are good for us. But if you want inspiration in terms of how you can dial it up some more, here are a few ideas that might appeal:

· Grow something (in a pot if you don’t have a garden) – ideally something you can eventually eat. There is something so satisfying in growing your own food. Most supermarkets offer cheap pot and seed bundles, often designed for children.

· Talk a walk in a local park and leave your mobile phone at home. No music, no checking texts, no photos for your socials. Just be in the moment. Make a mental note of what you see and hear, how you feel.

· Draw something. I bought some paint pens and often draw colourful doodles on the rocks and pebbles in my garden. A sketch in pen on the back of an envelope is also valid. Plus, colouring-in books remain popular for those wanting to slow down and be more mindful. But you can’t have the TV or a podcast on at the same time. Music is fine.

· Cook a new recipe, ideally something very different to your usual repertoire. Maybe pick a random country and find an interesting dish that you could make from there. Extra points if you shop for the ingredients locally (easy for me to say, I have an amazing array of different ethnic shops in my area – I accept that for some of you that might be more of a challenge).

Thank you gift

Thank you for reading the whole article. As is my habit, you get a thank you gift. This week it is a picture of the three-legged dynamo that is my Pip. My cats are a delightful source of positive friction in my life 😊

All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.

Death prep, Steph style

2022 was the year I had to sign a form stating that I understood that the chemo they were giving me was palliative (this was a situation the word oxymoron was made for). It was the year I had to prepare myself for the ultimate worse case scenario. The oncologist was hoping to “buy me a few good years” (their definition of good and mine, may differ), and that was their best case scenario. So…. I wrote a will, I put together a funeral/wake play list (it is epic, you will want to score an invite when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil), I decided who would care for my cats and I gave a bunch of stuff away to charity. Hell, I’d be living in a fully minimalist zen space by now if the chemo side-effects hadn’t taken the wind out of my de-cluttering sails. Which is probably a good thing, since I thrive in clutter. Particularly book clutter.

The elephant in the room

I am writing this in 2026, shouldn’t I be dead already? Yes, but I was lucky to have an oncologist who really fought for me. I was young, an anomaly for endometrial cancer (although how many anomalies do there have to be, before we accept that cancer is increasingly impacting younger people), so she pitched a surgery for me. One surgeon said no, as there weren’t enough precedents. But another surgeon said yes, he’d cut me open. It was a very exciting and optimistic development, I can not lie. I’d already had a hysterectomy in 2018, what more was there left in there? Actually, a fair bit. My remaining reproductive organs were removed, along with other stuff. I like to say I was gutted like a fish, but that makes some people wince. Still, I have an epic scar and I can’t spell or pronounce the actual name of what they did (although it was an amalgam of stuff, so even the long named surgery doesn’t cover it all). So now I get to be the precedent. No pressure, but I owe it to those who come after me to live as long as I can.

The surgeons were positively euphoric after the surgery (ironically the head honcho surgeon who signed off on the procedure had Covid so couldn’t perform it himself, but his team were epic). I think they may have been disappointed by my muted reaction to their enthusiasm, but I was away with the fentanyl fairies. Plus, it turns out, being in hospital makes me cranky. After 6 days I negotiated an early release, on the condition that I had a blood transfusion (their condition not mine). This was during the heatwave of July 2022, so my mum thought I was crazy to want to leave the air conditioned hospital, but I was delirious with the need to sleep. And sleep I did. In fact, that first night out of hospital, almost four years ago now, is the last time I got a full night’s sleep. It was a beautiful thing. I remember it fondly. My cat Louis wedged himself across my legs, so I couldn’t leave him again. There was no risk of that, I was totally out for the count.

So, what now?

In a couple of weeks I get to see my oncologist and find out if my cancer has come back. I am hoping that it remains undetectable, but these check-ups are always a source of anxiety for me. I become a bit of a scanxiety hypochondriac. Every twinge a warning to prepare myself for bad news. And I have a lot of twinges. Among other symptoms that you really don’t want to know about 🚽

I am someone living with cancer as a chronic illness. There are thousands of us out there, not cured, not dead, but something in between. As cancer treatments become more effective, this number is growing. And the medical system is not designed for us. Charities are forced to pick up some of that slack, but the local charity that helped me manage my pain closed down due to lack of funds.

Pain is a part of my everyday life. So is fatigue. Some days I am full of beans, others I struggle to shower. Some days I walk like nothing hurts, others I have to use a crutch. I am luckier than many people living with chronic pain and fatigue. I have incurable cancer. That gives me a high level of sickness gravitas. How messed up is that? Yet you know instinctively that it is true. There are people out there who are chronically ill, desperately hoping for a diagnosis that might result in medical professionals taking their struggles seriously. Others have been given diagnoses that are stigmatized or under researched - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome I’m looking at you. I’m really hoping that the flurry of research into Long COVID finally provides the solutions needed to help those with CFS.

But even with my cancer card, I don’t get much in the way of medical support now that I am living in the in-between. Which can make me feel like I’m failing. I’ve been in remission for over 3.5 years, shouldn’t I be better by now? The medical system is behaving like I should be. And I get a lot of sympathy from oncologists who agree that there should be more support out there, but they’re not the ones who can provide it.

The reality is that the health system (in the UK) is designed to help patients in crisis, to try and stop us dying. It is not designed to help us live well. Maybe if it wasn’t so underfunded, there would be room for more holistic support. But we have to work with the reality we are given. In my case, pain, fatigue and indefatigable hope.

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This sounds like a nightmare not a quixotic dream

I have come to terms with the fact that my life is the nightmare scenario, the cautionary tale, the “there but for the grace of god go I” situation. I can’t work full time, and when I do work, it needs to be remote first, which limits my options. I get exhausted if I do too much physical activity, but my pain levels rise if I don’t do enough physical activity. I walk a daily tightrope. My boundaries have boundaries. I’m still working this all out as I go along.

A Life Quixotic isn’t about living an easy life. It is about the contentment and happiness that can be built in defiance of challenging times. It is creating new things out of the rubble of who we thought we were going to be. It is about sharing stories in the hope that they help others who are struggling, and mistakenly think they are alone. It is an anti-social-media social space, where life isn’t sugar-coated to the point of toothache.

My favourite Winnie the Pooh character as a child was Eeyore (still is). I was first diagnosed with depression at 15. I am now 51 with wiped out savings, creeping debts and a wonky body. If I can find contentment in the rubble of a life I worked so hard to build, anyone can. That is the point. It isn’t about finding the positive in every situation. Some situations are just plain awful. It is about accepting when a situation is shit, and choosing not to let it break you. My weapon of choice is dark humour, but we all have different coping mechanisms.

So, am I grateful to still be alive? Yes, most of the time. But that gratitude doesn’t translate into constantly feeling the need to pretend that everything is fabulous just because the alternative was death. I’ll smile when I bloody well feel like it, and I’ll cry when I need to.

Gratitude is not the only emotion available

This is for all the cancer inbetweeners and chronic illness sufferers who are expected to be grateful - embrace gratitude when you have something to be grateful for (and there is usually something, if you look hard enough). Gratitude feels good, and you deserve to feel good. But you are also allowed to feel the full range of emotions, just like everyone else. If you are muzzled by a need to constantly perform gratitude for simply existing, you are being denied an essential outlet for your negative emotions, which means they get buried and fester. It is the emotional equivalent of holding in your farts. Just because the alternative was death, doesn’t mean you can’t complain about the small things that are making your life awkward now.

You are allowed to complain, but (and this is true for everyone) you should treat complaining like junk food and avoid overindulging. It is satisfying in the short term, but unhealthy if you consume too much of it. On the flip side, when you are on a restrictive diet that denies you junk food, it only makes you crave it more. Balance is key.

I created A Life Quixotic because I am trying to build a contented life. But you don’t achieved contentment by ignoring the hard stuff or sucking up all the petty stuff. I’ll be open. I’ll share the challenges. I’ll also share how I got through them. Because so far, somehow, I always have.

Quixotic Homework

I like to leave my readers with something practical they can do to lift their spirits. This small piece of optional gratitude based homework comes from the “Science of Well Being” course from Yale University - run by the brilliant Dr Laurie Santos (or at least I think it does, I did the course years ago and I struggle with chemo/meno brain memory issues). You can do the whole course for free online. I highly recommend it. In fact, this may be a sign for me to redo it myself.

The task

Think of someone who helped you in some way. It could be a big thing, or lots of small things, but someone you are genuinely grateful for. Someone who had a positive impact on your life. Write them a letter explaining what they mean to you. Send it. Ideally the old fashioned way (who doesn’t like getting something through the post that isn’t a bill?), but if you don’t have a real world address for them, an email or even a DM is fine. I promise, the simple act of telling someone why you are grateful for them will give you a morale boost.

Your reading to the end gift

Since Louis got a mention in this article, it would be rude not to include a photo of the glorious ginger. This was taken in 2022, when he’d regularly lie on the floor next to my sofa, keeping an eye on me, as I recovered from chemo.

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All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.

As a freelancer, my work-life is a roller-coaster. My year so far…

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

quiet
quiet
it's oh so quiet
listening to bjork
bills stacking up
no-one replying to messages
pipeline filling
everyone calling at once
busy
too busy
make yourself sick busy
pipeline emptying
recovery…

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When I googled “Stiff Upper Lip” (and after I ignored many photos of what looked like various types of cold-sore), I was met with a plethora of images of older white men in bowler hats. You know the type, dripping with old school gravitas. Sometimes the hat was replaced or enhanced by a British Flag in the backdrop. It seems…

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Shit happens

That is a given. And it can feel like some people get more than their fair share of shit, while others seem to breeze through life. The word “seem” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. When I look back on my life, there were a lot of times when on the surface, I was living a dream (not “the” dream, there are so many to pick from). I had a great …

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