Finding the Wild Path

I am upstairs in the café in Debenhams during my lunchbreak, desperately working on the novel I hope will save me from the life that is making me miserable.

I don’t always get to take my break, I don’t always have a free evening, I often work weekends but, when I do get fifteen or twenty minutes spare, I work on my novel like I never have before.

 Like my life depends on it.

I sit in the hard armchair in my counsellor’s office looking for someone to tell me how to live. I know that’s not what counsellors are for but I’m desperate. We have talked about writing, we have talked about my law career, and then he says,

“What do you think would happen if you were to write full time?”

He may as well have asked the armchair for all the answer I’ll give him. I stare at him blankly. If writing full time was an option, doesn’t he think I would have taken it?

So, he says into the silence, “what would happen if you just did it for a set period of time? Say, six months?”

And then the reasoning begins – the justifications for staying in the life I can’t bear: I couldn’t! Imagine telling Mum and Dad! I might live with my parents but I still pay rent, I still have a car to run and a phone bill to pay. I’m saving to get my own place too.

And I can’t give up my job, I’d never be able to justify it to a future employer – they’d think I was weird, unreliable, flakey. I would ruin my future and deplete my savings and I’d have to stay unemployed and living with my parents forever.

And what if I did? What if I gave up work for six months to write and realised I couldn’t do it? Couldn’t finish a novel, or my writing was terrible. And how would I know? How could there possibly be some kind of quality control in place to test if the six months had been wasted or a success?

But I’m driving home and I can’t get his questions out of my head. My mind is racing miles away from the roads, my muscles feel alive with potential. I feel like I’ve just been given access to a parallel world. And, for the first time in years, there’s a bubble of hope and excitement inflating in my chest.

By the time I’m home all I can think is, if I don’t do it now, when I have the most security and the least responsibility, when would I?

For weeks I make my secret plans. I sit in court taking notes, I draft letters to clients, I drive to and from the police station and, all the time, I’m wondering how I could make it work. The bubble of excitement in my chest is unpoppable and, the more I think of the life I could have, the bigger it grows.

I think I would be more insane not to take the risk. Writing has been the longest activity of my life, my constant source of absorption, my life-long companion. And I had savings, I could use those for rent and petrol and bills.

A six month window would put Mum and Dad’s minds at ease – it would just be an experiment that way – a small intermission from real life. And, if I started now, that gave me six months before The Festival of Writing in York. The Festival offers the chance to put your work in front of literary agents for feedback; that was that quality control I was looking for. It all came together perfectly.

I presented the idea to my parents (who were mercifully accepting and probably imagined this was the start of my breakdown) and used my last pay cheque to buy a ticket to the Festival. At the end of March I was officially unemployed and my six month writing experiment began.

I was taking the gamble at last.