When the world moves on
Some thoughts on the path life leads us down, and the worlds we pass through on the way.
I’m 46 this year, which isn’t noteworthy or an accomplishment or anything to write home about in and of itself. Skipping back a few years, I barely noticed my 44th birthday when it came, and it was a few months before I realised it had been exactly 20 years since I’d graduated, gotten a job I was actually qualified for, and started my career.
It also meant it had been 10 years since the complete psychological breakdown that caused me to abandon the creative practice that had formed the first decade of that career. When I’d managed to get myself back together enough to work again (Thanks for nothing SaMH, genuinely.) I just, gave up.
Like a lot of creatives, then and now, I was grinding away on side projects and art whilst doing the day job, which for me was and still is UX, so I put what remained of my energy into the day job, moved into UX consultancy for large corporates, and settled into a mundane 9-5 existence for the next decade.
Now, ‘complete psychological breakdown’ is a lot to unpack, and since it’s not what this is about, I won’t, if that’s all the same to you.
I made disastrously bad choices about the people I chose to collaborate and work with. For years.
It would be more years before I’d finally discover I sit at one end of the autism spectrum, but that’s also another story.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that by giving up my creative practice, by not making art anymore, I was removing my connection to the creative community and the scene that had brought me up. It also hadn’t occurred to me that the scene had no reason or obligation to keep me in the loop.
Two major things happened around about the same time that had added to my downward spiral.
Cocaine had flooded the party scene in Scotland, and suddenly nights out were no longer a blur of hugs and good vibes and chilled after parties, but an aggressive scrum of insufferable coked up arseholes shouting at each other.
Then, over the course of about a year, that scene that I had naively thought of as a community, a family, left en masse for the glittering lights of London.
I half-heartedly tried to join them at the time, but ultimately I couldn’t do it.
I was at rock bottom, but I despise London like no other place on Earth, so I think the little part of me that was still switched on and still looking out for me screamed NO and told me to stay.
Everyone had gone, and almost immediately, I was isolated and alone for the first time in my adult life. The scene had moved on, and I was falling apart and didn’t know what to do.
This is where I fast forward, before this all gets too awkward and sentimental.
I eventually bounced back psychologically, and although I didn’t recover my creative practice in the same way, I’ve arguably had / have a successful career in design.
I took a sideways step which pushed me into leadership, but 10 years ago that broken young guy thought it was all over, that the world had left him behind.
For me, it was my first lesson in controlling your own path and the direction you take.
I’ve always been a dispassionate person, so although I balk when people ask what my ‘passion’ is (because I’m reluctant to say ‘I don’t have one’) at the same time I’ve learned that for me to be healthy, I have to be truthful and authentic to myself.
When I was young, I was just going with the flow, trying to be accepted and trying to fit in. I didn’t know who *I* was, because I’d invested in hiding my identity amongst the crowd. Like a lot of AS folks I just wanted to be ‘normal’, whatever that is, and to my naive mind it meant taking on a group identity, becoming part of the crowd.
I was wrong.
This year was the first time I stopped to look around, in a ‘where are they now’ kind of way. I guess the first heartbreaks came from the realisation that at least a few folks I thought I’d been close to really had moved on from me, and although I still thought of us as close, separated only by time and distance, they clearly (some vocally) didn’t.
But I’m getting sentimental again.
Anyone who’s ever been part of a scene knows that there are usually a few folk at the centre of that scene, and a few folk who might go on to mainstream success, which was exactly the case with the crowd I grew up around. More than a handful of my peers from that time progressed from the scene to making it big. Globally big.
To state the completely obvious, ‘ceasing all creative activity’ is a pretty effective way of calling a halt to your own progress, but at the time, because of my complete lack of passion for anything (which I didn’t know was a characteristic of my flavour of ND, along with being socially inept), I felt I was just making a compromise.
My peers were all willing to compromise on things, so I thought it was just a grown up thing to do, except my compromise wasn’t that, it was self-immolation.
Without a single exception, those folks who went onto major success stuck to their guns, and although there might have been a hundred different things they were willing to compromise on along the way, their craft and their practice wasn’t one of them.
And there I was, doing the exact opposite.
I wouldn’t compromise on the business aspects, I wouldn’t suck up to influential people, I wouldn’t put myself out there, but I’d compromise on the work all day long, and eventually I cared so little about the work (partly because I’d compromised it so much) that I gave it up.
Reflecting back on that period of my life I learned a few things, first that if you want to make it big doing the thing you’re passionate about or good at, it has to be all consuming, and you can’t compromise your practice for anyone or any price. You have to be in control of your output completely, and you have to walk a very fine line between passion and professionalism.
Second that there really is no wrong path (#nowrongpath). Despite all the turmoil and emotional trauma I’ve mentioned, life carried on as it always does and so did I, and even though it wasn’t the path I was following originally, I made a success of it anyway.
Lastly that regardless of how old you are or what stage of life you’re at, if things aren’t working for you, change them, because the one thing none of us know is when we’ll have to move on from this world, and life is short.
I’m 46 this year, and over the past year I realised all that I’ve lost. The world has moved on like it did a decade ago, but unlike then, I’m not staying put.
I left my prestigious, responsible, grown up leadership job 2 weeks ago and I don’t know what I’m going to do.
And that’s exactly where I want to be.