Untitled Blog Post #2

Posted on July 30, 2024

Am I having a mid-life crisis?

Hear me out. So far in 2024 I’ve been hit with two major illnesses, lost my six-year-old nephew to cancer, and gone through hell with the gender identity clinic in the wake of the Cass Report. It’s been… a lot. And I’ve been increasingly wondering what my next step is. Where do I go from here? What do I do with my time? Am I halfway through my life already? I hope not. I want to live for 300 years. I don’t think that’s realistic.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I’m no stranger to making big life changes. I’ve left stable jobs for startups, started businesses that failed, moved across the country more than once, completely changed career trajectory several times… and I’ve always found that to be an asset to me. There’s strength in interdisciplinarity, and in being able to tell a story across different worlds.

But as I sit here in London, four years after moving here because I’d been wanting to for quite some time, I once again feel restless and have that urge to fly away. There are loads of factors – I love this city and have made some amazing friends here, but most of them I communicate with online and see rarely, whilst actually living in the city is so expensive I can barely afford to go out and do things.

The other is that I’m unsatisfied in my job, which doesn’t pay me enough to stay living in the city. I took a significant pay cut to do this job with the promise of bigger rewards down the line – but growth has been slow, budgets have been slashed, and without some major scaling the equity I have isn’t worth anything.

Greener Grass

But is the grass any greener elsewhere? I love writing, but that’s never going to pay the bills – so how do I balance that with a job that pays me what I’m worth? How do I find a new, emerging business to work for that I can really throw my weight in to, relaly solve challenges in?

Am I just having a mid-life crisis? Is this all just a response to recent trauma?

I was chatting to my brother a couple of months ago and after I told him I was looking for other opportunities he said “are you ever going to settle down?”. He’s had two major jobs in his life, owns his home, has roots just six miles away from the house we grew up in together. I can’t think of someone so polar opposite to me on paper.

Is that what all of this is about? Am I the kind of person that just can’t settle down anywhere? That always needs to be moving on, like the Littlest Hobo, constantly moving on? Am I so much of a contrarian that the second I feel comfortable or settled, I have to move on? I have to wreck it? Is that why I ended my last major relationship and walked away from the house we owned together?

I Had Dreams

Or, perhaps, I’ve had big dreams that I’ve never actually fulfilled – and so nothing feels quite right. At 15 I was convinced I was going to emigrate to New Zealand and open my own business there. Living in the countrside, close to nature, but having a mobile workstation I could drive around to help do a whole bunch of things from technical help to building safe spaces and communities. It was a heck of a dream.

When I went to the US on my gap year four years later, I actually enrolled in university there. I’d decided I was going to come back to the US to stay, and try to do something similar there. I could live in a log cabin by a lake (and I mean that, my employer out there had one I could use whilst studying) and I could maintain that sense of freedom I felt being somewhere so huge, yet so small.

I got talked out of this within 12 hours of returning to the UK and have regretted it ever since. That was twenty years ago.

Jesus, where has the time gone?

A harder story to tell

I’ve had a few calls with recruiters recently, and I’m finding it harder to tell the story that I’ve weaved across different roles and industries. The story is the same – but it seems to be landing differently now. People seem less interested in the interdisciplinary experience I can bring to a role, and more interested in how many years I’ve had doing x and y specific thing. The job market is saturated, unemployment is high, and nothing is jumping out as hugely exciting.

Perhaps it’s time to start my own thing – but if I do that, how I support myself is something I’ve not yet figured out. And will I find satisfaction in anything until I address the dreams I’d put on hold? Can I find people to build something exciting with? Something ethical, something new, something that really feels special?

I’m full of ideas and energy, and seemingly totally cloudy-headed when it comes to working out the details. The how, the who, and particuarly the where.

The world is so big, and I’ve explored so little of it. If I really am halfway through my life, how can I justify staying still when there’s so much out there to do, experience, and see?

And, if money is the only thing that can give us freedom in this capitalist hellscape, how do I balange earning enough to be free, with doing the things I really want to do?

Answers on a postcard…