When the year began, I wasn’t sure what to expect from it. I was a little apprehensive, because 2022 had been so significant—so much had happened—and I figured that years like that were the exception, not the rule. I wanted another 2022—a year of growth, change, and milestones—but as I’ve said before on this blog, I don’t always know how to create the life I want for myself. Part of what made 2022 the year that it was for me was the presence of an external structure—university. I had a set of assignments to do, with specific dates to complete them by, and I was in complete control over whether I completed them or not.
When 2023 began, I had one target—get a career job that’s based in London. And while there were things I could do to boost my chances, the decision was ultimately out of my hands. I’d been applying since September 2022 and gotten fuck-all for my efforts. Having a Master’s Degree didn’t seem to have any effect on my employability; I was still getting rejected at the first stage of the process with either a generic email response or no response at all. Unlike my 2022 targets—completing my university assignments, writing my articles, publishing my book, and finding a place to live—I wasn’t in control. And so when I looked at the year ahead on January 1st 2023, the road was foggy. There was no guarantee that anything would happen, and the only thing I really expected was more of the same. More cover letters, more scrolling through LinkedIn, and more emails telling me that there were many strong candidates for the role.
It was a quiet start to the year. My best friend was ill with a nasty migraine. I didn’t go to my graduation ceremony because I was feeling anxious and miserable, despite all my talk about how much I wanted to stay in touch with everyone. My roommate Minako was still in Tokyo with her family for a long holiday visit. And so I didn’t really do anything for a while except write my articles, read my books, and apply for jobs.
When Minako came back from Japan, she brought me some Shiba Inu-themed goodies—one of which was a Shiba Inu calendar for 2023. It had been over a decade since I’d had a calendar. I bought a plastic wall hook to hang it on and looked at all the blank squares. Immediately I felt desperate to fill them, to ensure that there were as few empty days as possible. And I wanted to fill them with unique events that would make me excited for the week ahead. Things like “Picnic with such-and-such” or “Such-and-such’s bday bash”, rather than dull reminders like “Rent”, “Cancel free trial”, or “Chelsea vs Brentford”. How much you get out of a calendar depends on your lifestyle, and having one really motivated me to fill my life with vivid, memorable experiences.
In retrospect, I’d say that in 2023 I’ve gotten better at creating those experiences for myself, whether that means organizing something fun with friends or getting out of the house to do something on my own. I think that when I remember 2023, I’ll remember it as an unhappy year dotted with these little happy moments.
Emily recovered from her migraine and that gave me something to write in my new calendar: Lunch w/ Em. I took her to one of my favorite places and we played Connect Four while eating donuts and chatting about our hopes for 2023. My hope was that I’d be able to write and publish another book, something more focused and marketable than Fractured Threads. A short novel, maybe. But the writer’s block I’d been having since October 2022 continued throughout the whole of 2023. I would toy with these little fragments—a character, a setting, a dynamic—but they’d never go anywhere. Usually, a fragment leads to something, and it snowballs. But for whatever reason, it felt like the magic was just gone, like I was missing some vital part of myself that had hitherto always been there.
I think that’s a big part of the reason I wasn’t happy in 2023. If I showed someone the photos from my camera roll or told them stories of things I did with my friends, then it would probably give them the impression that 2023 was a great year. But the thing is, those happy instances occurred in a context of general unhappiness. And I think not having a creative project in large part facilitated that context. Writing—specifically fiction—has always been where I get my self-esteem from. It’s the kind of happiness that I feel generally, rather than in a single moment. For me, writing is like working out or eating healthy; if I do it consistently, I feel more happy, motivated, and confident overall. And if I don’t do it regularly, then vice versa. It wasn’t just the specific moments that made 2022 a great year—it was the adherence to these lifestyle habits that contributed to an improved sense of wellbeing, which obviously had a positive effect on everything I did in my day-to-day life.
In 2022, while I did have a couple really bad memories, they occurred in a context of general happiness and were therefore less damaging. Whereas in 2023, everything that happened—good and bad—came at a time where I wasn’t feeling great about myself. In that way, my mental health has always been tied inextricably to my writing. I also suspect that part of the reason I was so uninspired creatively is that I was a lot more stressed in 2023 than previous years. Things were breaking or going wrong with the house, I was searching for a career job, worrying about money, and in general just feeling very uncertain about the future. Uncertain if I’d be able to land the job I wanted, uncertain if I’d be able to stay in London, uncertain if I was ever going to write anything again. If I could sum up 2023 in a word, it would definitely be “uncertainty”. It was the feeling that predominated the year for me, and it likely exacerbated my inability to write, because I felt unable to compartmentalize my stress and focus on imaginative exercises.
Things looked to be improving in the spring though. I might not have been writing, but I was making progress with my main objective for the year, which was to find a job based in London that offered enough for me to afford the high cost of living here. I started getting more interviews, and at the end of March I landed a new job as a copywriter for a design agency. Life was good for a while and my confidence was through the roof. Ultimately, it didn’t work out however, and after several months I got made redundant. At the time, it really stung, but in retrospect it might have been good for my personal and professional development. Lots of people get made redundant. It’s quite a normal thing to happen. A brutal reality of the working world. My problem was that I assumed my current circumstances would simply continue into the future, that I was “in”, and didn’t have to worry anymore. But the reality of the working world is a lot more dynamic, a lot more fluid. I was quite naïve not to account for forces beyond my control.
At the time, it devastated my confidence and it took me a long time to recover. I didn’t want to see anyone because I felt like a lousy version of myself, and I didn’t want people to see that. I had this stupid idea that I needed to fix my situation before showing my face, but my friends insisted I come out. The social calendar wasn’t going to wait for me to get my act together, and found myself unable to say no. Usually, I felt better once I was actually out; it was just the idea of it that troubled me. I had a very negative self-image, and when I imagined myself out with friends, I assumed that they would see the same image of me that I was seeing, and I didn’t like to think about that. Obviously, it was all in my head.
After a shit summer, things started to improve. I’d stopped pitying myself and I felt my confidence returning. I started to get a lot of interviews all of a sudden, and I felt myself actually getting quite good at them. At the beginning of 2023, I was nervous before job interviews. By autumn, I was used to it. Once an interview started, I felt myself becoming confident and talkative. I liked talking about the writing process. I got an adrenaline kick from connecting with interviewers.
In October, I got a new job as an in-house copywriter for a financial services company. My confidence surged, but I had to remind myself that to make it in London’s cutthroat professional world, I couldn’t be complacent; I had to remain agile, thick-skinned, and realistic. Obviously getting this job is a good development, but I’ve learned that getting a job is never a happy ending. There’s no promised land where you’ve made it and that’s that. Rather, it’s a step forward in a lifelong process. Nonetheless, it meant that 2023 ended on a high note.
This post was difficult to write because I didn’t want to revisit my redundancy and the miserable summer that followed. But I couldn’t very well write about my 2023 without them—my year was dominated by my professional journey and the impact it had on my mental health. Were I to omit all references to my redundancy back in June, then this post would be like a sandwich with no filling. It’s true that I do like these Year in Review posts to be “highlight reels” to look back on in the future, but they’re also stories. And while the story of 2023 wasn’t exactly a fun one, I think it came with a lot of positive progress. Not everything that’s good is necessarily fun or happy. And I think that should I get made redundant again, I’ll be better equipped to handle it. I learned a lot of practical lessons this year, I massively improved my copywriting skills, and overall, I feel like a more experienced, capable human being.
“Maybe that job was like your first love,” Aaron told me during one of our lengthy video calls during the summer. “She’s not the one you end up marrying, but she teaches you something valuable that you’ll carry with you forever.”
As I mentioned earlier—while 2023 might not have felt great on the whole, it wasn’t without its moments. I read some amazing books like Heatwave by Victor Jestin, Normal People by Sally Rooney, and Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie. Emily and I ate and drank our way through a dozen different cafes, bars, and restaurants in London. I babysat a local sausage dog named Ziggy. Taylor dropped re-releases for Speak Now and 1989, there were some incredible AoE2 tournaments like NAC 4 and Warlords 2, and Scorsese reunited with De Niro to give us Killers of the Flower Moon. I enjoyed cozy homemade dinners of fajitas or soba with my roommates Minako and Yíjūn. In April I threw a birthday party for Emily that included mermaid balloons, party games, and a customized chocolate fudge cake. In fact, birthdays were responsible for most of my favorite memories in 2023. We celebrated Jolie with a picnic at Hyde Park, eating cheese and cold cuts before lazing on blankets under the trees, feeling the hot sun on our eyelids. We celebrated Hilde with a picnic at Greenwich Park followed by sushi and wine at one of her favorite spots. And we celebrated Sigrún with a picnic at East Greenwich Pleasaunce in which we decapitated a caterpillar cake and discussed burial rites, atheism, and polygamy. As usual, I didn’t tell anyone about my own birthday, but somehow my close friend Lucia found out, and organized an evening of Thai food, shuffleboard, and cocktails at London Bridge in the company of Emily, Hilde, Daisy, Rae, Minako, and Sigrún. Minako’s parents came to visit us for her graduation, and her mom made us a lovely dinner of miso soup and tonkatsu, which we washed down with sake. When the summer ended, Minako moved in with her partner Ørjan, and Yíjūn and I welcomed our new roommate, Robin—a nurse, ailurophile, and thrill-seeker from the south coast. I went to the theatre for the first time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, catching two amazing plays in Dr Semmelweis and The Confessions. Robin and I went to see my all-time favorite comedian, Frankie Boyle—and it was incredible to finally see him live. I went on a memorable Bookstore Crawl through London with friends from my Publishing MA, which you can read about here. In December a few of us went to see Icelandic pop singer Daði Freyr at a gig in Kingston, complete with free Santa hats upon entry and synth-pop covers of Christmas songs. At work, we had an amazing Christmas party at The Landmark, a 5-star luxury hotel in London, where we got fucked-up on white wine and danced to a live band—I’d never experienced anything like that before. I had a nice Christmas back in Nailsea with my family, joined this time by my brother’s puppy Scout. I showed them Past Lives, we played games of Articulate!, and my mom made the Christmas turkey with stuffing on the inside this time. On NYE, Robin and I went for a Thai meal followed by drinks and dancing at a local pub, which was a nice end to the year.
As you can see, while 2023 might not have been a very happy year overall, it still had plenty of happy moments that I know I’ll look fondly back on in years to come.
TumbleweedWrites 