leaving everything behind

and making it look so easy, as julia wolf said

It might just be a quarter-life crisis, but I’ve decided I actually sort of hate my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful for what I have. I have a career that most people on here would kill for, and I’m hugely respected in my field. I have the most incredible partner, and a cat and a dog, and a family that is flawed but would do anything for me. I should be happy, but I’m not, and it has taken me a long time to work out why that was.

The truth is, I have come to a point in my career where I can’t progress any further. I knew that I would feel this way last year, when I had a book reach #1 on the Kindle store. Once you reach the top, there’s not really any further that you can go. I considered going into management, and I have a degree in it, but it isn’t for me. I want to work for myself, and that has constraints.

So, aged twenty-four, I had a colossal breakdown a few weeks ago. As the kids say, I am suffering from success. I’m not even a quarter of a century old yet, but I’ve achieved everything I want to do. I have a degree, I’m getting a second, and I have a bestselling book, not to mention an obscenely high salary that I do not deserve for the amount of work I do. I have a home in the countryside, and the perfect person to share it with, and my own little family, and for all intents and purposes the only real ‘progression’ I can make in my life is having a kid, which I do not want to do yet.

Honestly speaking, I didn’t know what to do to occupy the next seventy years. If I am only a quarter of the way through my life, or even one third, I don’t know how to fill it. It’s such a stupid problem to have, but it made me existential all the same. It was for that reason that I kept it to myself for a while, because I figured it was simply a depressive episode that I would snap out of, but when that didn’t happen I knew that I needed help.

Of course, the first person I went to was Ben. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, he was beyond supportive, and understood me entirely. We sat and brainstormed ideas for a while, and then he started to sound sort of uncertain. I wondered if he was going to tell me to suck it up and continue, but obviously he would never do that. Instead, he put forth the one idea that I had always told him I did not want to do.

He suggested I opened a bakery.

When I was little, it was what I wanted to do. My friend Ella and I had visions of us running a cat cafe, with maid outfits like in Tokyo Mew Mew, and I really did want it, but as I got older I realised that those businesses have been struggling for years and it’s only getting worse, especially with the cost of living crisis. I had put it in the back of my mind, safely in the abyss, even though when I made a coffee cake Ben’s mum and sister were adamant that I should pursue it. I told him I was uncertain, that the timing wasn’t right, but he spoke to me as though he was positive it would work.

“Well, give it a try. You can write your own book too, while you’re at it, and go from three books a month to one for work while you get started. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work.”

He sounded so much like me in that moment, except with a southern accent. That was pretty much the speech I gave him a year and a half ago when I was trying to persuade him to make his own gardening business instead of working for someone else. He has flourished since then, so maybe I will too.

It’s funny, because I am always the first person to tell my friends to make big changes. I believe that if you are ready for something, your body will tell you before your brain, and when my friends are in a funk, I help them take stock and remove the dead weight. I’m good at it when it’s someone else, but admittedly when it comes to myself, I question it. I mean, if everything in my life is good, then why am I so miserable? I have been keeping myself going for months even though my job wasn’t as fulfilling as it once was, and it has started to show.

I’m losing my spark, the one that has always been settled in me when I’m in a good place. I don’t walk around the house singing as often, and I don’t have an urge to spend time outdoors. I just want to avoid my responsibilities and play on my phone. When this happens, I know that something is very wrong, and that I have to pull myself out of it. Thankfully, I’ve been looking after my friend’s dog Blue a lot, and as the little guy needs me to walk him three times a day, I’m getting my sunshine in.

At least now, I have a plan. In a couple of months, we will have moved into a new house, and I will be able to do something I have dreamed of for years. I’ve spent time putting together costs and profits and all of the numerical things, which has been great for my brain, and today I created a logo for it. I’ve cropped the name out so I don’t have people finding it later without my knowledge, but here it is.

I am a menace with Canva and eleven elements.

I wish that I had gone to Ben sooner, because today is the first time in weeks that I have felt as though I’m doing something worth my while when it comes to my career. Maybe it won’t work out, but if I finish this year and all I can say is “I tried something new, and I stepped out my comfort zone to do it”, then I’ll be fine with that.

I’ve also decided to bite the bullet and give antidepressants the good old college try. I’ve said before that I haven’t used anything for my mental health other than a short stint with a panic attack medication. I took it twice, and when I reached for it a third time after feeling an attack come on, I knew it was going to become an addiction. It wasn’t a bad attack, I knew that, but already I felt myself relying on medication and it frightened me.

Drug abuse and alcoholism have ruined the lives of many of my family members, and I have always been terrified that I would eventually follow suit, and it was so bad that I had a fear of paracetamol. If I had a migraine, I simply sat down and waited for it to pass, because the thought of getting addicted to pain relief far outweighed whatever pain I was in.

But my mum has a doctor, and he is incredible. He has talked us through what it would look like, and has told me that if I feel a reliance again I can call him and we will look at it further. We’re going to start me on antidepressants alone at first, and then if I need anything for stress and anxiety then we will add it on. For now, I just want to be out of my fog. I think that once I have the depression under control, I will be able to work on the rest of it myself, and once I have my better habits again, I’ll come off of them. That is the plan, at least.

I’m lucky to live in France, honestly, where all you have to do is go to a doctor, say that you don’t feel great, and then they write you a prescription. It’s cheap, too, even though I don’t have insurance.

I’ve always done this, though. When things are difficult, I run. I was struggling in England, and afraid of my exes, so I ran away to France. I struggled in my first year of university, and my mum had cancer while being the only parent at home, so I went to help instead of living my life there and figuring out the difficulties. I struggled with the idea of my social media being public and visible, so I locked it down completely.

And now, I am so tired of running. That was another thing holding me back; I never stick things out, I just jump to something else, and so I thought that this would be different. Now, I see that there has never been anything wrong with letting go of what doesn’t serve me. Sometimes, I have a more negative mindset than I would like to think. I am optimistic for the most part, but I’m only human, and that leads to me magnifying my flaws when there isn’t any real need to.

Regardless, I am changing my life. Soon enough, I will be in a new place with a new job, but with the same wonderful people in it with me. I’m not going to see it as me giving up, but evolving. My time as a ghostwriter may have come to an end, but my time as an author has not, and I am looking forward to writing my own story. I have the plot ready, and now all that is left to do is map it out fully and then write it. That’ll be easy enough after doing it for nearly seven years straight.

If you were looking for a sign to do something new, consider this it. We all have so much life left to lead, and if you want to spend it travelling or baking or reading, then do it. Otherwise, why are we here?