Tag Archives: resigning

Don’t wake me

Posted on July 17, 2011 | 3 Comments

My first book Hunting Lila comes out in just over two weeks’ time, and joy, it’s getting rave reviews and will be on the 3 for 2 tables in Smiths and Waterstones throughout August.

It’s been a long journey and if you were with me from the start of can we live here you’ll know how I only first started writing when we decided to leave the UK because I couldn’t think of any other idea for how to make money. And thank God I didn’t google how much writers actually earn. But anyway fast forward 18 months and I actually have not one, but THREE books coming out in the next year.

ahahahahahahahahaha

There’s a line in Lila where she thinks that maybe she’s lying on a pavement in south east London comatose because she can’t believe the reality of her life and that’s pretty much how I feel every single day. I walk around grinning like a simpleton. (When you do this it’s surprising how many men smile back at you). I also drink a lot of wine because a) in Indonesia there isn’t any (or none that I can afford) and b) I feel I have an excuse to celebrate every minute of the day. I also buy a lot of things (more on this later) kidding myself that one day I’m going to be rich and will be able to afford to pay it off.

Ahhahahahahahahaahaha (that’s my publisher and every other writer in the universe bar JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer and Stephen King laughing at my naivete).

For the last two weeks in London I’ve been meeting my agent and my publisher for posh lunches, I’ve been editing my second book, and I’ve been working hard on promoting Hunting Lila (in between shopping of course) – there’s a blog tour starting on the 1st August and I am stalking the heck out of readers on Goodreads (I figure if I friend them all they might feel more inclined to give me a nicer review – cunning huh?). My favourite question so far in the interviews: How has your life changed since getting a book deal?

The funny thing is, I realised that my life wouldn’t be that much different to how it is now – ok fewer wining and dinings probably, but we’d still be in Bali. And I think that’s a really cool thing. My writing didn’t create the lifestyle. The lifestyle created the writing. (Ok and also John paying for everything at the moment is sustaining the lifestyle – thank you thank you amazing husband).

But the really exciting news, well second after the news that I have bought the most stupendous Vivienne Westwood dress and killer shoes for the launch, is that a ten year friendship with someone I met at uni has evolved into lunch at the Ivy Club (Daaaaaarling) and an offer to option Hunting Lila by an independent production company.

It’s early days of course and I’m naturally circumspect about stuff like that, though I am going to be wearing Westwood to the premiere and have written the clause to go in the contract which gives me the right to sit on the casting couch and test drive the male actors…but as I said, I’m totally circumspect…

If I am actually lying in a coma on a street in south London somewhere, please don’t bother waking me up.

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The morning after…

Posted on December 12, 2009 | 1 Comment

There’s a smile splitting my face in two at 7.30 in the morning despite my epic hangover. Let’s analyse why.

  1. I don’t have to get up for work.

Don’t look for number 2. There is no 2.

I don’t have to get up for work EVER again. Shhhhh don’t interrupt my joy with questions like ‘Forever? Or just for the next year?’ In this world, In this pre-lit dawn,  I’m going with forever.

I lie there contemplating this astonishing truth. I was poised for terror, panic, crippling paralysing fear of the kind only the girl with the long hair in Ring can normally inspire in me. It takes me a few seconds  to scan my mindspace, like a person who’s just been shot trying to figure out what parts of their body are still functioning. Then it comes to me. That strange,  startling, blinding feeling is euphoria. I am, I realise, more intensely happy than I’ve been in ooooh a pretty damn long time. Let’s go with the forever word again. Birth of first child? Wedding day? Errrr. Maybe this happy.

I lie there coccooned in a mountain of giant pillows that Lula has piled over me to keep the monsters at bay pondering this alien feeling.  Then I throw off the monster barriers and without really thinking about what I’m doing I walk to my wardrobe and start ripping through it, yanking all the clothes that I class as work clothes from hangers and flinging them onto the bed. I stand and stare at the pile and then stuff the lot into a bag and go back to bed.

My biggest fear was about a loss of identity. But I don’t feel it. The word that pops into my head is unfettered. Someone suggested I could do a Mr. Ben and choose a new identity and job title every day. But I don’t want one. Unless I can be a pirate.  Maybe I’m still drunk I realise as I stagger slightly back to bed. I did have a unique blend of spirits last night  followed by a bacon double cheeseburger.

Another thing astonishes me. For the last 6 months I’ve been stressed. Imagine my brain as the mosh pit of the Brixton Academy during a White Zombie performance and you’d be about there.  But this morning, I wander downstairs. The doors are hanging off their hinges like wobbly teeth, a man is chainsawing away in the garage, two dozen boxes lie scattered like an obstacle course for the Running Man in the living room and there is a list as long as a banker’s bonus of things to do taped to the fridge door but  I’m so not stressed. I even smile at the mess left in the kitchen. Even the crap that has lodged in the plug hole of the sink because John refuses to use the strainer doesn’t get a rise out of me.

I am still happy when we leave the house to do some things on the high street.

‘I need coffee,’ I say.

‘Sure you can afford that now?’ John asks.

Ok, so I knew at some point something was going to take the edge off my euphoria.

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Burrowing through shit (as Tucker says)…

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

Opposite me are six men in suits. They are grey and weary  and joyless. Having said that, I am pretty joyless right now too.  I wish they would stop holding these conferences on high floors. It’s just tempting fate. Either I’m going to jump or I’m going to push someone. Though, as it’s a voluntary sector conference I’d have to navigate around way too many soapboxes to make it to the window and I’m lazy.

After the first three syllables spoken by the keynote my brain of its own accord switches off like when they stick a knife in the cerebral cortex of a Terminator T800 model to stop it rampaging.  I know that my work husband is bored too because out the corner of my eye I can see he is mauling his pen like a hungry cocker spaniel chewing on a bone. This is a dead giveaway that he is either thinking or bored. In this case I opt for bored because there’s nothing to be thinking about other than how to make it to the windows and he has just reached for his stash of Rennie and popped one which means he is bored and frustrated. Join the club. I wish he had something stronger I could pop. I gaze out the window and see the tower of the Truman brewery and sigh audibly.

Four days suddenly seems like a very, very long way away. As in, about as far away as the paleozoic era looking backwards. It feels like we’ll have colonized the moons of Jupiter before I get to hand over my security pass.

In truth I am feeling very ambivalent about four days’ time, because in four days’ time life as I know it ends. Maybe I’m institutionalised – like the guy from the Shawshank Redemption who gets paroled and finds freedom all too much so hangs himself. At least I’ll have a soapbox to stand on. I’m reminded all of a sudden of a Malcom Tucker line – It’s like the Shawshank Redemption, though we’re burrowing through more fucking shit and there’s no fucking redemption. He could have been describing this conference.

I wasn’t this freaked out before childbirth. I was so ready for that.  So ready in fact that at 8 months I was sharpening the knife and preparing to give myself a c-section I was so done with waiting. This however, this stepping into the realms of the unemployed and possibly insane, this I’m not ready for at all. I have no idea how I’m going to feel on Friday when I wake and realise that I don’t have to go to work. The place that after home is where I’ve spent most of my time in the past 8 years and which has occupied way too much of my brain space. Mostly I’m scared about who on Friday I’ll be.

I will be me of course, but I’ll be a different me. I will not have a title for one thing.  I am starting to understand why Princess Di fought to keep her title in the divorce. One grows very fond of such things. If I’m not Head of Projects what will I be? I try to list all the other things I am known as to make myself feel less of a nobody – mummy mo (to the bean), sugarplum (to a select few), Lardarse (to my brother – this doesn’t make me feel better strangely), Blossom (to my dad). Once I was called a MILF by a random stranger…that does make me feel better.

Where am I going with this? I know this is classic psychotherapy material. I must rid myself of ego and all that but one thing at a time. I need to rid myself of my security pass first and that’s going to be a big enough challenge.

Then I wonder what other things might change come Friday other than my bank balance, my alarm setting and my freedom from conferences that make me want to commit suicide. I wonder whether certain character traits I possess might disappear along with my business cards. For example what will happen to my perennial impatience, intolerance of stupidity, cynicism, sarcasm, brusqueness and flaring nostrils? Will they vanish too?

Yeah. Not likely. I hear you.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Anything pour moi…except the records maybe.

Posted on November 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

I am going to be drawing some parallels now between myself and Diane Kruger because I look just like her. So get ready.

We just watched this film called ‘Anything for her’ (spoiler alert!). In it Diane is accused of killing her boss and sentenced to 20 years in a prison where the hallogen strip lighting makes even her, and lets not forget she played Helen of Troy, look ugly. But her husband, who you don’t believe for a nanosecond she would look twice at in real life and which therefore put my belief suspending ability really to the test in ways that even New Moon didn’t, is convinced she’s innocent (and actually she is innocent despite me yelling ‘she so did it’ for the first half of the film).

So the husband spends ages drawing scale plans of the prison on his bedroom walls, robs a drug dealer accidentally murdering him in the process, sells everything they own, says a permenant adios to all his family and then breaks the ill-lit Diane out of the prison so they can leg it to San Salvador with bambino in tow.

When the credits roll I turn to John,

‘Would you do that for me?’

He pauses an inordinately long time. I assume this is because he is weighing up whether he would say adios to his record collection for a life on the run with me. I don’t want to know the answer to that one so I hurry on…

‘Well I suppose it’s slightly different. Her husband was convinced of her innocence, whereas you’d probably be convinced of my guilt. For pretty good reason.’

John laughs but he doesn’t argue with me. Hmmmmmmm.

It sparks some debate in my head that night whilst I’m trying to sleep about the things that people will do for love, and all the things you wouldn’t be able to do without someone – metaphorically at least -breaking you out, getting you a fake passport and subbing your escape. I’d better start being nice to John. Never know when I might need him to make that call over the records or me.

However, it occurs to me that whilst John might have nagging doubts over my innocence if I ever got charged with murder, he has on the other hand shown himself to be a pretty cool conspirator in plotting my escape from the strip lighting of number 1 London Bridge. Without his reassurance I’d definitely still be imprisoned / employed. Witness…

‘Are you sure we can do this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really, really sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you keep me if it all goes wrong?’

I think he says yes to this. I block out the answer.

So, you see, Diane and I have a lot more in common than just looking the same and fancying Pacey from Dawson’s Creek.

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As a super social ape I am starting my own shrewdness

Posted on November 13, 2009 | 1 Comment

Two days ago I was walking along the street, slipped on some cobbles and reaching out to steady myself, grabbed hold of a man’s penis. It’s been two days and I can still feel the giggle bubbles of hysteria breaking over me every time I think about it. It gets better though. After grabbing his penis I then had to spend two hours in a meeting with him – he wasn’t a stranger. I knew him. I had to sit and eat lemon tart and discuss NHS commissioning with him whilst trying not to laugh or look him in the eye without thinking, ‘I just groped your penis.’ No matter how long I live, no matter how many Frankie Boyle podcasts I listen to, this will forever remain the funniest thing that has ever happened to me.

I met Mark Earls too – the author of Herd. He was really nice, I say that even though he got a gift hamper and I didn’t and even though his 8 minute session was better than mine and my work husband’s. He got me thinking about social behaviour and how we humans like to follow the herd. Mark says it’s because we’re ‘super social apes’. My penis grabbing is surely evidence of that very fact. He should use that as an example in his next book.

So we’ve proved I’m a super social ape but I think it’s really clear that I’m not following the herd. Or the shrewdness – because that’s the collective term for a group of apes. Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t either until I looked it up. Resigning is not an example of mass behaviour.

The book Herd actually has this as a subtitle: How to change mass behavior by harnessing our true nature.  So I’ve just ordered the book because I want to know how to create a mass movement of people who  say Fuck it and jump off cliffs. Not real cliffs. I mean the metaphorical cliff called working 9-5 for someone else.  I’m going to create this movement by figuring out how to harness our true nature. I think that my penis grabbing might be the first step on this path. But I also think that to do this properly I need to read the book. Then I might ask Mark for some help because he’s cleverer than me. Then I’ll get back to you when I’m ready to launch the movement. Until then buy Herd and Fuck It.

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I am taught a lesson by Alannis & Life

Posted on November 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

If I had a bullet and a gun right now I’d kill myself

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I’m definitely going to kill myself

I am sending texts to my work husband.  People are walking between the tables like prison guards at The Maze and I’m half expecting a baton to come crashing down on my illicitly texting hand.

I’m at some sort of unconference but I think they could have better marketed it as an alternative to a fume filled car. It’s kind of ironic that this mental torture is happening in Amnesty International’s HQ. I want to start screaming about human rights violations but then I turn and see the pictures on the wall of refugees and starving children and guilt swallows my temper tantrum. I decide to focus. On what my feedback comments are going to be.

At 1.01pm I can be found propping up the bar in the Barley Mow where I have fled so fast that the other people at the conference are probably still rising from their seats to join the queue for limp sandwiches whilst I am already pouring a cold beer down my throat. I contemplate staying here all afternoon making friends with Negro Modelo but then a woman with a voice like she’s been dragged over hot coals whilst smoking 50 B&H all at once sits next to me and orders a double baileys. I see the future and decide to be brave and return.

Refreshed from my pint and a quick spin around American Apparel (one skirt – check) I bounce back into the room. Within 5  minutes I’ve had to leave a conversation before I speared someone with my chicken satay skewer for being a twat. I think the beer has made me aggressive. No, I smile at myself,  that’s just me.

The afternoon trudges by, though they cut the last hour -  something which I feel I can take credit for – sometimes having an unpoker face works. Without saying a word I have curdled the atmosphere to such a degree than four grown adults feel the only cure is to bring proceedings to a premature close. Bliss – there is now time for a quick file and varnish at Nails Inc.

Like Alannis Morisette, everything seems ironic to me today. Yesterday I was waxing lyrical about how great work was and how I was having second thoughts about leaving. Well now life, that great, wise teacher has ripped the rose tinted contact lenses from my eyes and reminded that there’s quite a lot I don’t enjoy in my day to day working life. Today has once and for all cured me of my fear of jumping off the cliff.  I am now running full tilt towards it.

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stepping off escalators without valium

Posted on October 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

I was talking the other day in a post about the sense of community we’re finding just as we leave – remember the jazz dancing neighbours spinning off lamp posts and the pimping out I’m doing of John? – in a similar way, just as I resign and prepare to bugger off for a rather long time, my job starts to get really exciting (as opposed to just exciting which clearly it is on a daily basis all you colleagues reading this), things are starting to happen, interesting people are appearing left, right and centre – money is almost literally being thrown in my direction, unfortunately not the sort of money I can use in Topshop or for buying ludicrously expensive moisturisers. It’s generally speaking public money – the kind that can only be spent on public good and positive outcomes for disadvantaged people. Our finance director won’t let me spend it on positive outcomes for my wardrobe which I feel is putting me into the disadvantaged bracket.

So because it’s exciting times, I’m starting to panic yet again that now’s not the time to go. That now is infact the time to stay. That if I come back I will be back to square one. That, horror of horrors – I will be FORGOTTEN. I decide I need to compose a Wilfred Owen style poem to myself.

Before I can begin writing ‘dulce et decorem est pro resign and go travelling’, someone gives me some good advice: ‘Don’t panic, you are only stepping off the escalator and you’ll be able to step back on it if you want to.’

Yes, I think triumphantly, women step off that escalator all the time to have babies. I did. I put away the valium feeling renewed and confident. Then I am reminded that just two weeks after having Lula I was phoning up my work husband and begging him, literally begging him, to give me some work or be responsible for my being sectioned.

How, I wonder, will stepping off the escalator be any different this time? Other than John having to negotiate the Indian mental health system and not the British one, in order to have me sectioned. But I look out the window and it’s not even 5pm and it’s pitch dark outside and my breath is condensing around me and I think screw that escalator, maybe I can find a nicer, sunnier, slower moving escalator in Bali. And if not I can always skype my work husband and beg for work. Or, plan b, drip feed myself valium.

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Waitrose, Denial and Consulting

Posted on October 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

I am in Waitrose and I am about to cry. It isn’t because of the prices, nor because of the semi-religious experience that shopping in those wide, airy aisles inspires in me, nor because Lula now strapped firmly into her buggy after hightailing it around the store, is screaming ‘But I WANT a croissant!’ over and over until every person in there is standing with their hands clamped to their ears, staring in horror at the middle class monster I have spawned. No, I’m not crying about that, although I want to. I’m crying because I have realised my days of shopping in Waitrose are numbered.

I don’t always shop in Waitrose. Some days I slum it in M&S.  Ok, that’s not true, though I’d like it to be. I’m actually a Sainsbury’s girl. Waitrose is my treat shop. Some women go for facials – I go to Waitrose. Some people go to church – I find enlightenment and a rather nice line in rice crisp things at Waitrose. My days of shopping there are numbered however, because I have only just realised that very shortly I will have no money. Even though I resigned a while back now, this particular fact didn’t permeate my consciousness until today. If it had I probably wouldn’t have resigned. Denial is a handy psychological tool.

Come January I won’t have anyone paying me anymore for delegating, practicing creative writing in fundraising reports and reading Lainey Gossip in my downtime. I won’t even be able to shop in Lidl. The thought is enough to turn my insides liquid (the thought of having no income, not the thought of shopping in Lidl – I get my catfood there). I have never not had money coming in. When I was a kid I had pocket money (actually one of the many bonuses of my parents divorcing was that both of them paid me pocket money – it was like double funding). When I was a teenager I had money earned from temping (I was a very good receptionist though I did get fired from Accenture – the thing I am most proud of in my life – yes even more so than having a child). And I’ve spent every year since graduating earning. What will happen at the end of January when no money comes popping into my account? Well, not much actually because I’ll have the money that is supposedly buying a new bathroom with marble tiling and gold plated taps to see me through for a while. And when payday does come around, I will be laid out on a massage table under a coconut grove in Patnem beach in Southern Goa so hopefully I won’t even notice.

However, John says I need to focus on thinking up ways of earning income when we are away. I worry that maybe he doesn’t want to ‘keep me.’ As if I would be a kept woman I want to yell, but secretly and appallingly, I think I wouldn’t mind it. The feminist in me is like a caged beast. I can hear her snarling at me. Oh, Ok. I let her out. I need to earn my own money. I will not take money from my husband. Just from the bank.

So, I sit with my pencil hovering over the paper trying to work out what possible skills I have that I can use when I am away travelling. An hour passes, then a day, then several months. Then it comes to me. I can be a consultant. There are so many people calling themselves consultants then surely I can too. What do you need to be a consultant? You need people to consult you. And you need to be able to look like you know what you are talking about. I know I can do this latter. It is what I do in my job every day. I am well practiced. I just need people now to consult me about things. What should I consult on though? I only have two ideas so far: I could consult on how to commit career suicide. Or on how to not get divorced whilst planning a round the world trip (though I might have to wait on this one until we’re safely on the plane or I might not have any credibility).

Failing that, I can write. And try to get paid for it. And maybe one day my blog will be as big as Lainey’s. Though with fewer pictures of Robert Pattinson on it.

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Nightmares, feeling the fear and a little thing called status

Posted on September 20, 2009 | 3 Comments

Last night I dreamt I was running around a supermarket with towering white shelves. We were in India. I was looking for something. I can’t remember what now. And I was throwing up all over the shelves, projectile style.

The night before I dreamt – and this is a little weirder – that I was being tied to a giant wooden cross (like the one they use in Jesus Christ Superstar) and thrown into a swimming pool face down.

The night before that – I’m not going there on a public forum. I’d lose all my Twitter followers and gain a whole load more. It was dark. And graphic in a way that would take you days of trawling through the deepest recesses of the internet to find something that even came close. Which makes it sound like it was sexual – which it wasn’t. For me anyway.

I do what I always do with my hallucinogenic dreams – I turn to John and ask him to decipher them using his knowledge of pop psychology. Even he struggles to keep his face neutral at the symbolism of my drowning whilst being tied to a cross. Apparently the fear I’m prodding down during the day, is poking up at night into my dreams. But I don’t get it – fear? Why is fear hiding out in my subconscious? The first week after I slammed my resignation letter down on the CEO’s desk, the smile that was splitting my face was so wide that I thought I might need stitches. I wasn’t afraid. I was euphoric. But now that has started to fade. Which sucks. Because I can’t get it back. You can only resign once from the same job after all.

So I start blaming the voice of authority in my head, that sounds just like my father, for seeding the fear. I feel like I need to start reading ‘Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway’, donning a hooded sweater and dancing up the steps of Capitol Hill punching the air, before the voice in my head which is telling me loudly that I’m ‘insane to give up a well paid job in the midst of a recession’ makes me shuffle over to my boss on my knees and beg for my resignation letter to be shredded.

Luckily, before I can do this, the voice of the eighteen year old who normally rules the airwaves in my head (and convinces me I’m not too old to shop at Topshop) is like, ‘Whatever, shuttup,’ to the dad voice, and she’s shouting louder so I’m listening to her.

Anyway, I don’t need a job for the next year because the bank manager is nice and thinks we’re getting a new bathroom. And we shall be living in South East Asia on rice and beans  and coasting in the spare bedrooms of friends and family wherever possible (and in a rather luxurious two bed villa with a pool in Ubud but shhhhhh). Thus I have declared to John that together with the bathroom slush fund, there are sufficient monies in the bump account (that we saved for a second child that we’re now definitely not having after the crushing tantrums of our first child showed me the light) to see us through on our journey. The extra pocket money from the bank manager is now necessary because having just paid £2000 for the tickets (Alula had better be sleeping in that seat and not on us for every single one of those flights), I have precisely £489 left in my travelling account. I know India is cheap, but it’s not that cheap.

But back to my nightmares, I hate to admit it but I think the real cause is not cheese, nor the voices in my head. It’s not the job issue, or rather the having no job issue, nor is it the giving up of a house, saying goodbye to friends, or the knowledge I won’t see Topshop in awhile (which actually, whilst I’m on a reality check, is coming at the right time - I just got caught in the stampede for Christopher Kane’s collection launch and realised that I actually am too old for dayglow and studs). It’s really all about giving up status. Such an ugly word but it’s the truth.

For the last eight years I’ve been working in the non-profit sector as a Head of Something. And there is a little part of me that is terrified of giving up that word. A head. I’m a head of something for another 13 weeks and after that I’m a nobody. I’m just me. And I won’t have lots of people to boss about. Only two, I remind myself, trying to look on the bright side.

I ask Lula, “Who’s the boss? Who’s in charge?”

“I am,” She tells me.

Damn it.

by Sarah

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Why? Why? Why?

Posted on September 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

A lot of people keep asking us why – what inspired us to do this trip?

About six months ago I wrote my reasons on some Post-Its and stuck them on our bedroom wall next to a pinboard that I covered in pictures of white beaches, turreted chateaux, hammocks and clippings from the guardian travel section. Oh and this postcard.

La Majorite c'est vous

Here are my reasons:
Reasons for a new life (in the sun)

There were several things that poked me along the way. It took ten months from niggling half-formed ‘got to do something’ thoughts, to resignation letters and flight bookings. Here are my main prodders.

1. We are sitting on a plane flying back from Mexico. It is early Feb 2009. There is a man behind me whose naked, tattooed gut is pressing against the back of my chair. I look around the plane and think of jumping out the emergency exit. And this is not a response to ten hours on a flight with a toddler. This is more to do with the horror of coming back to Britain after two sun drenched weeks road tripping up the Mayan coast. That was when I first had thoughts along the lines of ‘why are we living this life in London that allows us a couple of exotic holidays a year when we could be doing it full time?’

The idea parked for a while until…

2. We speak to Rich, John’s brother. He runs several social enterprises from Mumbai and is generally inspiring. He tells us to just do it. I feel like I’m in a Nike ad.

3. I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-hour Work Week and fall in love with the concept of not working ever again.

4. I realise that Lula, our baby, is no longer a baby and will be starting school in 15 months’ time (Sep 2010). A quick scan of the local Ofsted reports puts me into a panic. We have ‘that’ private vs state debate and I realise that neither really works for me. I am just not sure that our education system is providing what children need for the 21st century in either sector. Add to this my horror of facing the prospect of being tied into working in London in stressful jobs for the rest of our lives (at this stage I had parked Tim Ferris and was getting realistic).

5. I manage to convince John on steak night Wednesday that this is what we need to do. Absolutely and completely. And totally.

5. I read Fuck it: The ultimate spiritual way and decide to say Fuck It to everything. Job? Fuck it. Scared of not having an income? Fuck it. Possibility of getting amoebic dysentary in India with a child in tow? Fuck it.

6. One of my best project managers at work tells me she is leaving. I say Fuck it. I am too.

7. I resign and they make plans for my succession. It is like a bridge is burning behind me and I can’t turn back.

8. Ex-housemate comes around to discuss renting house off of us. She looks out window, sees a robin and says, ‘but won’t you miss things like English birds?’ I look at John then back to Lizzie and say, ‘Er, no. When I’m lying on my sunbed by the pool in Bali, I don’t think I’m going to be thinking about how much I miss English birds.’

9. Every single person I tell our plan to turns around and says ‘That’s so inspiring’ except for my father in law who thinks we are mad. I feel like Gandhi. No one has ever told me I’m inspiring before and now I feel like I’ve been told it 384 times in the last week alone. I could get used to this. I might not be a Head of Projects anymore but I am inspiring.

by Sarah

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