“Don’t rush” the messages always say. After I post something about needing to restart work after a break, whether a holiday or a move or a week that fell apart, I get beautiful, supportive messages that urge “don’t rush, don’t rush, don’t rush”. And while I feel and embrace the loving intention behind the message I always think “but I’m not rushing?”

It could have gone one of two ways. I couldn’t call it, before the move, what was going to happen to my creativity after it. Either it was going to catch fire, or it was going to smoke away to a barely scorched log.

One of my dearest friends recently launched a new Substack. I received a text from her in the morning saying she was thinking about it, and when I got back from my hike a few hours later it was live. As always with these things, separate from the happiness and pride we feel for our friends there is also what we make it mean about us.

I kept putting off making the thing that would become Story Class. I wouldn’t even let myself have an idea for it, wafting away every thought saying “no, that’s not enough”. With everything I have made over the last year I have taken a high stakes approach: “this has to be it. This has to work”. I pinned all my financial hopes on big, untested risks, my expectations sky-high, and was invariably left scrabbling in a shortfall afterwards.

What it all comes back to, is a work worth living. Every decision, every change and shift, every transition of the business model, every challenge undertaken, every yes that should have been a no and every no that should have been a yes – all of them were in hopes of making a work worth living.

So that really exemplifies why I came into 2023 knowing that if I was to build the business back up to the firm foundation I craved, I had to actually know what I did. Not in general, not sort of, not “it depends” – I had to know, unequivocally, what I was here to do.

It started in August. I was driving back from a week with my family. In the last fifteen minutes of the journey you come up off the expressway and all of a sudden, as you crest a little hill, there are THE MOUNTAINS. They spring like a pop up book ahead of you, the tallest peaks in the country, and at their tail end, the smaller hill behind my house. Usually when I see this view I feel my entire self lift – “there’s my hill! Here’s my home!”.

It has been an effort to start writing this. I haven’t written a word since the beginning of January, when I had all this news to share, when I published my intentions for the year with a flourish, when this was the year I was going to show up but then… I can’t find the word.

When I go back over my reflections of 2022, the words that stick out are “unfocused”, “drifting”, “waiting”. Last year I tried on a more casual approach to work, a following the feelings, see what happens approach; and not a lot did happen, because I wasn’t making anything happen. I scraped and scrabbled and it all felt so hard. I didn’t want another year like that.

The trouble is, I have always wanted to be everything. My dream career choices in childhood ranged wildly from farmer to teacher to fashion designer to Prime Minister. I would be so sure, as I traced figures from the Next catalogue to colour my own designs onto, that this was it, only to jump aboard a totally different ship when new inspiration took me.

If I have listened to anything that is not Taylor Swift’s Midnights in the last two weeks it has been by mistake. The album goes on in the car, in the kitchen, and in my head – word for word, beat for beat – any time I am not actually listening to it. I scream the lyrics so hard I give myself a headache. At first I was unsure about it, but by my third listen I was certain – this music was curing me.

About a month ago I sat outside a cafe with my friend, the one that does my favourite coffee, and noticed a small white note on the door saying “we are looking for staff”. I thought “I bet it would be nice to work here”, and then we got on with our day, and then I spent the rest of the week thinking about how much I would actually like to work there.

There is something so particular about being lost and blocked with your work. There is the shame of course, of being so lazy and so unfocused, and trying to hide it from the world so they won’t think less of you. There is the frustration of having all this energy with no outlet, of actually wanting to have work to enjoy but not having the ideas to work on.

There has not been a day in my entire life where I have arrived at a desk and snapped into flow the moment my bottom hits the seat. There has not been a project I have undertaken that sprung into life at the first twist of the key in the ignition.

For as long as I can remember, work has been a rush. I was always late for school, and then always late for work. In my own business I was always right up against deadline, putting things off until they had to be done with all the other things that also had to be done. Always pushing and striving for more, never really doing what I was doing in the moment but a few steps ahead.

You may have seen me sharing my to do lists on Instagram Stories, and if you’ve seen that you’ll have seen how often I change my mind. It can be little things, like writing this post on Monday not Friday, or doing a podcast episode about y instead of x. Or sometimes it’s big things like taking all the focus and content plans for autumn, and doing the opposite.

I have now been single for two years. This, at 31, is the longest period of time I have not had a boyfriend since I was 12 years old. Which is… kinda frightening as a stat. Because I was so young, yes, but also because for seventeen years there was someone else in and around my life.

A while ago I was on my afternoon lap of the country roads when I passed a girl who was about sixteen. She had her ear buds in but she looked up a beamed broadly at me, a smile I recognised as the one I always used to do to signal to grown ups that I wasn’t one of the scary teenagers, I was a good one. As I smiled back the thought in my head was “god I wish I could switch places with you”.

Launching The Cabin has shown me the problem with fulfilment. Well, not fulfilment itself, but talking about it. I have found it hard to talk about fulfilment because it is so “is that it?”.

Maybe you find this. The desire for fulfilment to be something more than just what you want. The expectation that it is this magical thing glinting on a hill top, and then the disappointment when you find that it's just… doing more of what you want to be doing.