Tearing Up Plans and Crafting New Stories

When life derails your plans, how do you find the courage to start anew?

In December of 2019, I did something I hadn’t done for years—and it felt fantastic. With the help of an old-fashioned large-scale paper wall planner, I spent a solid two weeks mapping out the year ahead. The result was a Liquorice Allsorts chart of coloured washi tape and sticky dots. A visual representation of my hopes for the upcoming year. It was meant to keep me on track to "create a business and a life I love". (Anyone recognise that phrase?)

Six months later, I tore that wall planner into pieces.  

It was all looking quite rosy in January and February. I started a new Instagram account that focussed on the new business, began to build an email list and to write regularly, applying all I’d learned over decades of telling stories for the commercial and heritage sectors to real people. I found my true passion—in unearthing the small, personal stories of the individuals who make the real world and helping them find their own voice—and began work on content for what would have been my first online course.

But when the UK officially went into lockdown in March, our combined household income from the live events industry dried up overnight.

We all had to make big decisions at that time. Everyone made transitions, experienced losses, or pivoted (how I hate that word)  in some aspect of their life and business. That year, I pivoted so many times, four years later my head is still spinning. Like an rugby player with a head injury, the reverberations have echoed back and forth, rattling my brain, for far longer than I anticipated. 

My partner and I had to reassess our priorities and make some hard choices. Our priority was saving our home—the bungalow in my partner’s name that we had shared for the previous three years. To do that, we needed to sell my flat.

I abandoned the wall planner and invested the early lockdown months finishing the interior of the flat and transforming the garden from a bramble-ridden wilderness into an oasis of calm; ready to put the flat on the market the moment the estate agent said go. Despite the underlying anxieties, I allowed myself to enjoy the process. Instead of feeling upset at decorating for someone else in a space that had been hard won, I tried to think of it as a way to detach from the space; to make decisions that were commercial rather than personal.

The estate agent was positive. He loved the flat and everything I’d done to it. Londoners were desperate to get out of the pandemic capital and a bolthole by the sea was highly desirable. The moment lockdown was lifted, the flat was on the market. It should be a quick and easy sale.

If only.

That last paragraph—and the Insta-ready photos—doesn’t begin to touch on the stress of the selling process or the anxiety that erupted when a brand new damp problem was flagged by the survey and ripped the first buyer from my fingers just as the sale was about to go through. Or the frustration of constantly chasing the second buyer until she finally admitted she’d been made redundant and her mortgage offer rescinded. Or the anger that threatened to explode every rigid muscle in my body every time I had to answer yet another idiotic question from the third buyer about how when I last washed the windows or the likely cost of installing a cat flap. 

My stress levels were not helped the callous disdain of a government that thought an appropriate response to the decimation of the cultural and creative industries was to misuse one artist’s work to launch a dystopian campaign telling ballet dancers and other creatives to retrain in cyber; while one former politician, best known for previously crippling the British egg industry, exhorted us all to get jobs as delivery drivers.  

I made no attempt to plan for 2021. December and Christmas passed with as much joy as it did for all of us not attending a Downing Street party. 

It took over a year to complete the flat sale. A year of constantly fluctuating anxiety about finance and the state of the world and anger that, no matter how hard we worked, our fate was in the hands of strangers. We were all in survival mode. I gave no thought to planning.

All the time, that once beautiful wall planner was staring at me from the wall beside my desk saying, “You shoulda kept going. You could have made sooo much progress if you'd stayed on track."

I’ve never been great at switching off the anxious part of my brain to focus on something else. And I hate being guilted by stationary.

Tearing it up was a very deliberate choice that felt almost as good as its creation and early implementation. I’d been thinking for a while that I should just take it off the wall and put it away. If I saved it, I could come back to my original plans when the world had righted itself. Maybe I could salvage something from my original plans? 

But so much that it contained seemed redundant in this radically different world. And it’s too easy to spend more time trying to make old plans fit a new reality than it takes to start from scratch. 

It’s also easy to let old expectations, old stories that no longer fit, hold us back. Yes, it’s important to acknowledge these stories. But if we want to move forward, we can’t let them hold us back. 

“Hello, story. I know you're there. I see you. But frankly, you're not helping me as you are and I think you need a rewrite."

Sometimes it's good to just start afresh. To write a new story. So I let it go. I took the planner down from the wall and tore it into pieces small enough to fit in the recycling bin. Instead, I worked gently through multiple small plans without allowing myself to look at the big picture.

Something has happened this past December. Maybe, after four years, I’ve finally stopped spinning enough to see a way more than a couple of months ahead at a time. I got a new wall planner and new box of washi tape. And I now have a brand new Allsorts chart and a plan for the whole year ahead. 

That plan begins with finally launching the course I’ve been working on since January last year. It’s not the course I started four years ago. It’s something that has emerged more gently in this fallow period. Something that feels more solid and more grounded for all that.

But in all the excitement and focus of planning and creating, I’ve been reminded of another me-problem—telling people about what I’ve created.

We’re a week into January and I’m already a week behind on my shiny new Allsorts plan, simply because I’m incapable of doing the thing and talking about the thing at the same time. I’ve put time in my schedule for the talking and the telling, but it takes a huge mental shift for me to go from one to the other. Instead, I keep perfecting and tweaking the thing that no one knows about; checking and re-checking the content, classroom, student journey, payment processing, etc.

I didn’t set a resolution at the start of this year. But I’m setting one now. My sole resolution for the year is to allow myself to do the thing and talk about the thing imperfectly. Starting with telling you about the thing—right now.

What is The Thing?

Called The Memory Mine, it’s a six-week programme that uses a guided journalling process to help you unearth your memories and create a bank of personal stories. Stories you can use in your own creative projects or to create a memory archive (a little piece of yourself) for your family and for the future. 

It launches later this month with the course beginning in February. 

This is the course I’ve been working on for over a year. The background, the content, the tools it contains, come from my almost thirty years experience of storytelling in different mediums. And from my personal struggle to access my own memories.

More info to come very soon—

If you’d like to be added to the early access list for “The Memory Mine” click here. The intake for the beta round of the course will be limited so I can focus my attention on making sure students have the best experience possible.

It’s taken me four years to gather the courage to create another plan for the year ahead. Its stripes of washi colour fill me with the joy of gentle anticipation. I just hope that, in its creation, I haven’t condemned us all to another world-upending pandemic of lockdowns and anxiety. 

Nah. I don’t have that much power.

Do I?

 Does anyone else struggle with doing the thing and talking about the thing at the same time? I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I’d love to know your solutions.