Growing Pains — Suzey Ingold

Like many people, I graduated from university with a false sense of confidence. Confidence, not necessarily that I knew exactly what I was doing or what was next, but confidence that I had entered the next stage of my life. That in the crossing of a platform in a gown, I had gone from that strange pre-adult student stage into a fully fledged grown-up.

I was wrong.

There is no good word for that stage between the end of your teens years and actually becoming an adult. Whereas childhood and teenage years seem to fly by in an instant, adulthood splays out endlessly before us, just one big chunk of time until, perhaps, you start to consider the term old – a word my parents, both now in their seventies, still protest against.

In this post-student, pre-adult life, I ricocheted around from job to job and, eventually, from one country to another. Almost three years ago to the day, now, I applied for a two-year visa to live in Canada entirely on a whim. I’ve now been living here for two and a half years with an application to remain as a permanent resident pending. My brother once said he didn’t quite know how I did it but, somehow, even when the other path might have seemed easier, I tended to end up on the road I should be on. Following gut instinct might not be the most informed way to make decisions but it certainly has got me this far.

One note from 2017 Suzey that I’ve carried with me right up to today.

In October of last year, I travelled to Morocco, a country I’d wanted to visit for half my life. I wouldn’t realise it until much later but something about that trip kickstarted a change in me. Maybe, it was just the timing of it all. I’d just come off the back of three film festivals in a row, feeling for the first time in a long time like I was exactly where I was meant to be, doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. I got tonsillitis before my trip and laryngitis when I got home, so was forced into a period of rest on either end, before starting a new job (which I would end up losing in the spring as the company hedged their bets on the current climate and called it quits).

Maybe, it was the immersion into a landscape and culture so utterly unlike what I had known. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to travel extensively from a young age and, with that, comes an understanding that the world is much bigger and more complex than what life is like on your street corner. But a lot of my travels were confined to pockets of Europe, a far cry from riding a camel through the Sahara desert or weaving one’s way through the maze of the souks in Marrakech.

Steps in a different world – and towards a different me.

I started my new job with the intention of settling down a little bit. It was my first truly stable, full-time, grown-up job. No contract end date. No see you next year! like I was used to on the festival circuit. An opportunity to grow in a company. I grew restless very quickly. I explored another job opportunity although inevitably turned it down. None of it would really matter anyway as I was forced back into freelancing come the spring.

I spent the summer picking up odd freelancing jobs, utilising the array of random skills I’ve gained or self-taught over the years: from web design to copy editing to spreadsheets on spreadsheets. I started writing again, properly. I wasn’t making enough to make ends meet, exactly, but it was something.

Towards the end of the summer, I felt so incredibly off-kilter for a couple of months. Still a far ways off from the cave of seasonal depression, I couldn’t make sense of why I felt so low. I put it down to the delayed impact of the pandemic and the past few months. That may not be entirely incorrect but I also, in hindsight, don’t think it was just that weighing me down.

It was the emotional equivalent of the growing pains you’d feel as a child – not quite a pain, exactly, but an uncomfortable sensation under your skin that you couldn’t quite shake. It took a month or two to come through it, and a solid week of sleeping following my wisdom tooth surgery, but from the other end, I could start to make sense of it all.

I thought I’d become an adult when I graduated. Or, if not then, maybe when I moved halfway across the world. Surely, one or other of those rites of passage would have taken me from bumbling post-teen, pre-adult thing into a proper grown-up. My niece would probably continue to suggest I was “maybe six” but hadn’t I now grown?

For the first time, properly, I feel like an adult now. It’s been a year in which my values and principles were repeatedly questioned, as much by the pandemic and the social turmoil of the year, as in my personal life. It became a running joke between my old roommate and myself that, during lockdown, I turned into more of a socialist every day.

I just moved into, what feels like, my first grown-up apartment. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve moved into a new home not out of necessity but because I wanted a change. No scrambling to find a place because of a new job or a relocation but, simply, because I wanted a place of my own. Looking around now, basically unpacked, more or less decorated, I can see myself reflected in the walls. My adult self. The self I am now.

I don’t believe there’s an endpoint in personal change. I don’t think that the person I’ll be in five or ten years will be the same version of myself that I am now. But I do know that I’ve never felt quite as comfortable in my own skin, or so sure of who I am, fundamentally, as a person, as I do these days. Getting to know this new Suzey, I’d say she’s the best version I’ve seen so far.

Over the past five years, I’ve kept a “Q&A a day” journal. Some of the questions are more trivial than others – it goes from what did you eat for breakfast today? to what’s your biggest fear? from one day to the next. But it’s always interesting to read back on what the past four years of Suzeys said in response to each one. About predictions that did, or did not, come true.

What is your dream job of the day? is probably my favourite to look back on. In 2016, I said fashion photographer (what?!). In 2017, editor-in-chief of British Vogue (ah, yes, still in the days when I harboured dreams of a fashion career until I worked in the industry for exactly one hour and realised it’s hell and I just like clothes). In 2018, I wrote author, with a note that I supposed I was one but I wanted to be a successful one. In 2019, I put freelance writer – and that I was going to make that a reality. This year, I wrote down screenwriter, which I suppose falls under the category of freelance writer, anyway.

I gradually narrowed down where I was going and who I was, over the course of five years. One question asked, where do you see yourself in a year? In 2019, I wrote: Still in Toronto. Hopefully in my own apartment. Maybe freelancing/writing full-time?

Weirdly, and kind of not of my own doing, that’s exactly where I am, a year later. I’m still in Toronto. I just moved into my own apartment, which from me saying, “I’m going to look at an apartment today”, all happened in the space of a few weeks. And I’m freelancing/writing full-time. I don’t really know that I expected to be here by now. But I’m here and, for now, enjoying how it feels.