Unfolding in Halves

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

This year, I turned 31 alone in a comfortable hotel on the island of Madeira. This, of course, only after my mother had berated me for the fifth time about why I never spend my birthday with her anymore, instead insisting on isolating myself in exotic locations. (I would have thought the reasons were obvious, but apparently not.) To appease her, and also for tradition’s sake, I let her bake me an early birthday cake: a strawberry cream cake, the classic Nordic summer sweet that I have had served to me on almost every birthday since I was a child, albeit now with lactose-free cream to finish. 

“I’d like a candle,” I said to her, “but I don’t need 31 candles.”

Well, she couldn’t have placed 31 candles if she’d wanted to. In fact, my choices were either a singular “1” or a singular “0”. I chose “1”.

It didn’t mean much, really: it was a symbolic candle. Blow the candle and make a wish. But as I plucked the cream-coated wax number one out of the cake, I wondered if there might be another kind of symbolism buried within, because this year had been something of a new beginning. So maybe here I was, in fact, halfway through my first year of this new chapter.

When, nearly six months ago, I set out into this somewhat unknown year, I had two main goals: the first, to find a place that I could call my forever home, and the second, to write as much as I could. I’ll come back to these in a moment.

For, as much as I had my goals, my body had their own. At the end of last year, I was broken down in many ways. I could rarely think straight, so burnt out from the years upon years of stress-laden, overworked weeks. My body needed rest for my mind to heal. And while I didn’t consciously set out to find this, the way my schedule developed as I settled into my routine of travel allowed for it. It allowed me for maybe the first time in my adult life to focus on one thing at a time, and to really excel at it with that focus.

In Rome, my focus was on being a student and on improving my Italian. I wrote next to nothing. But it didn’t really matter, for my mind healed during this period to allow me to write the next month. And, so, the next month, my intense focus became writing—a screenplay, that I hadn’t intended to work on, that had come to me in a sudden moment of inspiration and then refused to let go. I wrote an outline in three days. I wrote the first draft in seven. Ten days, conception to page. I couldn’t have done that a year earlier. I couldn’t have done that six months earlier.

While the number of words on the page over the past six months may not be extraordinary, what has come from it is. A project I am intensely proud of, that is garnering positive feedback and gaining momentum in the right places. A project that I could see actually going forward and elevating the next part of my career. A project that, once again, came to fruition in just ten days.

The most important thing I’ve done in this year has been to recover. And I hadn’t even fully accepted that I needed to, or realised that I’d begun to do so.

And then to my home. I can’t say, as I sit in a small community library in Stockholm with a good friend who is visiting from Canada, that I have fixed my spot yet. I have a strong contender, a contender that other cities will have to work hard to beat. But I also know that I wouldn’t have had that contender had I not taken a month to live there and try it out. 

I trusted my gut instinct that said I needed this year: to be selfish, to make the choices that others might not understand but that allowed me to best build the path forward to my future. I trusted my gut instinct and I was right to, for it has led me to where I’m positive I am meant to be.

I am fortunate to have been able to take this time: to have had the liberty to make this choice with an inheritance from a generous relative who we lost some years ago. I recognise the luck that placed me here. But I am also where I am today in as much through my own sheer grit and determination. Without the decade I worked in the film industry, and the 12 years alongside I spent writing seven novels, countless short stories and articles, aside from my work as a freelance writer and copyeditor, I would not have been able to write an actually-good script in 10 days. I would not have been able to know what to do with it next. I would not have the self-motivation, organisation, and dedication to not only craft my entire schedule but also keep to task and deadline to produce anything at all.

So, yes: I am lucky to be where I am. But I also worked hard to get here. Just as I will keep working hard through the half of the year yet to unfold, to keep building towards the bright future that I can see before me. Distant, still, but clearer now than it ever was before.