A600AASS Day 21 - Thank you.
03.11.22
It’s been hard to pinpoint exactly where this journey started.
Apparently, Chris and I talked about walking the Camino some years ago, but I can’t remember when.
I know my dad wanted to complete it, but so far hasn’t had the chance.
My godfather’s completed it, but I’m not sure that he was the source of inspiration.
But about 6 months ago, Chris and I started talking about it in earnest, and started making tentative plans to walk.
At that stage, I was six months in to burnout leave and it was starting to become clear that my life wouldn’t — couldn’t — be the same as it was before. The Camino seemed to call to me as a means to mark the turning point, the place from which I might pick up the pieces and rebuild.
So what follows is an attempt to clarify the recent history of this walk, and, perhaps, an attempt to identify some waypoints for the longer, larger walk to come.
When I joined the company in London, my boss half—joked over lunch that insecure overachievers make the best consultants. At the time I laughed.
But by the time I stepped back from work in an act of self-preservation, I’d come to realise what a toxic mindset that half-joke represented, and how wholly, over the course of my career, I’d come to embody it. I was doing work I didn’t believe in, often for people who didn’t offer me the respect and goodwill I offered them, all in the hope of receiving those great stand-ins for self-love: status and pay.
In the early stages of my recovery, my therapist told me that all I needed to do was eat well, sleep well, and walk an hour a day. Nothing more. She had to tell my that for three straight months as I tried to fill every waking moment with projects. Boy, I LOVED a PROJECT! Officious note-taking of all the books I’d be reading! Singing lessons! Dutch lessons! Coffee meetings! In trying to make the most of my new-found spare time, not only was I delaying my recovery, I now realise I was really just distracting myself from the chasm that was about to open up in my life.
By the end of 2021 my autonomic nervous system had finally started to calm, and I began to develop an awareness the depression from which I was suffering. I’m no stranger to the black dog, nor being medicated for it. I was also certain that I didn’t want to go down that path again. Too much conqueror’s pride. Too much fear of, again, having the highs cut out of the sine wave of life, the price of antidepressants cutting out the lows. I wanted a different way out.
Inspired by Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants, one of those books for which I’d officiously written notes, his widely-acclaimed How to Change Your Mind, and a bunch of my own research in to the therapeutic use of psychedelics to help mental health disorders, I arranged a trip with a therapist based in Amsterdam.
During my intake, sat under headlamps outside a bar on a miserable December day — COVID still reigned —, I told her I felt like I was deep in dark lake water.
I couldn’t see.
I had no buoyancy.
I was running out of air.
And because I couldn’t tell which way was up, I couldn’t tell where the lakebed might be, so I couldn’t kick my legs against anything, and I couldn’t swim up to the surface.
After years of shaping myself to what other people wanted me to be, I no longer had any real sense of who I was, what was important to me, or even what my gifts were. In the absence of work, my identity began to fall apart, and I was drowning.
I told her I wanted to find my lakebed.
I’m an explorer and an observer of the world.
As I entered the final stages of my trip, these were the words I that I spoke, and for the next hour or so, I would speak out loud to the therapist, but mostly to myself, about what those words might mean.
In the weeks afterwards, they still felt a little abstract, fanciful even. Who was I to have such confidence, such certainty, such lofty ambitions!? But in the months that have followed the trip, and as I’ve pieced together the evidence from across my life, those words and their meaning have become more and more concrete.
I’m at my most fulfilled when researching and writing and connecting the dots across domains.
I’m at my most fulfilled when hearing others’ stories, and giving them a platform so they can be shared with others.
I’m at my most fulfilled capturing the beautiful mundane that so often goes unseen but can speak so clearly if we just shut up, look and listen.
And I’m at my most energised and aware when I’m experiencing some kind of cultural dislocation that awakens and sharpens my senses.
And so, in small part, that’s why you’re reading this newsletter.
Chris and I attended a Hoffman refresher in July, and we were asked to state out loud the things that we would like to achieve in the next 12 months.
I said I wanted to have an exhibition of my photography. I’m working on a collaboration with another photographer on that.
I said I wanted to publish another 12 editions of Looking Out, my newsletter and podcast that connects the dots across automobility, design, and culture.
I said that I wanted to write and share my photography more publically, and here we are.
I think this is how the threads of a new life start to come together.
The experience of this walk, and of the fulfilment I’ve derived from capturing it and sharing it with you, has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my life is on a different path now. I can’t go back to who I was and I can’t go back to where I was. This is both immensely exciting and terrifying.
As I write, I realise that I’m mid-leap from the life I thought I had, and I’m still not entirely sure where I’m going to land, or what life’s going to look like when I do. How do I make money? How do we build a life that allows me the freedom to be fulfilled, to be energised, and — crucially, because I haven’t mentioned it yet — to regularly rest and reset?
Craig Mod, who inspired this newsletter and inspires me generally, offers a few principles for a fulfilling life in the beautiful One Dumb Trick. In short, they are:
Value creating good work with good people, and avoid bad work with arseholes,
Break the social or legal contracts with broken people and broken organisations to create the space for said good work with said good people,
Keep fixed costs of living low to enable the freedom to fulfil the first and second principles.
They sound so, so simple, so easy to implement, but after years on a hedonic treadmill, trust me, it takes fortitude to take them on. But that’s the work ahead of me, and I’m really fucking excited.
So, here we reach the end of A 600 and a Scallop Shell.
It didn’t start how I expected, and it ended with me truly humbled, but throughout, there’s been you all reading along, sending me messages of love and support and generally lending me the feeling that there might just be something here in all these words and images.
I’m truly grateful, and I hope we get to do more of this.
Big hugs,
Drew