Hello! 

I'm back from my two weeks off and straight into your inboxes. Gather round children, for I have many lurid tales of adventure in lands afar and - no that's not true because I actually spent the best part of three hundred and thirty six hours sloping about London doing sweet f*ck all and you know what?

IT WAS THE GREATEST

I ate oversized meals with old buddies, read three books I'd already told people I'd read, watched Most Of Television, saw two brilliant plays one of which was by a good friend (always a relief when friends' plays are good), got ridiculously smashed at an indie club night and suffered for a whole week because of it, completed Red Dead Redemption 2 (RIP Arthur Morgan the real Old West MVP) and - mostly importantly - towards the end, found myself with the urge to write again. I promised myself that I'd not do any writing in this time, no matter what, so I quashed the instinct by forcing myself into the admin wonderland that is my tax return and discovered, among the tears, that I've now paid off my student loan. Farewell, cheap debt! You were my last connection to my misspent youth, but I look forward to misspending the money I "gain" back each year on trying to reclaim said youth via inadvisable means.

(I won't I'll try to save for a mortgage somehow I guess and one day hope to earn myself some of that sweet sweet negative equity because I hear lashing yourself to an overheated property market is the coolest thing to do in your 30s I didn't make the rules)

Turns out though, it wasn't entirely time off since it coincided with me having to make a big decision about work. The rest of my year is all planned out but there's a little wiggle room, wiggle room that could probably be taken up with another project. But in front of me were two projects that I really liked. Tricky.

One of main reasons for my time away was to try and get some semblance of clarity and control over where I wanted my career to go because if there's one thing that's defined my last few years (beyond being an emotional nightmare), it's making hurried calls under pressure. I've rarely regretted them but that felt more like luck than design and here I was yet again. I flitted between the two in my head, never being certain, always feeling awful because the people involved were all lovely. My poor agent had to deal with my flinging arguments at her down the phone, incoherent rhetoric designed to stay in my head which was finding it hard to stay there.

And then I woke up on the Saturday at the end of my second week, stayed in bed til two in the afternoon, just scratching the ear of the cat that had been nestled up alongside me all night and slowly it came to me...

I was going to turn them both down.

I'd pick them up next year if it was possible - again, I did really like them both - but I was not going to even entertain starting in 2019. It felt like a ridiculously rebellious thought. That wasn't one of the options. Why would it be one of the options? I've never turned down stuff if I didn't have to, how ungrateful would that be, this was a joke of an idea. But the thing about joke ideas is that they're the ones that tend to linger and sometimes they turn out to be the best ideas. As I write this, having made the call, it still feels that way. This is my situation: I have five or so exciting projects ahead of me, all of which are led by my own concepts. I have enough time to write each of them to the best of my ability, with a little contingency built in too. I have enough money to last me until the end of the year. Which is...amazing? I haven't found myself in this situation since before I started writing! I've been so caught up that I hadn't even noticed that where I am right now is exactly where I'd been aiming to be all this time. 

If I'm being kind, it's because I've known little else but overwork for so long that it's hard to picture what anything else looks like. If I'm being more truthful, it's because overwork has been a shield, hiding the need to step back and develop myself more in order to become the person I'd like to be. What does my life even look like if every moment isn't pressured by a hard deadline? I don't really know. I'm sort of scared to find out, I think. Trying to keep things positive I tell myself that I can use that wiggle room to finally, finally plot a return to directing film like I always intended. Many a boozy night out has been spent boring my friends with my repeating that desire over and over that I was starting to get a little Revolutionary-Road-Let's-Move-To-Paris-And-I'll-Write-A-Book with it. I'm scared of a less pressured life, yes, but I'm more scared of that fate. So if I say it to you guys, I've locked it in a bit. I'm going to direct something this year.

Yes.

Cool.

(Wait. Is that pressure? Wheels within wheels...)

Sorry, this has been quite an introspective newsletter and I wish I had some sort of wisdom for you or wider learning to share from my time off. I mean, I guess I've learned that two weeks and beyond is exactly the sweet spot for proper time off and there's little point in aiming for anything less but I suspect you guys all know that already and it's a bit like when your parents call you up to tell you a piece of news you heard weeks ago or theatre gets really excited about a conceit in a science-fiction play that film did to great acclaim thirty years ago. Hey look at that? Exactly a thousand words.

Back in the habit.

Vin x

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