The Year of Experiments

What it is, why I'm doing it, and a couple of uncharacteristic sport related metaphors

After the thing that happened last year {it’s a long story - I wrote about it here}, I decided to make some changes to how I was running my life. And by ‘some’, I mean ‘a lot’.

It wasn’t like everything was dreadful in every category, but in any life there will always be things that aren’t flowing as we might wish, or that could benefit from being recalibrated, or that we’d prefer not to be there at all. And so often, we carry those things around every day like an increasingly heavy and distracting backpack, because we don’t realise they might be different, or how much agency we actually have to make changes or let them go, or we literally just don’t have the time to sit down and pull out what’s in there and give it all a thorough clear out and tidy up. {Or, more truthfully, we say that because we don’t want to deal with what we might find in there.}

What my three weeks in bed with a deranged disc gave me was the time and space to take a good long look inside my backpack. And what my decision to stop fertility treatment after almost six years gave me {while it took away an entire life, both literally and metaphorically}, was one of those fork-in-the-road moments where circumstances temporarily take the day to day tangle of to do lists and commitments off the table, and you experience the sharpness of vision needed to make some decisions in favour of a life with the possibility of - at the very least - a smaller backpack.

As I lay in bed during those weeks while my back healed, I knew I was being presented with something essential that we don’t often choose proactively - nothing.

By which I mean, I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t work, and for a while I couldn’t even read or watch or listen to anything because of the pain. Any extra stimulation to my senses was unbearable. All I could do was try to find a position I could stay in for a few minutes, and be with myself.

I’m not a stranger to quiet - I live alone {with a small pupper, who admittedly is not as quiet as me} on the edge of a hamlet; I’m self employed; and while I prefer to stay away from boxes, I do identify very strongly with concepts like ‘introvert’, and ‘HSP’, and also hermit. I love being alone. More than that, I need it, more than anyone I’ve ever met. I’m rarely lonely. I relish silence. So there was a part of me that paradoxically loved having the day to day of my life stripped away for a while; even though it was because of intense pain; even though it forced me to confront, and then make, the biggest decision of my life.

It reminds me a little of the ghosts that visit Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. With each visitation, they take him out of his ordinary life to show him how it looks from an outside perspective, and it’s only then that he sees the truths he needs to see, so he can change what’s not working.

I suspect we all have stories of being taken out of our lives temporarily by something so powerful that the only possible response is surrender. {And for those like me, that only after a valiant effort to resist it.} And how could we not then see with new eyes?

So there I was, just me and my backpack and no distractions, and nothing to be done but to turn it out and sort through the contents.

Once I’d made the life-defining decision that took parenthood off the table, the playing field lay open ahead of me, and from it arose questions.

{Sidenote: I was going to change ‘playing field’ for a different metaphor - someone like me should really not be using sports analogies - but it’s actually exactly what I mean. Both a field of possibilities, and a place for play.}

Questions like: Who am I now? What’s possible for me now? What do I really want for my life? What feels meaningful? How can I live out my values in this new landscape? How do I want to live? Where do I want to live? Am I going to need a bigger van?

Which is when I decided to do it all differently.

I’ve always been an experimenter. It seems to be my natural approach. I’m endlessly curious, and while I could in no way be called a scientist, I do love me a good experiment. It’s how I started and grew my business. It’s how I ended up moving 300 miles across the country. It’s how I ended up with a little barking fluffmonger. And a campervan. And a Substack. And a crochet habit.

There are two main reasons I love an experiment:

1. It opens the door to the realm of infinite possibility, beyond what my fearful little limited logical brain can come up with.

2. It takes the pressure off needing to be right, where right means successful, rich, perfect, or whatever other limited options the material world can offer. There is intel and experience to be gained, however things turn out.

In other words, with an experiment, whatever happens - you win.

So, faced with a completely different sort of life than the one I’d been aiming for, the obvious thing to do was to conduct experiments. In fact, since I didn’t any longer know quite who I was in this new space, or who I might become, or what kind of life might be possible for me now, why not throw the whole thing up in the air and let it all be an experiment?

I’d had to let go of two of the most important things in my life over the past few years. First, the person I’d wanted to spend my life with {that’s a whole other story}, and now the possibility of being a mother. In a culture that glorifies both, while offering less space and approval for those who don’t go that way - not to mention how deeply I wanted both on my own account - having both of those removed, albeit through decisions I felt I had to make to stay in integrity with myself, was a powerful proposition.

If I wasn’t going to be a wife or mother {and of course, I may not remain single for the rest of my life, but I am deeply content to be solo} - well, what was I going to be?

Or, more interestingly and less limitingly, how was I going to live?

I had wrestled already with the question of what makes a life ‘worthwhile’ and what signifies fulfilment when you live in a world where the answer to that is primarily spouse and/or offspring, and had shifted to a place in myself where I no longer felt ‘less than’ because my life looked different. So I was well placed to come quite quickly to the understanding that I could ‘create a different kind of life for myself’. That was the phrase I used with myself, and when I told my family and close friends about my decision. It felt good to affirm it, to feel it settle into my being as a new truth. And this time it was one I was choosing and owning, not one I was afraid I’d have to end up with because I was somehow defective. I expanded on that by adding that that would mean ‘a life devoted to being deeply and wildly creative in all the ways I felt called to’.

What a luxury!

Once I’d relaxed into that new space, the relief was surprising and profound. And that’s when I decided that for the next year {to start with anyway}, I would make experiments all across my life - because I was in the privileged position of being able to do so, and because it’s the best way I know of gathering intel about what’s possible, expanding beyond what appears to be on the table, and unearthing what feels right at the deepest levels.

And after all I’d given up, and because with each decade we all tend to care less and less what ‘they’ will think, I also found myself in a place where I cared a lot less about doing or getting things ‘right’. A part of me actually felt like she was finally getting to come forward and exist without justification or diminishment. I was surprised to feel excited. I thought I’d need to go through more of the terrible grief, until I realised I’d been grieving so hard and for so long that this decision freed me to experience something else.

So what does a Year of Experiments even look like?

Well first, it looks like writing a lot of notes, and drawing a lot of diagrams.

I looked at the different areas of my life - my work and business, where and how I lived, the rough proportion of time spent on different things, my values, priorities, the things that call to me. With a kind of giddy surprise I realised I could actually do pretty much anything now. {This wasn’t entirely untrue before, but when you’re inside a particular story - especially if it’s relentlessly emotionally intense - horizons are restricted by that narrative. Exiting the story reveals a kind of permission to go off piste.} I could travel more. I could spend more time with loved ones. I could shake up what a day was, how it could look, how it was structured {around dog walks, of course}. I could explore different ways to make money. I discovered I would be refunded for the final treatment I didn’t have, and gave some thought to how best to apportion that out to support the new dreams and plans.

I didn’t formalise a plan, because that felt like the antithesis of experimenting, in my very unscientific way. Although ironically, I’ve ended up with more in the calendar throughout the year than I normally would, because I kept finding things I wanted to try that had actual dates attached.

Here are some examples of the experiments I’m running this year:

• Letting out my house for several months over the summer

• Making my studio livable, so I can still be in Cornwall and paint when I want to

• Exploring more new places in the van - both day trips and overnights

• Thinking of certain places as ‘bases’ I can bounce off for said trips {eg. My studio is my Cornwall base; my parents’ house is my Sussex base}. This means I have different places to bounce from, and somewhere to come back to that’s not too far, and that also feels like home, which - as a huge homebody - feels essential to me.

• Offering one to one mentoring via email {it’s called The Artist Letters and the first spaces I opened filled the same day, but you can join the waiting list here if you’d like to know if/when more open up.}

• I signed up for a writing course, as part of my greater commitment to developing my writing.

• Giving priority to making my art. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for many years. I still want to support other artists - and will be doing so through my membership, Create a Collection course, and 1:1 mentoring - but my own making needs to come first this year.

• I want to try painting on plates.

• And make a cardigan out of crochet.

• I want to paint a mural {a small one, indoors}.

• I’m helping my mum do a low key, ‘we don’t really know what we’re doing but let’s try these ideas’ renovation on part of the annexe at my parents’ house. {Mural potential here.}

Bonus things that aren’t strictly experiments, or that are only partially experimental, or simply tentative ideas:

• I’ll be taking my first holiday in 900 years - with family - and leaving Pops in the care of a lovely lady called Margaret who will live at my parents’ house with her. {I’m both excited about and dreading this.}

• I’m considering a road trip to Scotland in the van.

• I may or may not be looking at slightly larger vans.

• I have a decades long dream to spend winters further south; this isn’t so much a plan as a ‘let’s just keep exploring that idea’.

• I’m considering home exchanges. If I’m letting my house out for a bit, and I find I like that arrangement, why not make it available for home swaps at other times? The Home Exchange website also allows for having guests without it being a straight swap, but earning points you can use for different places. Pretty genius.

The biggest experiment of all is not something you’d see on the outside though. It’s to do with how I am in myself, what I’m ready to let go of, where I sit in myself having already let go of two of the things I wanted most in life. It’s to do with finding out who I can be when significant parts of my perceived identity are stripped away; how I can truly enjoy such freedom, and what becomes possible now that I’ve never considered or thought viable. It’s about deciding to finally, properly, trust myself and my intuition, and see what happens if I follow that over strategising, planning, and control.

That’s partly why all the experiments. Doing things the same way, keeping everything in its status quo, feels safe and comforting, and I do think a life needs a good dose of that, especially in the world we live in now. But I also know that it stifles growth if nothing ever changes, and even though it’s scary, and triggers anxiety and is full of uncontrollable unknowns, some of which I won’t like - I’ll always choose growth and change. This ever expanding universe is so full of wonders, and experiments allow new energy to come in - new potentials to come forward. That’s exciting to me, and necessary.

At the end of the year I will come back to what I’ve written here and maybe I’ll tick some things off, maybe I won’t. But I know for sure that the playing field is there in front of me, and I’m ready to play.