But what will I do?

Truthfully I don't know and it's heaven.

It’s Tuesday 5th of September 2023 at 11am. I am six weeks into a six-month life transplant. In the middle of July our family of five left our home in Sydney Australia bound for North America. We took a long route via Hawaii and a mind-blowing roadtrip through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho before reaching our final destination in Toronto, Canada. This will be home until January on account of a medical fellowship my husband Nick is completing.

Which brings me to this moment. Today, for the first time in my life as a parent of school-aged children, that our three daughters aged 13, 10 & 7 are all at school, and I don’t have work. I don’t have anything I need to do. There is no where I need to be. It feels as foreign as it does delicious.

What I would do today, is a question each of the girls asked frequently in recent weeks. It’s been a popular topic for group discussion in our family bubble, led by everyone bar me, driven by a mix of fascination, thrill and envy. Because while everyone else has now reported for their version of regular duty in Toronto -  school for the girls, hospital for Nick - I am free. What will I do?

Bake? Walk? Read a book? Watch Netflix? Try and make friends? What on earth will I do with this freedom?   

I didn’t ever say this - to them, to Nick or even myself - but I knew. I would find myself a cafe. I would order a coffee, I would open my computer and I would write. Of course I would. “But that’s work!” the girls will say.

Except it’s not. Writing just because I can is not work. It’s my true north. My happiest place. From the minute I woke up in Hawaii, on the very first morning of this adventure, I felt the tiniest tug of this thrill. The familiar and foreign luxury of tapping away just because I can. Of being happily distracted by finding the right words to wrap around a day or a struggle or a joy or a memory. Of being able to order my thoughts. Random thoughts. Big thoughts. Little thoughts. Finding words is my soul-filling, time-disappearing, happiest pursuit. 

I actually learned this the last time I found myself living overseas. The year was 2011. I was 28 and a first-time mum with a delightful eight month old baby girl. I was newly married and living in Oxford where my co-conspirator in life was doing a master’s degree. My tiny companion’s reliable predilection for daytime napping meant I could reliably carve out an hour a day to write and I started a blog. For a year I published blog posts at least twice a week. For another two and half years I posted at least weekly.

I knew I loved writing before I started a blog but before I started a blog opportunities to write were limited. The obviousness of that is wild and yet? It wasn’t until I created an outlet to write freely that I experienced its tank-filling properties.      

If I were a different person, I could have written freely daily. I could have kept a journal and written down anything and everything I liked. I am not that person.

Starting a blog gave me a reason to create regular opportunities to write. Fitting writing in between naps (not my own) meant there was no scope to procrastinate. I didn’t know it at the time but turns out I was a student in the Jerry Seinfeld-school of writing. His method for writing is simple: you sit down and you write.

You don’t wait for inspiration to hit. You don’t wait until you can rent a villa in the south of France or the Cotswold’s for three months to sip tea and tap out a masterpiece. You don’t wait for the right conditions for creativity. You create those conditions by sitting down and writing.

Every single masterpiece that depends on the written word – book, play, TV series, film -starts the same way: with a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper. Someone sat down and they started writing.

It didn’t spawn a masterpiece but the discipline and habit of blogging paved the way for me to forge a career finding words - as an editor, a columnist and even an author. Twelve years on, it’s hard to fathom that sentence but no eventual professional success goes near the personal riches and satisfaction I derived from sating my creativity. Just because I could.  

Blogging proved a steadfast companion through a season of life marked by big change: a stint living overseas, a baby, a toddler, adjusting to life as a working parent, another baby, and my husband’s hellish and herculean first few years as a surgical registrar. It was my virtual village and sanity. I lived for comments and replies. I loved the purpose and outlet and identity it provided.    

But, it nearly wasn’t. For a long time I didn’t start a blog despite setting one up and wanting to write. Self-doubt induced paralysis meant that shell of a website sat empty and dormant for 18 months. It would have stayed that way permanently were it not for the open encouragement of the incredible group of girls I had befriended after Nick shared with them my idea.  

The moral of this long story? You never know what comes next. That is the most terrifying, wonderful and liberating lesson I have learned in 41 years. It is the reason that today, from a cute cafe not far from our new home in Toronto, I am wilfully ignoring the seeds of self-doubt about what I could possibly say that is of interest or value, and I’m writing anyway.   

What will I do? Truthfully, I don’t know and I have never been happier to not have an answer.