Finding Hope in Life’s Revisions- on failure, fifth drafts and third acts

Sometimes living life and writing a story are similar. In both, the blank page are intimidating.

It’s been really hard going through a divorce, having no social network, and job-hunting all at the same time. My life feels like staring at a blank page.

I wake up at night often, not sure how I will pull it all together. I need a job, a C1-level in Spanish (so I can advocate for my daughter, make friends, find more work options, and participate better in Madrid life), and build a new social circle.

The ‘writers’ of this season in my life seem have raised the stakes: mass layoffs from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitch and other high profile companies has left the tech industry saturated with experienced jobseekers competing for the same few jobs. In Spain, the majority of tech jobs are in Barcelona. I am tied to Madrid for co-parenting. Most companies mandate 2-3 days in the office, so remote work options are few and in even higher demand.

Sometimes in writing we have a carefully planned plot line in our head which needs be scrapped. Then the way ahead goes from clear to foggy. I had a path I thought I was on in life. The path is gone and I need to write a new one.

Yet this isn’t the first time I’ve had to change direction or start again. Nor the second time I’ve walked into the fog.

The first time was coming to the UK at age eighteen. I arrived with a family friend from my home country, but she acquired a boyfriend in our first week. Soon, I was alone in a new country. But in my loneliness was also a freedom – a blank page. Childhood is having a page your parents and society write on. This was a chance to write my story.

The second time was when I realised I couldn’t go on with my course in university. I loved working as a hospital biochemist in my industry year – but the NHS salary wasn’t enough to live on in the UK. By this time, I had an equal interest in web design which seemed more satisfying and financially viable. My friends had all graduated while I was on my industrial year, so I changed universities to Oxford Brookes and was much happier commuting to and from my first non-dorm “home”. I started freelancing in web design to build up my portfolio. During that finally year, I ended a relationship that once gave me stability and a consequence, the path to UK residence that had been within reach was now a hero’s journey away. I was told so many times that it was hard to make it as a web designer and to get U.K. residence as a non EU citizen. To just come home.

Resilience is not the same as grit. Grit is the power to power through tough situations. To wake up at five am to get to the train station by 6am carrying your heavy backpack with a few study books and arrive to work early. Grit is getting through classes and daily revisions and handing in coursework.

I didn’t lack grit in making the choice to change course because the things I did to create a new path required grit. Getting clients, managing freelance work along with university coursework and studying. Resilience is the ability to self check while grinding on, and say “this isn’t the road I need to be on”.

The third time was moving to Spain to be with my partner, after the years of working in a cosy glass office as a web designer and earning a comfortable salary. The move came suddenly, not the slow and deliberate one we had talked about in our years together. I started a freelance product design business – a crash course in itself coming from web design- and networked with English speaking companies to get work. I started a meet-up group to make friends, planned social and design events energetically, and spent the weekends writing my marketing and social content and learning about running a business.

Resilience is having your back against a wall and being capable of imagining a way out. Even if it’s not perfect.

This is the fourth time, maybe even the fifth time. Having a baby is like scrunching up a sheet of paper titled “who I thought I was”. There was no part of me that wanted to drop my 6 month old baby off at daycare during a pandemic. Not when I had to do my own sales and marketing pipeline to even get clients again. Meanwhile the economy was crashing. I had build my identity so much around what I did that not working gave me an identity crisis, and I needed to learn who I was outside of that. But the difference was the lack of fog in the road ahead, like in the other times.

So. Four revisions and a blank page.

Some days I wake up feeling so tired at starting over again, again. Sometimes I wonder what it says about me to start over so many times.

In life, starting over again and again is sometimes seen as inconsistency – or failure. But in writing – and in product design- it’s considered refinement.

Yesterday I was listening to a review of Neil Gaiman’s masterclass on writing. The author reviewing it said she was on her fifth draft of her current novel. That in between the fourth and firth draft was where she finally found the real story. That she finally saw what made her story special.

It reminded me of the podcast interview of Jane Fonda, talking about how intentional she was with her life after 60. She described this phase as her third act. In this act, all the parts of the hero’s life come together to make sense.

Today I’m thinking maybe the fifth draft of my life is the charm. Maybe it’s the lead up to my third act.

It doesn’t make me less tired, but it gives me hope. Hope is a lamp that helps us see our way ahead though the fog.