January 11th, 2011. It's 11.41am, my husband is still sleeping, and having looked back through the last two years' worth of writing I am trying to grasp some degree of inspiration on a grey morning. Suddenly my life is smaller, contained within the walls of our flat and the roads of the town, a bare three miles from end to end, and lacking any adventure to pursue.
It's a strange thing, independence. In three years of university I was never truly 'free' - I had essay deadlines and library fines and places to be and people to be friends with, and the pace of life was intense to the point of blurring days into one another. But, to draw reluctantly on a cliché, I'd also never felt so alive. The city was my playground, the college my canvas, every breath and sight and sound a splash of ink to my pen, as if amidst the work and insanity my mind was over-producing and all these colourful ideas were bursting out. Since leaving university I have not written a single poem, or story, or even a letter. Independence meant a job, which I have since lost and as yet have been unable to replace, and bills, and monotony, and struggling to fit into a new home where I know so few people.
You may think I sound ungrateful, and that I would have been naive to expect anything spectacular (you'd be right, and I didn't) - I always knew it would be hard, and what is life without its hard times? We need them to put our blessings into perspective. I suppose I did make some assumptions which have not served me well - that a job for which one is not trained is easy to keep; that an Oxford degree (or any degree) guarantees employment; that marriage itself would provide enough of an adventure. I love Stan, and finally being his wife is wonderful, but as I'm sure anyone who's married will tell me, it's hard to be a good partner when you lack goals and personal fulfilment. Every step of my life has been spent in pursuit of something, and now my goal seems so far beyond my reach that I have no clue what to focus my energies on.
However, there is always hope. Our value does not come from what we do, after all - or from what we earn, our social status, our friendships, our charity donations. When I remember that I have value beyond all these things, I am re-energised; I have the courage to explore my heart and all that I long for, not materially but as a joyful fulfilment of the abilities and passions that have been placed there. A job is a job - we can't all be paid for the thing we love. But we can see the return of investing time and energy in it, of bringing it to others as a gift, of revelling in the fullness of who we were made to be. I refuse to be disheartened. With a little help, I will yet emerge victorious. After all, it's a new year - when better to take on the world?
