The first big flip flopping steps
I’m in my beloved city of Capetown – the most beautiful place on earth – where I’ve been hanging out for a couple of months. I’m taking it very easy, going to gym, lunch, beach, playing tennis seeing friends etc. I’m staying in the maid’s quarters attached to my friends’ beautiful house in Camps Bay. Their living room has huge sliding glass walls on two perpendicular sides that pull back to open the house to the ay, the water, the sun. But my friends also live in the windiest section of Camps Bay, which is a famously windy suburb of Capetown, which surely deserves to knock Chicago out of the top position as the global titleholder for The Windy City. The pine trees outside their house are bent sideways like old crones, and sometimes the wind picks up the deckchairs by the pool and hurls them over the fence into the road below. But I like it. I'm so chilled I'm in a coma. My friends look after me so lovingly, say that I can stay forever. I am at peace here. My mother calls from Canada one night, very angry and says its time for me to stop “faffing” my life away.
But I’m also on the phone nearly daily and flying back to London for job interviews with Deutschebank, Citibank and other financial institutions after the head-hunters crawled out of the woodwork in late in 2005. Head-hunters are the professional equivalent of cockroaches. And though I’m utterly passive in terms of actively looking for a job on my own initiative, because they’ve approached me, I go happily along with the interviews and plan to go back to work. (They want me, they value me, I need the validation, therefore I must take the job, this is the right thing to do, because it validates me.) And, in fact, I go far, far down the road with Deutschebank, and I convince myself I want the job.
Yet this whole process starts to stress me out. Everyone wants to hire with immediate effect – they keep asking me “When can you start?”, even before I've finished the formal interview process. And yet I’m also planning to go on from Capetown to Sydney for Mardi Gras and to spend some time there. I ummm and awww and wriggle and tell them, ohhh, maybe I could start beginning of April. In my mind, I flip flop back and forth on what to do daily. Nay, more frequently than that. I flip flop several fucking times a day. And each flip flop takes away a little more breath and energy until I feel like an insect trapped in amber. I google creative writing courses in Sydney at the top of the list is a 10 month course with the Writers Studio in Sydney starting directly after Mardi Gras aimed specifically at aspirant first time novelists and screenplay writers who have a brilliant novel idea that they want to give birth to, in a first draft. This piece of amazing serendipity really skewers me, psychologically.
And then, after one long night during which the wind moaned and howled outside like demented animal, and I thrashed and tossed in my hot little room, I raise myself up out of the muggy sheets, go and make a cup of green tea – I’m an addict, by the way – and it comes to me in a blinding flash that the only reasons I think I want to take another banking job are all negative ones. Another job in banking would address my deep-seated fears that I won’t have enough money, won’t have enough structure to inject some discipline into my life, won’t have any status in the eyes of people. And most importantly, banking is a job that I know I can do well, as opposed to writing which is a job that I’m pretty dead certain I’ll be a failure at. So a job in banking, as opposed to the writer’s life, is tremendously validating on certain levels, at least. But I realize that I want the job in banking because I’m obsessed with psychological safety, but that I don’t want to do the work itself, that I fucking hate banking, that it leaves my soul out to freeze dry.
And when I realize that, within 10 minutes I fire off a slew of emails to all the relevant bankers and head-hunters, with some lame excuse for pulling out of the interview process. And 20 minutes after that, I email my American Express number to the Writers Studio to reserve a place on the 10 month Novel and Screenplay First Draft course. What joy! What freedom! I dance in the living room, in my shorts, to Kate Bush's Eat the Music.
But of course, nothing in life – or at least in my head – is ever clean. I still flip flop! I have sleepless nights about my decision and I send emails to former colleagues asking if I’d done the right thing. A good friend of mine in Joburg, who was a very successful banker who quit the industry to go to art school in New York and become a sculptor, announces to me that he’s not going to be a full time artist, but instead is going back into banking. This drives me absolutely fucking insane! For a little while, at least. But I guess the point is that the oscillations of my flip flopping slowly become less extreme. As time passes, I settle into the conviction that even if I don’t turn out to be a writer, I am certainly not a banker. Leaving it was and is the right decision.
Hallelujah! Peace at last!
But I’m also on the phone nearly daily and flying back to London for job interviews with Deutschebank, Citibank and other financial institutions after the head-hunters crawled out of the woodwork in late in 2005. Head-hunters are the professional equivalent of cockroaches. And though I’m utterly passive in terms of actively looking for a job on my own initiative, because they’ve approached me, I go happily along with the interviews and plan to go back to work. (They want me, they value me, I need the validation, therefore I must take the job, this is the right thing to do, because it validates me.) And, in fact, I go far, far down the road with Deutschebank, and I convince myself I want the job.
Yet this whole process starts to stress me out. Everyone wants to hire with immediate effect – they keep asking me “When can you start?”, even before I've finished the formal interview process. And yet I’m also planning to go on from Capetown to Sydney for Mardi Gras and to spend some time there. I ummm and awww and wriggle and tell them, ohhh, maybe I could start beginning of April. In my mind, I flip flop back and forth on what to do daily. Nay, more frequently than that. I flip flop several fucking times a day. And each flip flop takes away a little more breath and energy until I feel like an insect trapped in amber. I google creative writing courses in Sydney at the top of the list is a 10 month course with the Writers Studio in Sydney starting directly after Mardi Gras aimed specifically at aspirant first time novelists and screenplay writers who have a brilliant novel idea that they want to give birth to, in a first draft. This piece of amazing serendipity really skewers me, psychologically.
And then, after one long night during which the wind moaned and howled outside like demented animal, and I thrashed and tossed in my hot little room, I raise myself up out of the muggy sheets, go and make a cup of green tea – I’m an addict, by the way – and it comes to me in a blinding flash that the only reasons I think I want to take another banking job are all negative ones. Another job in banking would address my deep-seated fears that I won’t have enough money, won’t have enough structure to inject some discipline into my life, won’t have any status in the eyes of people. And most importantly, banking is a job that I know I can do well, as opposed to writing which is a job that I’m pretty dead certain I’ll be a failure at. So a job in banking, as opposed to the writer’s life, is tremendously validating on certain levels, at least. But I realize that I want the job in banking because I’m obsessed with psychological safety, but that I don’t want to do the work itself, that I fucking hate banking, that it leaves my soul out to freeze dry.
And when I realize that, within 10 minutes I fire off a slew of emails to all the relevant bankers and head-hunters, with some lame excuse for pulling out of the interview process. And 20 minutes after that, I email my American Express number to the Writers Studio to reserve a place on the 10 month Novel and Screenplay First Draft course. What joy! What freedom! I dance in the living room, in my shorts, to Kate Bush's Eat the Music.
But of course, nothing in life – or at least in my head – is ever clean. I still flip flop! I have sleepless nights about my decision and I send emails to former colleagues asking if I’d done the right thing. A good friend of mine in Joburg, who was a very successful banker who quit the industry to go to art school in New York and become a sculptor, announces to me that he’s not going to be a full time artist, but instead is going back into banking. This drives me absolutely fucking insane! For a little while, at least. But I guess the point is that the oscillations of my flip flopping slowly become less extreme. As time passes, I settle into the conviction that even if I don’t turn out to be a writer, I am certainly not a banker. Leaving it was and is the right decision.
Hallelujah! Peace at last!
posted by Peter at 8:45 PM
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