Dear Powells,
Last week, I called a Time Out on 2024 and started again.
Rather than easing myself gently into this year, I walked into it like a boxer entering the ring. I may not have been wearing a pair of silk shorts, and Eye of the Tiger wasn’t playing as I made my entrance but… my gloves were definitely up.
I pranced about on my tip-toes looking mean, trying to intimidate my opponent for the first week of January. Then the jabs and upper-cuts started flying! I socked, slugged, biffed, bopped, walloped, clobbered and clouted my way through deadlines, conveyancing affairs (nightmares), Substack letters, weekly cleans, tax returns, sketchbook pages, morning rituals, rough art, final art, Instagram take-overs, book launches, Ocado deliveries, London trips, Gumtree shenanigans, exhibition mishaps and roast dinners.
But the odds were always against me because I was fighting with a rather impressive opponent: LIFE.
Had my rounds with LIFE been broken up into three minute intervals and there was the opportunity for a little sit down in-between, I may have stood a better chance. But there was no referee in my boxing match; no-one counted to ten when I was lying splayed on floor, looking a bit battered and bruised and so I kept getting up.
I put up quite a good fight for a few weeks! Then, a week or so ago, LIFE delivered what was to be the final (low) blow: my favourite beloved wool cardigan with 1970s style brown buttons accidentally ended up on a synthetics cycle and shrank to the size of a sock. It was the second beloved woollen item of mine to meet this fate in as many months*.
There was no getting up after that.
I was out of zest. Pooped. Defeated. Pulverised. I was the walking definition of Burn Out. My brain felt like soup. I could cry on command. My creativity left me without so much as a goodbye letter. I had about as much life in me as a wet tissue. LIFE had run rings around me and hadn’t even broken into a sweat. And there was only one thing left to be done:
Nothing.
DO. ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING.
No work. No commitments. No social media. No emails. No Substack writing. No activities or movement that exceeded 3 mph. No television programmes that didn’t fall under the category of Period Drama. No clothes other than loungewear. No late nights or early mornings. Nothing that would raise the heartbeat over the recommended rate of 60-100 bpm.
And, most importantly: No feeling guilty about any of the above.
10 days later and I am feeling mostly human again. I have evaluated recent choices and chosen again. I had one minor relapse on Friday that was dealt with lickety-split and I have welcomed creativity back into my life—which is a relief quite frankly, as my business would be buggered without it.
Last week I took myself on an artist date to a Quentin Blake exhibition (unfortunately no longer on) and afterwards, as I ate my orange polenta cake in the exhibition cafe, I realised that his work speaks to me because it is so joyful; it was a delight to get lost in his imagination for an hour and I could almost feel the joy he felt when he was creating the drawings on display. My joy is always there, but when I start to view LIFE as a fight, I quickly drains like bath water down the plug hole. And so, I have begun my new new year by hanging up my boxing gloves, and in doing so my bath has started to fill up with joy again and that, Powells, is a much nicer way to start the year.
Yours, with the gloves off,
Powell x
*Note to self: Buy new washing machine… or at least start handwashing woollen items.
Because I missed a letter or two, I have made the above free for all. Below, as a treat for my paid subscribers, are a few drawings from my sketchbook that I have made in the last week or so.
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