Parallel lives

For everyone who's ever wanted to do "All The Things"

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Last week I attended the kick-off meeting for a (free) business boot camp I signed up for. The words “business” and “boot camp” came (unsurprisingly) with an avalanche of Slack messages full of emojis and exclamation marks.

I am questioning my impulsivity here (I signed up on the back of an Instagram ad, probably too late at night). I am now wondering if this is the right thing for me, at this stage. I was kinda looking forward to a quiet-er summer, frolicking in the mountains of Bulgaria, living the dream of being a nomad artist, notebook in hand soaking up the little pleasures of life and learning traditional Bulgarian embroidery alongside a baba somewhere remote where there isn’t any wifi.

The thing is, I also want to be an sh*t hot entrepreneur travelling the world. I want to be a content creator (have you noticed my new Instagram reels??), a food critic, a performance maker, a coach, a public speaker and sometimes even…dare I say it…a politician!

I want to do collage and sound installations, rituals and theatre. I want to write, make a podcast, take pictures, have a vlog. I want to travel and be rooted somewhere specific, call a piece of land my own but “home is where my hat is”. I want to belong. I crave for my neighbours to know me and to bump into friends at random when I go do my grocery shopping. I am a global citizen but want to feel part of a community. I get itchy feet and want to travel everywhere. I hate borders but fought for my passports. I even made a whole bloody show about that (and an exhibition, and a series of residencies, and workshops…!)

I am often overwhelmed by the possibilities and feel constricted by the narrow paths of choice. I could do so many things but day dreaming makes me inefficient and hesitant so I do nothing. Well, not nothing nothing. I clean a bit, tidy up a bit but never too much partly because I know no matter what, there will be mess soon again and partly because if everything was tidy and neat and nice there will be no excuse. Truthfully, I want to “flâne” in the French sense, just move and observe and take in my surroundings. But is that even true? When I have the possibility of doing that I saturate quickly and my mind is full. The body starts to play up… I want to go to bed but I am incapable of it so I watch Culinary Class Wars and suddenly I want to be a chef and a food critic and have my own restaurant and travel the world learning new flalvours and have my own Netflix show about it!

In the Business Boot Camp thing they made us do an exercise where we had to think about our 5 years’ plan (I know, original!). They asked us to consider life A (the current “real” one) and life B (the one you’d have to live if the thing you do now wasn’t available anymore. And I don’t know if it is because in the pandemic this scenario was all too real but it was so easy to think about plan B. There was also life C, the one in which you have all the money but to be totally honest I was most excited about retraining as a chef and be a food critic (life B) than being filthy rich. Perhaps because money has never been a big driver in my life or, more probably, because I actually lack the imagination of a life where all my needs are met and I have left over cash. Oh capitalism!

You see, I did grow up in a family where I was told I can be anything if I put my mind to it (people then had opinions about what is worth putting your mind to but that’s a story for another time). And I know this is privilege. Or being completely delulu – your choice.

It should be delightful this capacity to imagine and dream and think and twist and turn possibilities into plans and goals and action points. However, it is sometimes a curse – I want to be told what to do, praised for one thing and for that to give me the courage to just pursuit it, blindly. I want someone I know and admire to tell me I should do this or that, to suggest and for me to follow, unconditionally, like a gospel. I am not ashamed to say that I often would like to give my some of my freedom away so I don’t have to make choices, constantly.

“Trust the universe” is what I prevaricate on a good day but sometimes that becomes hard to believe in, you know? The more you grow up the more you are supposed to be this put together individual. As creatives we are asked to also be businesses and tell funders and other organisations what we are about and be very confident about that. But really, nothing is as immutable as these funding applications make it sound. I often have to prove that everything I have done so far is somehow all linked and it makes sense and it has a narrative whereas really, half of the time, I am a blind bumble bee just…vibing.

Yet, I am also lying to you because there are red threads connecting things together but I am tired of excavating them, so tired my hands are scratched and my nails are broken from trying to find meaning and logic. So yeah. I want to be a food critic and a vlogger and a performance maker and a writer and a podcaster and a restauranteur and… all and nothing of the above. I want to be a witch and live in the mountains, a diva and live by the sea, a nobody living in a city, a peasant living of the earth. Maybe I am all of them and none of them and they live parallel lives unaware I am calling to them… heeeey! Do you hear me??

A ripple or an inspiration or a motivation passes through my body and I do something. Maybe that’s that particular life calling back to me.

Maybe.