The Map I Inherited Was Useless...

Starting point: the map is not the territory.

When you’re a kid you think of life stretching out ahead of you. You imagine the destinations you will visit: school, work, relationships (may include meeting someone, The One), house, kids, career, happy retirement.

But you travel in the territory of reality and there’s all sorts of detail your neat London Underground Map of Life doesn’t reveal to you.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

School: for some kids, school is just to be endured. Maybe you’re bullied, maybe you’re not traditionally academic, maybe you can’t handle the enforced ‘always on’ social setting. Maybe it's ‘all of the above’. You look for ways to get through the days. The teachers’ words just wash over you. Every decision is short-term tactical. How to explain away why you didn’t do the homework. Mitigation for why you forgot your gym kit, brought the wrong book, mislaid the permission slip.

You leave school with nothing. Nothing close to the prizes other people take away: straight A’s, head boy/girl, captain of the team, a ticket to a good uni, or a ‘best days of your life’ summer just like the 1980s US movies promised. You were invisible. You were never really there.

You go to work. When you start out, you think work is a meritocracy. You find out it is not. Work is a bullshit social status machine. You need to learn the rules of the system and what it rewards, then you can advance. You need work because you like eating food and having a roof over your head. But you have to tell that cold dread inside voice to “shut up, I'm doing this because I need to” every time you log on. The leave allowance bleeds away. You can’t believe you only get 25 days plus bank holidays.

Relationships aren’t a safe space. You weren’t sure you were loved. Like, really unconditionally loved. Nothing ‘kid you’ did seemed to be good enough. Then you meet someone. You can’t let them love you because you are not to be loved. You are not enough, this is known.

You enter relationships but always hold enough back that you can walk out. You don’t put down roots that could get tangled up in the other people’s roots and fix you to one spot. You keep this flight plan in place for decades.

I keep saying ‘you’ but this is obviously my story.

Career. I always wanted to be in a band. I love music. I was also good at acting. I like to think I can write.

I didn’t do any of those things.

So, I spent my 20s not doing anything at all because I would not let myself do the things I loved.

No, it was worse than that, I spent my 20s destroying myself every single fucking day because I would not let myself do the things I loved. I had learned they were not valuable, that just being me was not valuable.

Nowadays, I work in tech. I'm good with ideas, holding ambiguity and complexity, storytelling and people. That’s what I bring. I don’t write code, other people are way better at that than me. I lean into who I am.

24/7 I wear a ring that has ‘I create my reality’ engraved on the inside. That’s to remind myself not to get stuck in the past. I cannot rewrite that story. I take that ring off and read the inscription at least 3 times a day. Each read is an invitation to remake my now and what comes after.

I also think of my late father when I do this, I reckon he’d think the ring was an unnecessary adornment but I draw strength from it. It’s just a token. The real power lies inside me and how I move forward. If I lost the ring, I wouldn’t lose the power. I’m not fucking Frodo.

When I look back at my life story, it’s not a straight line through conflict that is leading to a neat ending, a line on an underground railway calling at all stops to Resolution.

It’s more like a bag1.

A container holding a bunch of ambient experience objects that are maybe connected, maybe not. Or that combine in unexpected ways (“were you happy as a kid or are you funny?”).

These days I have ownership over what goes in the bag.

I create my reality.