I left my job back in August 2024, and ever since then, I’ve been doing things and not really knowing what to call it. I think that’s the beauty of what I do. It’s more of a vocation than a career, and it’s not defined by any one thing, which within our traditional frameworks, can be difficult to understand. And for me? Far more difficult to explain. There’s a saying that the life of a creative is not linear – it’s a spiral.

My work usually goes like this: I get what I call ‘a notification’ from something larger than myself that says ‘this’ and then ‘this next’. When I left my job, without any logical reasoning, I knew I had to write a book – so I wrote a book. Then, I knew I had to create a writing workshop – so I created the writing workshop. Except, there’s a caveat with these notifications: do this and do this with zero expectations of an outcome. All I was given intuitively was: it has to exist.

With the former task, that was easy. I loved the process of writing a book and cared very little for the outcome. To have a piece of my own imaginal world made manifest by my own hands was more than enough for me. Whenever people ask me about my book I always say: the best thing about writing a book is writing the book. But with the workshops, I couldn’t reach this same level of inner content.

During the summer, I had a confrontation with a writing organisation who I felt were creating barriers to entry for young writers like myself. The red flags lit up clear as day to me with issues such as accessibility, inclusivity and hidden fees. I had purchased a ticket for an event that they were hosting, only to find out after making my non-refundable payment that I also had to pay an additional fee to attend. This was never explicitly communicated before signing-up. The additional fee was something I couldn’t afford, therefore I couldn’t attend.

I felt excluded and frustrated, knowing that this event had exactly all the things I needed to give me the knowledge, connections and experience to grow as a writer. After this confrontation, I was refunded and it was promised to me that my extensive list of points would be taken to their AGM to be discussed. I felt quite disillusioned because I left the corporate world for a reason and I really expected better of the creative industries. But no matter the industry, I believe where there is hierarchy, there is exclusion. And where profit is priority, there’s no integrity.

So, one thing was clear to me – this was not the writing world that I wanted to be a part of. After that, I began to see my mission as this: if I can’t find where I belong in the world, then I’m going to create it. That’s when the idea of creating accessible workshops began to come into sharp focus.

I spent days during the summer making session outlines, designing workshop materials, creating a web page and a marketing strategy. I knew I had found what I was supposed to be doing because, like the book, I loved the process. I had visions of how this workshop would go: we’d gather online, I’d create a community and expand from there.

Then, it was go time. I launched my workshops and as fate would have it – I had absolutely no sign-ups. How could this be? The days that followed felt like a long day in the desert, screaming into the abyss with no one to hear. I felt deceived by the one thing I had put my faith in – that thing that was larger than me.

Truthfully, there was a gnawing part of myself that knew I could’ve done more and could’ve promoted it harder. But I didn’t. I felt this unfathomable resistance. It didn’t feel right because it wasn’t coming from the right place. I wasn’t being honest with myself. Underpinning all this was a deep-seated fear from childhood that I knew I still had. It was a fear of leading and a fear of being seen for who I truly am. Because as a child, this came at a great cost and there was still a lot of work to be done.

The following weeks were a sorry sight of despair and self-pity. I became a child again, throwing a huge tantrum. How dare I be led all this way just to be abandoned and humiliated. I gave up my job for this path. I faced shame, ridicule, misunderstanding. I risked it all…and for what?

The situation came to a head near the end of summer this year. My fiancé had injured his leg, we were struggling financially and the pressure was on to get a job, even part-time. So I took the no-sign ups as a sign that the Job Centre was a necessary visit and got mere inches away from abandoning what I had built with Ailsa Gillies Editorial altogether. I treated it like the defected child that I didn’t want and couldn’t bare to look at. I bought into the words of my work coach and began to resonate with phrases like ‘be realistic’. I gave up trying to prove that who I truly am, at my very core, and what I had built was worth something. No body else could see it, so why should I?

So, I became dutiful once again. Applied to over 300 jobs and logged every single one, much to the astonishment of my work coach. My CV was pristine. My skills were plenty. I even made three separate CVs for the three separate identities I was expected to embody – one an admin assistant, one a cleaner and one a journalist. I was no stranger to embodying personas to survive, but my soul revolts. It’s always just a matter of time.

In the weeks following, my inbox was oscillating between rejections and total silence. I stopped writing my morning pages as often and fell into a bleak routine of job searching. Anything else was too painful. The birds that I’d admire from the window in the morning stopped coming to the neighbour’s feeder. I knew that the once overflowing well of my life had dried up, and what remained was a pile of bones all but minutes away from complete disintegration. I was prepared to become dust, if it meant that the world I was living in was comfortable for everybody else except me.

One morning, I received a message on Indeed from a band looking for a manager and promoter. I had all the necessary skills and thought, finally, something creative. We had set up an interview together and as we spoke, something niggled inside of me. She had chosen me immediately, despite the claim that there were several candidates.

It was a flexible contract with incredible pay, which felt like it could work in harmony with my wellbeing. As the interview ended, she told me that she’d send me the contract and I was to get started immediately. The video call ended and I was dumbfounded with my lack of excitement. In fact, I stared blankly at the screen with unease.

Within minutes, she’d sent through the contract and asked me to sign. Alarm bells started ringing in my head. Something was awake in me. I read through the contract, feeling the emphasis of metric based goals and the reactive nature of the work. This was in huge conflict with the values I’d spent the entire last few years cultivating.

The work I want to do is measured in impact, meaning, connection and slow, steady and honest growth. Not this. The job wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t right for me. I asked her for a day to read the contract before I sign it, but there was this unspoken pressure to sign it fast.

After voicing my concerns around alignment, I sent a polite email refusing the role. I think this was also the point where I came to realise that the corporate world isn’t what my soul rejects – it’s what it represents. And what it represents can be found in the most unsuspecting places, the creative industries being no exception. Back to the job search I went, but not without a sharpening of exactly who I was and what I stood for.

In fact, it was at this moment that things took a huge turn for me. A once shadowy, vague image of myself began to emerge with crystal clear clarity. I returned to Ailsa Gillies Editorial. It was time that I came home to myself. After a discussion with my fiancé, I told him that the job search was doing me more harm than good. It was like hopelessly banging on doors that you know deep down are not made for your entry.

Together, we decided to scrap the job search as our financial situation improved, and he told me firmly that he believes in what I’m building. That’s a very rare luxury to have such a champion and supporter like that. It also became apparent, somewhere deep down, I still had a little champion in me too.

I picked up my pen again and slowly began building the relationship back up with both myself and the thing that felt larger. The more I wrote, the more the things that I had repressed and beliefs that I had clung onto began to surface and they were ready to be let go. From this, Bargaining My Soul was born, a poetic confrontation with my ego.

I eventually got to a point where I felt safe enough to return to the workshop idea again. This time, without any expectation. I reached out to a local cultural charity, Erskine Arts, with the idea of running an accessible and inclusive writing workshop. This time, as fate would finally have it, I got 16 sign-ups. It doesn’t take more of what you are for alignment to happen – it takes letting go of what you’re not. For me, that happened through being confronted with old patterns, old systems and old beliefs.

The best part of the work I get to do is that I don’t have to do it alone. It’s a beautiful dance between the charity, myself, the community and of course, that thing that is larger than me. It’s where all of our values have aligned in one place. I finally get to be seen, not as who the world wants me to be, but for who I actually am and how can I be afraid of that? I’m not living a perfect life, but for the first time in my life, I’m living an honest one.