coffee off the clock is a weekly column full of musings on life since i left my 9-5, and building a life around writing. join me for a coffee every week and follow my journey!

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i’m typing at the kitchen bar, perched on a stool with a hugo spritz and ice. the kitchen door is wedged ajar, keeping an open pathway to the sun. i can feel the heat against my back. it tells me summer’s close.

we chose this delightful day to visit koko house again, but this time in shawlands. we passed by a dozen cherry blossoms on the way. a soft day of indulgence. the souffle pancakes are unlike anything i’ve ever had (and i’ve had a loooot of pancakes as you know if you’ve followed along). and coffee today was a hazelnut latte as always, but it was true art.

yap score was unsurprisingly low today. 3/10. we mostly people-watched and just enjoyed being present. had quite an interrupted night of sleep. and i’ll be the first to admit that without a good sleep, i’m of no use, especially not to myself. i’ve been waking at 7am with the light glaring in my eyes through whatever cracks in our curtains it can find. proof that light will always find a way, right? and that once again, summer is, indeed, close.

but i’m still in some sort of quiet disbelief. that this day, this gloriously sunny friday, is just a tease. a glimpse of what we could have if we were closer to the equator. warm days that will always feel too foreign and too fleeting for a country like ours. like sand through the fingers.

to think i’ve seen 26 sets of seasons come and go and i can still hardly fathom their impermanence. no matter how vigorously you intellectually prepare for transitions, they will still sneak up on you in the most unsuspecting moments. sometimes at your kitchen bar.

bee sings from the living room, his human-mimicked peek-a-boo a soft contrast to the god-given sweet song of the robin perched on the fence behind me. the domestic vs the wild. and i’m somewhere in between. the theme of my dreams. of my writing. of my life for these last few weeks. and i hadn’t been letting myself feel very much last week.

in fact, i closed up like a daisy detecting humidity (i only learned this week that they do that!). i sensed my own tears and thought it safer to curl up my delicate petals. i even wrote last week’s column at a cold distance, living quite contently through my head.

but i went a long walk this week, in half-preparation for the kiltwalk that i’m tackling on sunday for erskine arts (you can support us here ❤️). and on my walks is where i receive guidance from something more honest (sometimes brutally lol). you cannot think your way out of this, you must feel your way through it.

i didn’t even know what ‘it’ was. i just knew i had a stranger waiting at my door and i was refusing to let them in. i’d pass by them continuously, pretending i couldn’t see their shadow while i was carrying laundry, cleaning bee’s cage, managing my step count, organising my wardrobe or editing the community anthology. and it waited. and waited. and waited. until…

it appeared in a dream. when i could no longer live in my head. i was lying in my old childhood bed when a shadow crept into the bed beside me. it felt feminine in energy. i looked forward, to the bottom of the bed and seen a huge keg of… coffee. it began overspilling onto the white sheets. the shadow got up quickly and left. i remember feeling both curiosity and fear. awe and danger when encountering it.

then, it appeared in the next dream, not as a shadow, but as a ghost. it felt like it was revealing itself to me bit by bit. this time, i was at a swimming event and i remember being in the sea, not afraid to swim deep, but afraid to swim far.

i could feel the ghostly presence of a woman around me. she’d do it, but not me, i thought as i took a seat on the ridge of a concrete tunnel in the sea halfway out. she spelled her name out on a blue ouji board i had beside me. it was an american woman i’d been friends with in the past.

i woke from the dream thinking about her. she was only in my life briefly. at a time where i really needed to believe that more was possible for my life than my job. she was someone i was grateful to have known, even if only for a breath. she was so alive. never in the same place long enough to be the same person. and for me, she was more than that. she was a symbol. of the other part of me i had denied.

she was a rebel with a cause. a risk-taker with the vivaciousness of life always at the tip of her tongue, never without a good story to tell. a cowgirl in the sand. and that brings me to this week’s song of the week. cowgirl in the sand. hello, woman of my dreams. i know neil young did the original, but there’s something that just speaks to my soul with the byrd’s version.

i knew what this was when i woke up. i wasn’t afraid of going deeper in my life. after all, that’s all i’ve been doing since leaving my job. i’ve been afraid to go farther. i’m afraid to expand. it was the denied explorer in me. i talked more about this realisation in who do you think that you are.

but unlike that week, it didn’t just want to be brought into awareness – this week, it’s asking to be lived. like i said, lately it’s been easier for me to intellectualise than to actualise what i’ve denied in myself. but it never holds. the emotions came hurtling in like a crowd of cattle. like twisting the bottle cap and bursting the champagne.

wild, untamed and uncontained. that’s who i was at my corporate job. the mask i wore well. i had no structure in my life, or no sturdy one at least. then, when i left, i swung to the opposite. i began building structure, containment, soft domesticity and responsibility. carl jung calls this compensation. and now, i believe i’m finding the third way of being. where my identity is not so fixed with either but a sweet union of both. integration.

so, i did what my dream showed me. i went swimming and specifically swimming alone. i needed to find out who i was outside of the container i’d so diligently built. and though a seemingly small and pathetic act, it was the catalyst of a radical change in how i feel about myself. i’m no longer saying ‘i can’, but ‘i do’.

– ailsa x