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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corpses, mushrooms, soggy marshland and graveyards. that’s the images my dreams have been giving me lately, and right on season as well 🎃. but the heavy feelings that taint my day from them tells me it’s more. i feel the grief. i feel the loss. BUT before i guide you into the depths with me, i’ll begin light and fluffy like these pancakes me and majd had from koko house this week. it’s been our favourite place for a while now and sometimes we just wake up, turn to each other with knowing eyes and souffle pancakes on our minds. that’s the marker of true love.

okay now let’s go deeper hehe! 🌊 after a year of studying dreams, symbolism and the unconscious, i know they’re not to be dismissed as random or trivial. nor the feelings that accompany them – perhaps the most valuable information we receive from them. so i’m recognising where i am: i’m in the midst of what alchemists & jungians alike would call mortificatio. some part of me is dying, or has died. and it’s not pretty.

i notice myself telling the same story of an identity that’s served its purpose and wants to be gently let go. to everyone around me, i call myself a hermit. and as soon as the words leave my mouth, i feel a misalignment. the same identity that aided in preserving my energy to heal, grow, read and study has now become limiting, suffocating and imposing. yet, in a very human way reader, it feels soo hard to let go of it. after all, for the last 2 years, it is all i had known.

it gave me my first book, my self-employment, my collection of poems, a body of work and the material i now teach in my classes. it taught me the value of my energy and the price of leaking it to everybody. and i understand it more now: it was compensation for all the times i didn’t discriminate and discern in the years prior and leaked my valuable energy everywhere at every chance.

the extroverted ‘girlboss’ who’d never miss a party or a chance to stay late at work. who’d pour a glass of wine and watch bridget jones alone in her own flat and say ‘this is the life’. until she had to put her empty glass back in the kitchen, where she’d tiptoe around slugs, pretend she didn’t hear the mice and avoid looking at the mouldy crust of plaster peeling down her wall.

she’d already fought losing battles with the letting agents. the next step would be legal action: but she didn’t have the time nor the energy. work was already taking that. a bustling social life that she’d never had before…was already taking that. a cascade of health issues…was taking that.

so romanticising suffering was now her only means of coping. after all, she’d received the warnings of what happens when you show ‘weakness’. suck it up, she’d tell herself, this is how aaaaalll the greats start out. and let’s not talk about the loneliness as she closed her laptop lid at 9pm. all through the day, knowing everyone but being known by no one.

that’s it, reader. i gave so much of myself away indiscriminately in that period of my life that the pendulum made a very natural swing to the other side. i had to learn how to preserve. to sustain. to discern. and i have, it’s just become a little too rigid now. the womb, the cave, the place where all tired souls go to be born again, had become a little too safe in my life. and safe is sooo comfortable.

then my soul riots, because it knows i can’t get too comfortable. it comes out in frustration, tension, ideas that spring forth, then go underground, then peak their shiny little heads back up again. sparks before the whole thing comes back online. and with every death, comes a rebirth.

i remember how with every leap of faith i’ve ever taken, i’ve been held by unseen hands. guided to the right places. drawn to the right people. inspired by the right things. but you can’t have sunflowers without soil. and right now, reader, in this very somber week, with no obvious outer cause for my grief, but a very obvious inner one, i’m in the soil. the hermit has died. my grip is softening. my hands are opening. i’m ready to receive my new costume. and it makes this poem i wrote a few months back all the more revealing to me…

I take orders from nothing
but those whispers in the wind that say this.
And the source of my suffering
is to search for those whispers with no wind at all.
Waiting seems to have a voice of its own.
You are in-between costumes, it tells me, in this glorious play of life.
I’m bare before the bedrock.
Wings to the waves.
Heart to the hearth.
There is nothing to wear.
You must wait for the silk from the seamstress in the sky.
Don’t you know? Hurried hands make a hurricane.
In the meantime,
like a child in the waiting room,
You must…

play.

until next week reader, may all your coffees be had with the realisation that it’s just a phase, not your entire life 💗☕️

– ailsa x