Doing things alone
I've done a lot of it lately
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, writing 15 (!) books, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries. I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my novels - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
When I started at CrossFit, a sentence I am obliged to open this letter with on account of the fact that the number one rule of doing CrossFit is reminding everyone with frequency that I DO CROSSFIT NOW, I started with a taster session.
The gym friend who suggested CrossFit to me said if I wanted somebody to go with that she’d come, buuuuuut unfortunately for me she was texting from the plains of Africa where she was on Safari. I run a tight ship, have limited windows of time, and was very much babe, thanks, but now I’ve decided to give this a go I’m gonna have to book in for like, tomorrow. It was the Easter holidays, you see, I was on a break from school, and I’d set myself a deadline of “after Easter” for being back in the gym, back working out, back impressing my kid by chucking weights around after a four-month break to get settled into my new job.
I didn’t think twice about it. I mean, not until I was in my car outside of the place, watching a class with chiseled Man-Gods with their shirts off climbing ropes and sprinting around the block, noting the women lifting weights bigger than my head. Then suddenly I realised, oh shit, I feel kinda nervous.
Kinda nervous has been my zone of being for a lot of 2025. I guess I’ve trained myself enough that booking in a gym taster session or applying for a job isn’t a big deal in itself. I don’t borrow worry from the future that way, don’t stress about what could or might happen until… well, right there, in the moment, when I’m suddenly bricking it.
Obviously the last four and a half months have been newness day in, day out as I navigate school, which means not only figuring out 250 staff names (first and last!!) and 1,500 kids names (also first and last!!) and the campus layout and where the staffroom is. It’s also been computer systems, student special educational needs, heads of year, intuiting hierarchies and allegiances, deciding on a discipline strategy, being sent to fill in somewhere with thirty seconds notice - essentially, pivoting on a dime has become my speciality. When I walked into the gym to find the person running the session my body had this a particular response that I was immediately aware felt familiar, and I didn’t realise how much of 2025 has been lived outside my comfort zone until I registered the discomfort in figuring out where to put my bag, whether to take my jumper off now or leave it, where I was supposed to stand and what I was supposed to do with my arms??? my face??? until we were all called into the session briefing. Basically, oh! This nervousness is what I not only feel right now at the taster session but also what I feel 89% of the time in my new working life!! WELL THAT IS USEFUL INFORMATION TO HAVE!!
(Expanding our zone of comfort is inherently uncomfortable. Discomfort isn’t bad - but we can’t deny it exists. I can’t, anyway.)