Working full-time has brought me back to life
it's an inconvenient truth
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself almost forever, mostly writing novels, largely done from the sofa. 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’ve been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. So, at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my books - I took a job in a high school as a substitute teacher. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house 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.
(pssst! I just revealed all the details about my summer 2025 book. Please do consider pre-ordering: it’s the single best way to help authors you love!)
My parents - and BFFs - have noticed a huge change in me these past two months, essentially commenting several times that OH! THERE SHE IS! THERE’S LAURA! SHE’S BACK! I don’t think any of us realised how much I’d faded, become so much less of myself. But this new job, getting up and out and wearing proper clothes and challenging myself out there in the world, in my community, suddenly I look different, feel different, act different. I’m busier than ever but wearing life lighter than I probably ever have done before. And it’s great. Suddenly I get what all the fuss is about!!
(Dad said I am like a pit pony seeing sun for the first time. A pit pony used to work underground in the mines and then retire to the fields and go nuts at the concept of fresh air and space to roam. He’s not wrong. Annoyingly.)
These are all the ways life is better lately, because of my new job:
my brain is quieter
This is the biggest thing for me. I can’t believe how many of my problems were made up before. They must have been! I’d sit at home in my sticky post-workout gear, telling myself I didn’t have time to shower because there were books to write… whilst getting distracted every five minutes by my phone, or scrolling industry press, or staring out the window, getting mad at something that happened five years ago or this morning, stewing in a soup of my own ennui until buying unnecessary things on Amazon Prime or H&M Home for next day delivery, to feel something, anything.
I’m busy right now, but vibrantly so: I write between 5 and 7am, and between 8.30am and 4pm I’m absolutely, totally, dreamily absorbed in kids, students, library duty, following up on that boy who was worried about their Maths test or student who had a spoken English competition at break or that Sixth Former who had a scholarship test for university. My day is postcards home and issuing detentions and running to find where the hell the food tech room is, I have seriously never even heard of this room! and I do not get a second to ponder the meaning of life because I am in it, I am life. I get home and am so doggedly determined to be present for my son that my phone is on the sideboard unchecked and we have tea, do homework and bathtime and then play a game and I am… fried. But good fried! Me and my quietened down brain drift off to sleep hugely content, with not an invented problem in sight…