it's been a year

on first birthdays, false starts, self-doubt and the art of building something meaningful by accident

When I decided to start this newsletter in the winter of 2022, I wrote the piece below in a whoosh. I nearly posted it, then chickened out and wrote something more anodyne. A year on, I feel braver and bolder, so I’m posting it now.

Not long after I turned forty something inside me broke.

It wasn’t anything as obvious or dramatic as a fractured bone or some kind of nervous breakdown or collapse. It was a moment of crisis, a turning point – but a crisis that was only palpable to me. I had no idea what was happening except there was no turning back.

I remember the moment clearly: It was in the fall of 2018 and I was sitting at my desk in my writing shed, waiting out an afternoon rainstorm so I could go in the house and make myself a cup of tea. The rain started coming down harder, heavier, until ice marbles were pelting the roof of my shed. A flash flood washed the topsoil off my garden and sent a large rat scurrying up the trunk of the eucalyptus tree that sits outside my window. I watched the rat with a mixture of fascination and disgust as it tried, rather hopelessly, to shelter itself under the canopy of ivy. I was wondering whether I ought to call the exterminator when I felt it: The breaking, I mean. 

I remember exactly how it felt: It was as if there was a retaining wall deep inside my chest, one I’d scarcely been aware of, which had begun to buckle under the pressure of an urgent, pent-up force. Almost as soon as I understood this — as if my recognition itself was the catalyst — the wall gave way. I felt a sudden release in my chest, then it was as if a torrent of hot liquid was rushing through me, one that had also swept me up in its current. I began laughing and sobbing in tandem. A series of conflicting memories, desires, images and emotions swept through my mind like an old fashioned newsreel. Then the wind died down and the rain suddenly stopped. The clouds lifted and the sun came out. The storm was over, literally and figuratively. The crisis had come as quickly as it went but whatever had happened had definitely happened. I was changed. I didn’t know how except that I could not unknow this singular fact: Something had broken inside me, a great shift had occurred, and with it a release. It was not an unpleasant or painful feeling but it was unsettling because it came with the certainty that my life was going to change dramatically in ways I could not yet fathom. I understood from that moment on nothing would ever be the same. I was completely sober, by the way.

Slowly my mind formed a single clear but inarticulate thought which was this:

Ah fuck. 

Followed by this:

Fuck, fuck fuck fuckety fuck.

Over the days and weeks that followed, I went about my life as normal, doing my work, caring for my children and as I did I so I realised three very obvious things which I understood I had, prior that moment, been very studiously ignoring. It was as if all the energy I’d put into ignoring these things rushed out of me the moment retaining wall broke in my chest and now I had to take stock. So I did. I wrote a list of these realisations and taped it above my desk. It read: 

1) My life is now close to half over

 2) One day it will actually end 

3) I have to start taking myself seriously

What did I mean by ‘seriously?’ Well, for most of my life the idea of ‘seriousness’ was something I found unappealing, a characteristic I tried, for a variety of complicated reasons, to shake off  at every turn. Like most career journalists, I liked to think of myself as savvy, clever, irreverent, nimble-minded, playful, pragmatic and strategic, but not serious, which I equated with solemnity, self-importance and dullness, a kind of egotistical mirthlessness. This, I suddenly understood, had been something of a mistake, a kind of betrayal of myself. Basically I’d sold myself short because I was afraid of failure. Much as I fretted and mulled about my work and relationships, politics, literature, the state of the world, what to have for dinner, my aversion to seriousness also meant I’d never actually contemplated who I was and what it was I actually really wanted (for dinner, or otherwise). I was always thinking of what I ought to be doing, thinking, eating, considering and so on, instead of what I actually wanted to do, think, eat and consider. I’d lost touch with my deepest most urgent desires and in doing so lost touch with myself and found myself living a life that did not feel like my life.

I was, in fact, so much in the habit of not taking myself seriously that if I dared to try to do so, even for a moment, it induced in me a kind of psychic confusion and nausea. In order to avoid taking myself seriously I’d spent the first half of my life essentially lurching, from writing job to job, city to city, relationship to relationship, project to project, house to house. Now in my forties, married with children, with a two decade career as a writer under my belt, I felt a bit like that famous Talking Heads song:

You may find yourself in a beautiful house

With a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself:

How did I get here?

So I decided to take myself seriously. How did I do this? The same way anyone ever does anything. I sat down at my desk and made another fucking list. But this one was not a list of revelations but a To Do List that came from the List of Revelations:

- I  would invest more in the relationships I cared about most.

– I would stop berating myself about things that fundamentally did not matter to me, and at the same time be honest with myself about the ways in which I was sabotaging and/or avoiding the things that did. 

– I would cultivate more laughter, lightness, joy, pleasure, surprise and meaning in my life and work and I would do so (crucially) even if it meant more tears, darkness, vulnerability, hard graft, failure and despair.

– I would write a book. Not just any book but a specific book I’d been trying and failing not to write for most of my adult life. 

– In order to write the book I needed to write would need to adhere to the first three items on the list. The prospect of this, combined with the book itself, scared me absolutely shitless.

Five years later, looking back on that strange afternoon rainstorm in the fall of 2018, I see now that my moment of reckoning was not the bolt from the blue I’d initially imagined. There was a lead up, a series of events that seemed incidental at the time but which had, in fact, led me to that breaking point. In retrospect isn’t there always? For one thing, the previous year I’d been fired from a writing gig (a regular weekly column) I’d held for 17 years. I did not miss it and understood I should have quit on my own terms years before, but the sacking itself had left me humiliated and bewildered. Also I’d had a second baby. Also Trump was elected. Also (related to my job loss) I wrote a column about having once wanted, for a fleeting moment whilst tipsy in my twenties, to breastfeed the infant of a Canadian Tory MP and the column went viral (but not in a good way). Also Britain had voted for Brexit. Also I’d just had a second baby and I was very, very tired. Also I felt fat. 

(I wasn’t actually fat, but that’s irrelevant.)

All these things happened, not in that order, and in the middle of it all I received an email from a chap called Hamish. Like me Hamish was a writer from Toronto and had recently had a baby and was very, very tired. I did not ask him if he felt fat though he probably did, newborns have a way of doing this to a person, even fathers. 

Unlike me Hamish had recently co-founded a new company called Substack — a digital platform for email subscription newsletters. Like everyone in the world it seemed to me (in reality a couple of hundred people on Canadian Twitter) he’d heard I’d recently been fired. Hamish said he was sorry, their loss. And I said, Well, thanks. Hamish and I arranged to talk and a fascinating conversation ensued, one in which we discussed infant sleep regression, digital innovation, acid reflux, creative destruction, swaddling, the perniciousness of social media, cot death and the uncertain future of journalism – not in that order. Hamish urged me to start a newsletter with Substack. I said I wasn’t sure. He sketched out the possibilities of the platform and envisioned a bright new future for publishing and journalism — a landscape in which serious writers and serious readers would be able to connect without being subject to the vagaries of algorithms and advertisers. Hamish was smart and convincing. His excitement was infectious. I was excited too, but I was also terrified and broke and exhausted.

But more crucially I understood that what Hamish was proposing would mean I’d need to bet on myself, and in order to do that I’d have to take myself seriously. So I vacillated (something I’m very adept at). I asked a whole bunch of questions. He answered them articulately and in detail. I vacillated some more. I promised Hamish I would think about it.  Instead of thinking about it, I pitched a bunch of  vague magazine story ideas I wasn’t interested in and wept in my shed as the deadlines approached. I breastfed during the day and mashed bananas at night and scrambled around for another job. Hamish got in touch a few weeks later but by that time I’d taken a contract doing celebrity interviews for the website of a healthy fast food chain that had just IPO’ed. Hamish said he completely understood. He said he hoped I’d reconsider and that once Substack had “a few success stories under its belt” he’d come back to me. 

He did not come back to me. (The cheek!)

Then the healthy fast food company had a bad first quarter and I got fired again. This time I did not feel humiliated or bewildered. I wrote a bunch of magazine stories I was interested in — longer ones, better ones. I flew to Canada to profile Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister, a terrifyingly intelligent woman with a fascinating life story. I investigated a convicted fraudster who’d adopted a new identity and run a successful crypto scam on Wall Street and began developing a podcast about it. I wrote about a family of warring billionaires involved in a seemingly intractable family trust dispute. I profiled Mark Carney, the charismatic outgoing Governor of the Bank of England. I was still struggling, but on the upside I got nominated for a bunch of awards I did not win. I thought about starting a Substack newsletter. My boys started school. Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister. I joined the PTA. Harvey Weinstein was charged with rape. I got bangs cut and took a job ghostwriting the biography of an elderly Dutch former nightclub impresario and playboy who hired me to craft his stories of sexual harassment and tax evasion into charming and hilarious self-published anecdotes. I sat in my shed and tried not to write a book. The book. There was a pandemic. I thought about Substack. Then something inside me broke. Then I wrote the book, a memoir. It came out last summer. 

It nearly killed me that book, my third book. But I had to write it. I had to. Some books are like that. I had to write it because knew it would change my life and it did, just not in the way I expected. I gained as much as I lost from it – in the end the effect was a net zero both in terms of what it brought me financially and professionally, but I knew beyond a shadow it was the best and bravest thing I’d published to date so it didn’t matter. For all the grief and pain it’s brought me, I would not unpublish the book I now think of as that book because by writing it and ushering it into the world I learned how to take myself seriously, both as a writer and a grown up person in the world who is one day going to die. I learned how to stand up and say: This is the kind of life I want and I am going to take the necessary and difficult steps toward making it happen and accept the consequences as they come because there will be consequences. It made me brave and fundamentally unafraid of failure — so long as I failed on my own terms, I knew it would be worth it in the long run.

Because of that shift, my life today is completely unrecognisable to the life I had in 2018. The storm blew in five years ago but most of the big changes have happened in the past calendar year – almost exactly one year to the day I started Juvenescence. 

I haven’t yet figured exactly what this newsletter has to do with all of it – the end of my marriage, a renewed interest in my work and an altered sense of self – perhaps it’s that I instinctively used it (and continue to use it) it as a laboratory for experimentation. A place where I fiddle around and talk to people and make notes toward understanding what it is I’m really, really interested in and want to write more about. A kind of safe space for taking myself seriously, for lack of a better term.

I don’t know really, and I may never know but I am sure of one thing: I have built something here. This newsletter is deeply meaningful and significant to me. It’s been a lifeline and a joy as well as a huge source of trouble, but it has absolutely been worth it. It even pays for itself. Its effect on my personal and professional life has not been net zero, thank god. (There are only so many net zeros a writer can survive in any given year and I’ve had more than my fair share since starting Juvenescence.) There have been moments when it felt like writing this newsletter was the only thing that dragged me out of bed in the morning — or prevented me from returning to it after I got the boys off to school.

All of which is to say that one year in, I am so grateful to all of you — my readers and subscribers — especially those of you who’ve stuck with me since the beginning. Thank you for your attention and patience. Thank you for putting up with my erratic nature, my occasional silences, my rants, my tantrums, my terrible jokes, but more than anything THANK YOU for taking me seriously enough to read what I write. I am beyond grateful for your support, your respect and most of all your time.

 This is just the beginning of the beginning, there is so much more to come. I am terrified and full of joy. I cannot wait to see what happens next.