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Notes From Inbetween Girl

On going dark

Just a quick one to round off this cursèd year

 
A few weeks ago, when it was slightly safer than it is now, I had to take a train to London. The journey from Brighton to Victoria lasts just over an hour – short enough to make seeing friends in the city during normal times relatively easy, long enough to give one time to sit down and do nothing for a bit. And God, I’ve missed journeys like that this year. Not just being able to see friends, but the travelling itself. 
 
Because aside from time you spend physically asleep, time spent travelling is about the only time you’re truly ‘off’. When you’re on a train, bus or plane, there is very little you can do for anyone else. You can’t fix anything, or come to anyone’s rescue. Nor can you just do that bit of washing-up, or just sort that bit of recycling. You are travelling, therefore you are automatically occupied. Out-of-bounds, off-grid. You are forced to go dark for a while. 
 
A snatched hour or two on a train as it slices through countryside, woodland and fields and houses flashing past the window, is good for the brain. You can let your mind idle, allow thoughts to swoop and dive like starlings. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that during that recent journey, I wrote something of my own for the first time in weeks. 
 
I’ve had this article saved on my phone for probably a year now, and while the advice to “cultivate a persona of unreliability” strays a little too close to that particular brand of tweeness we might call ‘Writers Are Special’ for my liking, there’s more than a small grain of usefulness to it. (Incidentally, writer Rob Palk recently stuck a pin in the whole ‘Writers Are Special’ discourse, in an amusingly cross manner.)
 
Off the back of this year, a lot of employers are now going to find it considerably harder to argue that all staff need to be on site every day. If previously you’ve had to fight to work remotely, the one positive that may come out of the pandemic is the end of that battle. But the trade-off for this is that the boundaries between work and home are no longer clearly delineated. When your desk is two steps from your kitchen, you’re never free of either of them. You’re always ‘on’, always contactable, never truly off. And that feeling can very quickly seep into other parts of your life – if you’re always available for your boss, you might as well always be available for your friends too. 

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be available for your friends, of course – I love it when friends need me! It proves I’m useful to them! – but everyone needs to retreat and focus on only themselves from time to time. To put it another way: I will drop everything for a friend who needs me urgently; I will drop very little to join a group chat about a hen weekend that’s not until April 2022. 

Sometimes you don’t know how badly you need to just stop until it’s almost too late – one innocuous WhatsApp message has you hissing at your phone, “No, not now! I can’t deal with one more thing!” If you make only one resolution for the coming year (and really, one is plenty), then make it so you don’t get to that point. Look. After. Yourself. I learnt this one the hard way a few years ago: the job I had was exhausting me, I wasn’t very good at it, and it wasn’t paying enough – so I quit with nothing to go to. Back then, I had someone to split bills with, so it wasn’t the risk it would be now. But it came down to quitting or… well, I dread to think. A few weeks after I left the role, my boyfriend of the time said to me, “it was definitely the right decision, because you were so sad and angry all the time, and now you’re not.” You are the only one who has to keep showing up for your own life, day in, day out, so make it a life you can bear, at the very least.

And as much as I hate to admit it, rest is good. Going dark for a day or two gives your brain time to recover, and to work up a hunger again. Good ideas sometimes need the dark and the quiet in order to grow. 

(Thanks for reading this year, you've no idea how much it means. Love to you all. Crack open the fizz tonight, we've earned it.) 
 

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