#15 - The resignation
or ‘False start’
For a moment, I really thought it was relier I was feeling. No more gas meters, no more jerks, no more days alone, desperately alone, fighting against everything: people, fate, weather. ‘I quit!’ Finally, I could say it out loud! And oh, what joy…
But now… What?
The first week, of course, it was all about going out to the beach or for coffees, accompanied by Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, or Hannah Arendt. And a different neighbourhood every day, why not? I could do it now: I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew Barcelona like the back of my hand.
But now… What?
I had enough savings not to have to work again until the end of the year. I could fulfill my dream: go to France, where I would spend three months at my parents' country house. Nature, silence, solitude. The perfect writer's retreat.
But now… What?
There were the cows, indeed. And the silence. So much silence, in fact, I couldn't focus very well. And then there was my idea for the novel, which had been sleeping within me for the past three years. But employed or not, I was facing a blank page, and the vertigo made me reel for quite a while. What more could I possibly say here, in France, or in Switzerland, or anywhere else for that matter, than I had at home?
Yet, all success stories began like this… “I gave up everything,” “I was unemployed,” “I suffered failure after failure, until…” Jack London, or J.K. Rowling, started like this…
But now… What?
I started to get really scared. Maybe there was nothing in me? I wanted to make the trees, and the music speak, and give a voice to everything we don't usually hear, but I realised, up there, at the foot of the mountains, that I didn't even know the sound of my own voice.
Three months passed, and I didn't write a single line (not one worth publishing, at least). I came home empty-handed, but it takes more than that to put me down. So I kept trying, I persisted, fought against the blank page and all the demons that awaken when you finally confront yourself with your own fears, but it was all in vain. Three months later, again, I was back to square one: no manuscript, no job, and I'd spent all my savings.
I guess the wise have known this for a long time: there is a time for everything, and everything comes in its own time. ¹ —
¹ : Ecclesiastes 3
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