20 things in 20 minutes: Things I learnt after being freelance for one year

A few years ago I gave a talk at Generic Greeting’s birthday party in Manchester about ‘things I wish I had known before going freelance’, and at the time I promised myself I would put that advice online too, so here we finally are!

This advice is completely inspired by a piece of writing I found by journalist Kate Hutchinson right before going freelance - you can read it here. In it, she managed to debunk a few myths I was worried about and make it all feel a lot more real. The advice she shared meant I was finally able to make the jump myself - and I remember thinking, I’m gonna do this and write my own advice at the end of one year.

Well… that was five years ago! But I’m really interested in demystifying what it’s like to work for yourself, or showing people that it can be so much more rewarding than a regular job, and not to be scared of that. Now I have started working on my own website, I’d like my blog here to be a place to share some more stories from freelance life, as well as advice on staying inspired when you still have to pay the bills, and pushing your own creative practice forward… so stay tuned for those.

But first, let’s begin at the beginning: back to the speech! Looking back now, some of these points might feel obvious to you, but I learnt all of these things on the job, so it figures other people might not know them either... let’s get into it.

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20 Things I Learnt After Being Freelance For One Year

At 25 I was creative director of a startup but was not allowed to attend board meetings. I was earning around £32k a year, with severe anxiety and moderate depression. I was unhappy, and had been for a long time. I had applied to countless jobs and never landed so much as an interview.

I was away in Berlin when a few friends suggested I could make something - a business, a brand - anything, for myself, from scratch. Then I would call the shots. My flight back to London was delayed by 12 hours, and to be honest it was the best thing that could have happened at that moment in time. I used all those hours to plan my next move.

Arriving back home, I knew I wanted to leave my job, but I also needed time to establish myself. I needed time to plan, and there was no way I would get that headspace from working in an office five days a week.

Knowing my bosses wouldn’t be happy about me just wanting time off to develop another career, I told them a very loose truth that I wanted to spend some time each week working on my writing. They let me push my full time job into three days, working 6am-5pm from home every day. This meant I was able to start with one freelance client, and over time, build that into four clients. Twelve months after going full-time as a freelancer I earnt less than half of what I was earning when I was in full time work, but I was already so much more fulfilled in my work than I thought I ever could be.

In just those twelve months that was abundantly clear, but there were also some INTENSE life lessons learnt in that time - and ones I believe it’s important to learn for yourself. Nevertheless, I feel like if I share these, maybe it’ll make it easier for you to spot when that trusty old life montage is happening before your eyes too.

So here are 20 things I learnt after being freelance for one year. Tell me what you learnt too. Let’s get wiser, together!

1. There is no financial security, so work out what your security fund looks like

If you graduated in the UK after 2008, you’ll know the last decade hasn’t been characterised with financial security for anyone. Being freelance is no longer considered the risky choice it used to be - it is far more normal. But that doesn’t mean you can get complacent. If you are in full time employment and considering going freelance, set the stage for your finances. You may not be able to save six months of your salary (who can?!), but a month’s worth of rent and bills doesn’t hurt. I’d also recommend having the means to repurchase all of your vital equipment - whether it’s savings, insurance or a credit card - if you need a laptop, camera, or anything else to do your job, make sure you can buy it again in an emergency.

2. You don’t have one boss any more. You might have five. And five inboxes, and five sets of team meetings to attend

This was a major appeal for me to go freelance: I was so tired of trying to guess the every whim of my old managers and ignoring my instincts. But when you do make the switch to being freelance, you’ll start to see that instead of one person to answer to, you’ve acquired a lot more. They may take up a lot more headspace than one - so get used to juggling. The same goes for inboxes and team meetings - the expectations don’t get lower, you just have less time to devote to each one.

If you want long term clients, try to invest extra time to behave like another team member if you can. It’s unlikely you’ll get reinbursed for this financially, but if you’re looking for stability, it’s worthwhile - or be clear in managing your client’s expectations of what you can do/attend.

3. You don’t have to say yes to every job

This was probably the key lesson I took away from my first year of freelance. I said yes to every opportunity that came my way. After a while, it’s time to get strategic. Every freelancer you know can tell you about the job that did them in, when they realised they’d totally overstretched themselves. Mine involves frantically baking key lime pies for a vegan restaurant I worked for in order to pay by rabbit’s vets bill, and inevitably dropping a load of them due to being so stressed out. Before saying yes to each new proposition, do your own due diligence: how many hours will this job take? How much will you earn for each of those hours? What travel and other expenses will you need? If the monetary gains are low, are you at least gaining valuable experience?

4. It’s not all oat milk flat whites and avocado toast, but make time to treat yourself if you think you deserve it

Another one for the first year freelancers - if only because the novelty does wear off, so grab it while you can: If you’re making rent and covering your bills, you deserve a coffee break. Take yourself out to that place you can never get into at the weekend. Go bask in it BABYYY.

5. Keep developing your network

It can be really hard to network in a big city but don’t let that stop you. No one has a clue who you are - which can be totally scary but also very liberating. Book into talks, lectures, or start volunteering. Don’t get stuck with industry friends on your Instagram and Twitter DMs and none in real life - if you feel like it, set up a meet-up, or research groups that may already exist in your industry. If you live in a smaller community, use that to its benefit too. Set up regional meetups and use your personal network wisely - everyone knows someone looking for you.

These people become your sounding board - having a great community around you is the best thing you can do to set yourself up for working alone.

6. Don’t let being skint stop you from what you want to do

You can always find people to give you money. This will change a lot with what you aim to achieve, but there are so many investors and crowdfunding options out there. If you have an idea or a skill, you have your half of the bargain.

7. Speaking of which: GET SUPER TRANSPARENT ABOUT MONEY

I spent months being coy about it, and I cringe at remembering the meetings I went to without discussing money.

Always talk about fees in the first meeting. Do not start working for someone without an idea of what you’re each getting out of it. That sounds CRAZY for me to say now but I did this for ages, and I know other people do too. If you learn nothing else in the first three months of being freelance, learn this.

8. Stop working for people that miss more than two pre-arranged pay days. Stop right there and don’t look back. It’s not you, it’s them

When I originally wrote this speech, a client owed me over £1000 and I’d had to just stop working for them so that number didn’t increase. After a lot of help from my freelancer network, I managed to negotiate that they paid me back £25 a week. Because I didn’t receive that money within a year of earning it, I had to cancel holidays I’d bought flights for and find another job on the spot. Don’t carry on working for someone if they can’t pay. No buts.

9. If you are not good at maths, pay someone to be for you

This is the one piece of advice I actually did know before going freelance, thanks to the article I mentioned above. I hired an accountant the same month I went freelance. I pay £40 a month for year-round peace of mind, and an invoicing programme. I am terrible at maths, so working a little extra every month to know it’s someone else’s problem is money well spent.

10. Keep track of your hours - BE A STICKLER for this. Add as much detail as you want to your invoices - keep a diary of what you did

I found the ‘ledger’ I used to keep for noting down my hours the other day and laughed out loud. Recording your hours in a haphazard way is only going to lose you money. Make a timesheet for every client you have. Use them as your to do lists, and then you also have an accurate record of what you’ve done every day. Do not shut your laptop for the day without updating your timesheet. If you worked extra hours and are choosing not to charge, add that into the invoice anyway, (advice picked up by another great pal from my freelance network, Sarah!) - let people see how hard you are working.

11. Look after yourself. Look after your mental health and your wellbeing. Make this your number one priority. You will not do yourself justice if you are not looking after yourself properly

If you are considering going freelance, just as you might start savings for that, I cannot stress enough how important it is to start sorting out any outstanding mental health issues you have. See it as another thing to set the stage for.  It’s a lonely freelance world out there, with no holiday pay and no sick days. However thick your skin is, it’s going to get thicker, and you need to look after yourself before all else.

12. Oh, and on the reality of holidays...

I didn’t have a whole day off in the first three years of being freelance. I had to work weekends to make ends meet. In the first few years, I wrote newsletters on Boxing Day, I worked on email updates at 4am in Iceland, and I had to abandon my Mum in Poland in the middle of July while I sat in our Airbnb doing 8 hours of club night promotion.

However, I’ve also been able to say yes to trips away I could never have done when working for someone else.

No one but me decides how many days of the year I am in a different place. That’s the payoff.

And you can go home for 10 days over Christmas without selling your soul to the HR department so YEAH.

13. Other great things you do really get to do

You can choose never to work another Monday again and spend every single one hungover in bed eating pizza… if you really want.

You can look after family - if you have those savings set aside and a few understanding clients, it’s much easier to be there for someone at a moment’s notice - that’s something that’s really helped me.

You can also:

- Take an afternoon off to see a film the day it comes out

- See that blockbuster exhibition no one can get weekend tickets to

- Go to record store releases

- Call your other freelance friends all the time

- Go to the park the first day it is 20 degrees

- Go to the beach the first day it is 25 degrees

- Stay out until 3am on a weeknight sometimes

I wouldn’t recommend doing this all the time but I would recommend doing this as much as YOU GODDAMN LIKE in the first year.

12. Try to earn some kind of money every day

A real thing I struggled with when first switching from fulltime to freelance was that it would get to 5pm and I would still feel a sense of completion that the day was over, but I actually hadn’t worked for anyone that day.

Keep your projects ticking over, look for new work and get the word out there that you’re looking for a certain type of experience. in the first months, when money feels tight, try to make sure you pitch for work at least once a week, do paid work at least once a week and invoice for something at least once a week. That’ll start the ball rolling.

13. If you have spent the entire day at home, it is nearly ALWAYS, no, it REALLY IS ALWAYS a good idea to get outside

Meet a friend for a pint, go to see a cheap film on a Monday, go for a run, walk to your mate’s for just a cup of tea, whatever. If you can afford a gym membership, you will be using it a lot.

14. No one cares about you - it is no longer anyone’s job to look after your welfare

You might be the one-dayer on the team, or you’re working without a contract (don’t do that if you can help it), you have no rights, you are forgettable and probably quite replaceable.

So make it personal. Go to the after work drinks if you can. Become part of the woodwork. Be harder to let go of. Don’t be the weakest link.

15. The best, more rewarding work I’ve done is for my community. It’s never been the jobs that pay the best. It’s always been the ones with people that share your values

Bear that in mind if there’s ever a toss-up between someone you have little respect for who has a lot of money, and someone who will really feel the benefit of you working for them.

16.  Everyone knows someone that can help you

There’s definitely a balance between wanting to make sure people know the kind of work you’re doing, and bragging non-stop about it, but do make sure people know what you can do, and if you’re looking for work, drop a few txts to your friends and contacts.

I have never had a single job from a jobs site or anonymously. It’s always been through a contact or a friend - your network is your most valuable asset.

17. Treat yourself like a business and split yourself up from your brand

Decide which messages ‘freelance you’ is putting out in the world - whether that’s on social media or just in meetings with clients - just because you’re working from home or you’re not on a contract like everyone else, doesn’t mean you stop being professional. You wouldn’t tweet about being hungover through the work Twitter account, so check in with yourself and if you should be doing it on your social media that your freelance network sees. You’re representing Brand You now. I know this sounds ridiculously douchey but as a former social-media-when-drunk fan, I stand by it!

18. JANUARY ALWAYS SUCKS

In my first week at uni we had a brilliant lecturer who told us there would be a day in November when we’d want to pack it all in - when being there would be so miserable and feel pointless that we’d want to drop out - and to see that through to spring (start on a high! I love it!). That day came around and I saw it coming - and that’s how all of January feels as a freelancer. Did I mention tax returns? Oh yeah - that. Get that fucker sorted in JUNE OR JULY of the previous year. And ALWAYS be saving for it. January is bad enough, don’t add taxes to it.

19. You do you

Don’t let people talk you in to needing and office space or a desk - if you’re not sure, give it a few months and work out if you need it for yourself. You don’t have to have a studio just because your best mate does. Don’t waste money working in a way you think you should be. I’m happiest at 6am on a Monday morning at my kitchen table with the whole week ahead. You may not be, but you may only need to use your local library every now and then, or a roster of a few cafes. You call the shots.

20. Embrace an off-kilter life

This was something I had little idea about when I first went freelance but it’s now my favourite part: if you’ve ever read about antifragility you’ll know humans get stronger by withstanding a bit of disorder and chaos. What doesn’t kill you, right? Well, going freelance is about embracing off-kilter living every day, working when you want, doing away with the 9-5. Embrace everything that means, and every way it will change you. It amounts to a lot more than waking up hungover on a Wednesday and not having to go into work. The first year I was freelance, I went away five times in the space of three months, because suddenly I could say yes to things I’d never been able to say yes to before. I worked on a supper club in Berlin, I wrote a recipe zine, I started catering vegan food for weddings.

You will never know if it’s going to be your last year working freelance, or just the first, so embrace every day of it that you can. Life gets a lot fuller when you decide how to fill it.

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And that’s all for now - stay tuned for 20 Things I Learnt After Being Freelance For 5 Years… (oooeee there’s some hard-won experience in that one too!)

Berliner Bike part III

Later that summer we drove out in Ana’s converted police van to the lakes. Conscientious Germans were always leaving notes on that van, guiding her on how to look after it (“fuck this yet again” Ana would growl, scrunching the dutiful notes into the gutter), and Ana was keen to get it out of the city after it had failed whatever the equivalent of an MOT is in Germany.

So one morning we wrapped up the food left in Ana’s fridge, packed her mocha pot and tobacco, and drove out.

We stayed at a friend of a friend’s (long deceased) aunt’s holiday cabin and swam in huge, clear blue waters.

We drank a bottle of wine each (Ana red, me white, always) a night and played cards. I finally got around to reading the copy of Gone Girl I’d picked up at Stansted airport when I’d left London. It freaked me out so much that I made Ana leave all the lights on in the cabin until I’d gone to sleep. She distracted me by planning dinners for her friends who would arrive in two days time - out in the countryside it would take us that long to procure the right supplies.

The morning Ana’s crew were due we set up two white tents as guest rooms and were suddenly cooking for eight.

We played more cards, ate a mix of breakfast and make-shift aperitivos all day long and spilled over into more than a bottle of wine each for dinner.

I hadn’t smoked weed since a not great evening in secondary school later involving every sink in my parents house and a lot of vomit. But on the last night I sat at the weed-smoking end of the table and must have inhaled a fair share.

I went to bed in the tent pitched a little further down the hillside. I had the distinct feeling of my feet rooting back into the soil. I rolled away from my friends and my head lolled out of the tent door.  When I looked out from beneath the canvas flap, the hillside had turned to Tame Impala album cover psychedelia, pulsating in the starlight.

Back in Berlin, this was how it was meant to be.

Ex-pat former lockjaw Americans held parties in erratically furnished apartments. They paid friends who were bar staff by the hour to make cocktails for a group of ten of us. We smoked and snuck out the bathroom window to escape. An English goodbye. We sat on pavements outside schbetes and everyone tutted at my Club Mate obsession while the other English expats bemoaned Brexit.

Everywhere there were signs. The issue of i-D I read, that was called The Time Is Now. The delay for my flight home that meant I had six hours to kill thinking all these things through.

Robert’s intermittent txts back to me.

Ana’s messages beginning once again, after the longest gap in messaging we’d ever had, because instead we’d been next to each other the entire time.

When I got back to London, eight weeks had gone by. It was summer.

Berliner Bike part II

I hadn’t seen Ana in two years, but she met me at the airport dressed as Vivian Ward from Pretty Woman, with a sign for Kit De Luca in her hands.

And for the first time, for a little while, for an amount of time neither of us had decided on, our days would be the same.

Everything was bigger in Berlin. I brushed my teeth over a sink nearly as big as my kitchen table. The water splattered on my stomach, refreshing skin exasperated by the flight over.

Ana lived here. With huge windows in the flat, high up in the block, that were left open at all hours, those things didn't matter.

We rode bikes everywhere with just one lock between us. You could lock one bike to another as the lock, and that was okay. In the middle of the street even, it didn't matter.

“It's not London, is it?” Ana used to ask me. She hadn’t lived in London for a long time, but she assumed.

We cycled one night to a club lined with foil. We left our bikes on the street and ran inside. We smoked and stood near the fans to cool down. We didn't have to buy any drinks. The DJ came and danced with us in front of his decks between songs. It was that kind of place.

My bike didn't have any breaks or gears, it was a contra bike. Ana found it in the building’s communal basement, and, after years of navigating Oxford Circus at rush hour, I was the only person that could ride it. It was pink and the front wheel got looser as I rode it more. I spent a lot of 3 and 4 am rides through Neukölln praying to the Gods of Cobbled Pavements that the axle would not collapse or snap, that it would get me back to Ana's bed just one more time.

Because there was another reason for going to Berlin (and not crashing a bike in Berlin) beneath spending wonderful, lost hours with Ana as if we were fifteen again and had nowhere else to go.

Because Robert lived in Berlin.

After a few days, I came an inch back to myself and remembered there was another person I knew here.

As if my brain knew, filed right at the back beneath those god awful letters from lawyers and remembering to talk about Nige in the past tense now, that Robert would be a good bet.

I didn’t know Robert well. He was a friend of my sister’s I’d met a few times in Glasgow. He’d moved to Berlin a few months ago.

Back in Glasgow, we’d gotten talking at a house party my sister held. She’d lived in a tenement block and the rooms felt cavernous enough that monopolising one person for a two hour conversation seemed reasonable. Rob lived a few doors down the street and left early in the morning after we’d stayed up all night taking the piss out of everyone else at the party.

The next day I found him on Instagram and realised the sum total of fiercely dark brown hair cut back super short and a job (he loathed) running a pub: it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to message him.

My sister rolled her eyes when I told her as if fancying Robert was the most passe thing anyone could do in 2019.

“Oh everyone has that phase babe.”

And to be honest, he was that kind of low-key hot that everyone would. But in Berlin, he barely knew anyone: different rules applied.

It turned out that Robert lived on the same street as Ana which I took as A Sign.

They'd never met, but I felt like somewhere, this coincidence, something would happen from it.

He told me to meet him at our local Ubahn. What a strange reality where we now shared a train stop.

Ana had to draw me a map as I didn't have a clue where I was. I was careful not to make too much effort as I got ready to go while she watched old episodes of Gossip Girl. I realised I had gone in for a second layer of mascara, and Ana pretended not to notice as she kissed my cheek on her front door mat. I hoped she wouldn't also recognise the smell of my expensive perfume.

Rob was three minutes late to the station and when I looked up from my phone I barely recognised him. He had glasses on now, and looked so different. My legs were covered in bruises, from that damn bike. I suddenly realised I probably did not look at all great.

We talked and talked and talked. Just like we had the first time we met. Ana asked me later if we ever ran out of conversation, but we never did. I loved talking to him.

We took the Ubahn to a restaurant in the west of the city that was full, then walked to an empty American themed bar in the centre of the tourist area where they served lurid blue frozen margaritas.

There were only two topics that were considered out of bounds, and that was what I thought about him, and what he thought about me. Perhaps it was in some referential nod to me being his friend’s little sister. We talked about everything else, people we couldn't stand, people we loved, people we admired. I tried to spot if Berlin had changed him.

And I realised, catching his eye as he waited for me by the restaurant doors to leave, and seeing how his face changed when I did, that in another parallel universe with duplicates of us walking around, this would be the start. It would begin right here.

After dinner we went to find Ana.  I thought he would leave at the schbete but he bought a bottle of beer and came with us, came and sat with Ana's Berlin friends and drank a Tyskie, smoked a roll up, sang happy birthday to someone neither of us had met.

The best part was that Glasgow felt like a world away, and London even further.

Robert said he wasn't used to being out so late or with so many people. I guessed it was weird for him to have to chaperone me through his new city only to then find a pocket of it down by a canal that I was totally familiar with, strung up with bunting, sparklers, cava, and my new friends.

The morning after seeing Robert I lay with Ana on her bed. She went to make more coffee and find an ashtray while I switched on her laptop. I re-read a draft message to Robert I had written on my phone after getting home the night before. I typed it on to the laptop carefully. It said how nice it was to see him. It was long for Facebook, a whole paragraph. I knew Ana would make me delete it if she saw it so I sent it, wincing with both eyes shut as I did.

Berliner Bike part I

A week after I got fired, I had to put my dog down.

Things were shit, I thought to myself, sat on the top deck of the bus with an empty dog carrier upturned, crying.

And they were on the verge of getting really shit.

My dog, Nige, had spent the last three weeks of his life watching me on the phone, a then Creative Director at the ridiculous age of 24 (as I’ve said before, they never should have given me that role), pleading with the board to let me keep my job.

Nige must have thought I looked fucking pathetic.

In retrospect I’m most upset about that.

Not that stupid job that ended when a well known morning news presenter tried to sue me for defamation that I was guilty of.

Or the fact that the week after I left, that week Nige got put down, was also the week they finally launched that godforsaken IPO, initials I resented even knowing.

I was buying filter tips in the local shop when I saw it on the telly.

My eyes did that weird super-focus thing they can do in real life but rarely do, and I dropped my card in the pile of reduced chocolate bars by the counter.

I was well and truly sick of myself and everything was out of control.

I was sick of my voice and sick of my writing. Sick of those letters from those lawyers and sick of playing back everything I’d said in those boardrooms to try and keep that stupid job.

And Nige might still have been there if I had changed one of those things.

There wasn’t a day in the surrounding weeks I hadn’t cried myself to sleep. I don’t remember how many, they were a tangle of no more 6am starts, no more Nige and no more paydays.

I posted an ironically/un-ironc GIF on Facebook because it felt ‘vintage-me’ and I wanted to see if an ex boyfriend would reply.

It was the start of spring.

And I said things like “I was fucking done” to my friends in the pub (they bought the drinks), like I was ready to draw a line under it, and like I had another bar of energy to use just waiting to plug into me. I feigned having some sort of strategy, and like I would be fine in a few days.

But really, I had no idea what to do, and I could feel something at the edges that wasn’t right.

I could sense that creeping sunset of depression a few days away and I knew things must be bad because it felt inevitable. I knew if it arrived, I wasn’t going to fight it.

That thing where your skin doesn’t fit right on you. And I had only felt that once before, when the depression had really taken hold.

My one saving grace in all of this was that I was able to tell Ana this, word for word.

And Ana told me to get on a flight to Berlin.

Because Ana said I needed a break.

And because I had no way of arguing back to her and certainly no one or thing to look after any more in London, I did what she told me to do.

I packed all my favourite clothes into a suitcase with no wheels and caught a flight that didn't come back.

In Memory

This writing was written ten years after I wrote Don’t Big It Up, and is a response of sorts, as I didn’t want to edit what I came up with then. It isn’t neat. It was meant as a short foreword, then it got too long. It’s messy. It’s also really inspired by the song Thirteen by Elliott Smith and the cover by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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I made two promises when my best friend died. One was to never lose another person to suicide, and the other was to never let a friend down like that again. I was 15, and both proved impossible to keep.

Their intentions were good, but those two promises nearly broke me. And in time, they were broken.

As much as I hoped my friend’s death wouldn't define my memory of him or my teenage years, he was a wonderful friend and I should have known better: it did. It cleaved it in two.

Losing someone, and losing someone in the way that we did, has made me hold on tighter to everyone else.

Ten years ago I found myself turning back to the diaries I wrote across our friendship. I fleshed out the writing and turned it into Don’t Big It Up, which I’ve posted separately. I framed it around the great times we’d had together because as a 20 year old, those were the easiest parts to retell. I would do it differently now.

My diaries replaced the facts, as I don’t have any recollection of those days. I have a vivid memory for so many of my teenage years, but not that one. So in that way, tucked into the bottom of my iPhone Notes, Don’t Big It Up has been an incredible aid. It meant I could tend to my fading memory of my friend and add the perspective of the following 15 years.

Only from there have I been able to measure the distance.

Now, I think after all these years of edits, of reworking and reconsidering (and now being 30 myself) it’s time to let this rest.

At the time, outside of our school, I didn’t know anyone the same age as me who had a friend that had died. Now I know a lot. And yet, it’s so hard to speak about people that aren’t here, with people who were'n’t there, isn’t it?

Even at that age I told myself he would never become someone I would hesitate to speak of. Age has shown me that was another promise that’s been difficult to keep.

_

Back when I was 15, I remember struggling to find any words to fill those diary pages, but the days we were going through did not seem real and I knew at the time I wanted something to know them by. You can only imagine (or maybe you don’t have to) how much double-thinking comes into the days following a friend’s death. I told myself I would learn from these days and never allow something like this to happen agan - to anyone I knew. I wanted to know what the signs had been. And yet all I have is those diaries and this writing to document it.

Apart from those tracings, I know almost nothing of the following twelve months that bellowed in after his death. I know we put on tribute concerts for him and sat exams without him, but I only realised with a jolt, searching around for facts with one of our mutual friends a few years ago, one of my best friends still, that I have no recollection of them.

_

As teenagers we missed him fiercely, but our lives were also changing very quickly. The school calendar swung by, uni applications were sent off and while I did spend plenty of time looking backwards (keeping the light on while I slept, the shower on while I cried), within three years we had all started new lives.

We moved in with people who had never heard his name, people who didn't know what the last few years had been like for our friends. But the dull pain of sadness of losing him has never passed.

Returning to this writing last year, a few days after going to one of our shared best friend’s weddings, I was able to come to a huge conclusion (it really did feel like getting to the top of a mountain) about not blaming specific people or reasons for his death and be able to move on with cherishing what I do recall of him.

He would have turned 30 last November, although it’s the final days of summer I think of him most.

I don't have photo albums or videos, selfies or Insta stories. I don't see my memories of him as finished, but my writing I have is the only thing I can do to be near to him, and to remind me of him.

You know, there may be a simpler way to say it:

I miss him every day and I think of him every day - and that’s no small thing to carry around with you forever. It’s started to feel like that’s the way I’m built now, with this crack right here.

And yet, I am beginning to see something here in the distance - that no matter the pain - maybe it isn’t about promises. Something tells me I was so fortunate to know someone like him so young, and be shown him. And maybe it’s just that everyone else I went on to love has benefited from that.

A Love Letter To A Best Friend

... and then she moved to bloody Berlin! Anyway, this is about my best friend and that kind of love, even when you live together. Because you live together, in fact.

I’ve left a lot of best friends and home towns. I’ve closed a lot of bedroom doors for the final time, their contents long shipped off to a new four walls. But I’ve never cried before leaving. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried more in front of anyone.

It was obvious for a long time that we’d be going our separate ways. I wanted to move to the East, Ana wanted to stay South, Kieran wanted to move North and I don't think Charlie wanted to live with any of us.  Ana had said we could look for somewhere all together, back in February, but things had changed since then.

Since then we turned 21, handed in dissertations, got jobs in call centres and started paying council tax. None of us had really talked about it and then suddenly move out day came around and Charlie was sat in the front garden on the three piece suite we were giving up to the council, his shirt tied round his head in the July heat, swigging on a bottle of Lucazade.

Three days before, we’d held our final party. All of our furniture had been emptied out and we filled that decrepit old house full of friends and alcohol. The 82-pages of A4 depicting a moon landing still hung up on the wall in the living room, cotton wool doused in peppermint to ward off rats still stuffed every crevice in the staircase, a string of lights from a hazy Halloween party remained crammed down the side of the sofa.

We didn’t need to live with each other anymore. I hated that part of town and no-one liked my favourite part. They liked the abandoned industrial parks and pool halls of Peckham, I liked the 24 hour bagel shops and warehouse parties of Hackney. I thought it was as simple as that, and finally, somehow, every room was empty, every surface cleaned for the first and last time that year.

The tears began at four in the afternoon. By five my eyes were swollen and the skin around them shot with burst blood vessels. I was furious that night she left; I spent two hours peeling melted candle wax from the walls of her bedroom, trying to stuff her abandoned duvet into a bin bag and hovering up the spare change left scattered on her floor. But I cried and cried.

When you live with someone you get to see their glorious day-to-days. The way they make their first cup of tea after a long shift. Abandoned cereal bowls left on the front door mat, contact lense paraphernalia, greying washing, various different types of soy milk, bags of abandoned spinach gone gloopy. Drunken munchies, pajamas at lunchtime. And day to day you probably hate all that stuff. But when you say goodbye to it, if that friend was true, you’ll miss it with a dull, aching pain that stays through the years. Keeping friends after you’ve lived with them is a rare, precious form of alchemy, but I miss Ana every day.

Not To Intervene When It Came To You

For a few months a few years ago, I did a lot of writing around happiness and what that means in these times. This is the personal account I put together, to inform the other writing. For the record, I truly believe it was Nick Cave playing that morning, and it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

It's late in the morning, half nine, ten maybe, and the sun has forced its way through the half-closed shutters. There's a beam of it on my face, which feels tight from the heat yesterday, and the drinking, and the salty food, and I suppose the dusty city streets of Barcelona. But this isn't what wakes me.

Somewhere vaguely outside and above us, I hear a keyboard playing, someone's dulcet tones singing in a familiar cadence, a pattern of crochets and quavers I know in my heart. It's a Nick Cave song, Into My Arms, and I realise with a deep, resounding tidal wave that it's Nick Cave Day at Primavera: we see him tonight.

I am barely awake but for this sunlight, the cool parquet floor of our budget hostel room and this music. The notes are just barely audible over the morning door slams and traffic of our back street alley. So quiet I know for sure I must be the only other person hearing this, and I never want it to end.

I have no headache from all the Sambucca yesterday. No hunger despite never quite tracking down somewhere to eat anything, in fact no urge for anything. Just to be there, listening. It's someone playing as well as Nick Cave, singing as gorgeously as him, and in those moments it just is him. Why not, I tell myself. Why not. I realise despite the awful flight times home tomorrow, the lack of any normal comfort, the heat stroke and whatever else, today, right now, I am truly happy.

Eventually the music stops. I can't remember if the song ended or if the sound faded away. At breakfast an hour later on our hostel room floor, I try to explain to my friends how much it really was Nick Cave singing this morning, that his voice woke me, that it was the most beautiful morning of my life.

They laugh into their microwaved lattes we've assembled from corner shop supplies and continue to chop fruit.

Find Your Groove And Savour It, A Meditation on Happiness

A few years ago I was asked by a magazine to write about happiness. This is one side to two pieces of writing I created around the idea. This piece was never published, but it pushed me to pitch and write and pitch and write. And writing makes me the happiest of all things, so, in the end, I'm really fond of this piece.

-

"The small rituals of life- the drinking of tea and the eating of cake-are really big things in disguise.”  

Alexander McCall Smith writing for The Observer, 2006 

I've had this quote taped to every diary I've used since I was seventeen. It's from an article written years ago about the pleasure of small rituals, daily life and I think in the background, the kind of happiness worth realising is all about us.

Here's the thing: we've been oversold on happiness. It isn't everything, it shouldn't be your be-all-and-end-all, and when it stops being that, a general state of fair-to-middling contentment becomes far easier to locate.  
Travel back just one hundred years and happiness still had the connotations of luck, good fortune and being blessed that has been written about since ancient Greece. But with the gradual rise of modernism and a secular, highly individualised culture, came the appropriation of happiness. In its current state, happiness is perceived as something within our control, a place we need to reach, a journey where we can pave the way.

Essentially, why pray for something when you can buy it at the local store? Long gone is the time when we left these things to forces of chance, religion or nature. Now we're supposed to be able to locate it within ourselves. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something that is getting needlessly obscured.  But if you recognise the things that bring contentment, joy and satisfaction to your life, happiness is likely to be found mingled in-between.  

How will you know? Well, for starters, if you’re lucky enough to have time to care, you probably have the tools available to be happy. It doesn’t have to be about life goals or five year plans. In fact, the individualised ‘agentic’ views of happiness can be really simple. It can be about sitting still and being okay there. Break away from all those feelings of unattainable targets and FOMO (thanks, social media) and it’s easy to see happiness is simply about not really needing anything at that moment in time.  

It does not mean success, it does not mean popularity, it does not mean notoriety or fame, or being recognised for doing anything. It means you are able to take a good look at your lot in life and be pleased. It means when you finally get into bed each night, you're able to be thankful for a bunch of stuff. We've already spent too long exchanging words like 'fulfilment' and 'satisfaction' for 'happiness'- and the difference isn't just semantic. By placing so much on an idea that's so hard to pin down, we're just making things more difficult for ourselves. Happiness in its nature is fleeting: one day it's all-consuming, the next day gone in a breath. But building a life around achievements, relationships, contentment  - that's got to be a better place to set down foundations for how you will construct your days.   

Better than being on some badly sign-posted road to nowhere. Because there is no trajectory or journey. The only thing that does change over time is wising up to what it is that makes you happy, and making sure those things, whether they're people, the right city, the right philosophy or the right way to spend your day feature as often as possible. Forget bucket lists and anything else that takes the focus away from reality, because happiness isn't something taking place ten years from now, and it's not going to arrive with your first pay check at your dream job. It needs to happen today.  

We grow old and everyone around us dies. And that's if we're lucky enough to grow old. The point is to find your little groove and savour it. Learn to live with your life, live it well, consciously teach yourself to enjoy the experience, and there will be happiness. 

You Like Music We Can Dance To

I was 29 and needed glasses for the first time and had to stop eating anything sweet at all because it hurt too much and I suddenly realised I was at that peak age maybe day or month where everything was the best it could be and the deteriation was beginning.

Like the summer solstice that comes so soon; I always maintained I'd come of age at 45 in some glorious Nigella Lawson-esq manner and was holding off until then. But really, it would be all downhill from here. 

The hangovers that used to be fine excuses to do nothing but now filled me with dread, realising all of those hours that go to waste just to feel a bit like Better Me for an evening. 

I explained to my Mum that I made a new girl gang during the press trip and how great it was they found me funny.

I said I thought maybe my usual friends were already funny and I hadn't realised. 

"All your friends *are* funny" my Mum replied.

"No I don't mean funny-strange I mean funny-haha and all *your* friends are funny-strange by the way."

I didn't want to tell her that I was lucky to have the friends I did have left because everyone you once cared for has left London by the time you're 29.

That it had become one city-wide game of musical chairs, for the good jobs and the good partners. Apart from I crucially wanted to stay nice and leave one day - a deal London wasnt going to sign off on easily.  

Fleeing friends are just one part of that bargain. 

The rest is wondering if your hair used to fall out at this rate five years ago while you stand in someone's armpit on the Victoria line home for the night, too tired to go for those drinks that were arranged three weeks ago. 

They’ll get re-arranged, pushed back in the diary, like the escape plan you once had for Glasgow and Manchester and Margate and Anywhere But Here, or - worse: back to the place you left at 18 that somehow feels welcoming again.

I used to think someone would come and tell me I had made the right decision with it all.

Then one summer’s day I realised I could still count how many babies I’d held in my 20s (four) and that my time on this unfathomably long business trip was coming to an end.

There was an end in sight, at least.

What did get used up in those eight intervening years to make those night buses and strip-light-lit bagel shops and club toilet cubicles suddenly unappealing?

What’ll get used up in the next eight? 

And dear god how crazy will the countryside make us or is it okay now we’re old? 

Don't Big It Up, A Story About Losing Someone

I have changed the names of people mentioned in this piece.

I was sat in the back of maths, our last lesson of the school year, with my best friend, Tracey, and a heavily amended list of names shoved beneath my exercise book.

"Just- don't big it up." 

I rocked back on my chair and handed Tracey the guest list to a party at my house that night. "I told my neighbours I'm having a girls' sleepover. So no more than three cars in the drive, and we're going to need a staggered entry."

Tracey glanced down the list and smiled at all the crossings out and '+1' additions.

"I'm on it," she said, folding the paper in half and half again. 

"I'm on it, trust me. But I'm bigging it up, okay?"

That summer was the best. Unbeaten. We filled July and August with fierce fun. We were all fifteen, and something had turned for the better; plans fell into place and parties took hold. 

We climbed on walls and through living room windows and listened to the same Motown album over and over again. We stained kitchens with sangria and hallways with river water. I spent all my wages as a waitress on haircuts and dresses from charity shops I cut too short. 

I was nowhere near happy or content, but veered on greedy and demanding and along for every ride. I wanted to be at every party, every sleepover, every telephone call, and it felt like if you missed one weekend you wouldn't know where to find anyone the next. 

At its core there were 12 of us. My brother was only two years younger than me, so our house became Designated Party House, and to my delight, it was every Friday night.

We would open up all the doors on the ground floor to become a large-scale oval we would run around, looping and looping. We would lock people in the airing cupboard, friends arriving with last Christmas' Malibu their mums wouldn't miss, other friends going missing for mysteriously long periods of time, endless playlists enabling Karen O to shout simultaneously from every room. There were futile attempts at punch and cocktails on the lawn, lip gloss maintenance, stubbing cigarettes out on the trampoline, duvets stained forever more in mud and Tango. All of us, together - the same faces, different outfits, new combinations, but always in search of more. 

Somewhere at the centre of the gang was Theo.

Theo was my first guy friend. One day I barely knew him. The next, we had made fun of each other for a solid 18 hour coach ride to Belgium on a school trip. By the time we were back in England, we'd organised a party for the next day and rearranged our chairs in History so we could sit next to each other.

At first shy, he became one of the most caring, quietly funny guys I've ever known. I cherished this new type of friendship that felt so different from the others. I did not try to manipulate the time we spent together - neither of us were invested in it because we fancied each other. We just liked being around each other. If he was in a room, I’d want to be next to him. Without knowing specifically what that was, back then, it was the first time I had felt that endless love of a platonic friendship. 

He didn’t put up with my shit. He got angry when I bitched too much, and sad when I wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. I had only known him a few months when I realised his approval was one of the only ones I sought out within our crowd.

Because never once in that summer were we satisfied. There was always a bigger party to have in secret, new friends to invite, and a new off license that apparently didn't ID. We would stay up all night. Endless energy from I don’t know where. By dawn the next day we would plan another one. We were always working on next Friday’s line-up. As summer went on, more and more people were added to that endless guest list. The plus-ones became plus-fours and I stopped caring what the neighbours thought.

Some time amidst all of this, Theo started going out with Alex, a girl we knew from another school. It started out as an MSN convo thing. Which is to say, he told me they talked online, when it sort of didn't count as proper talking, so I didn't give it much thought. Everyone was going out with everyone else: joke dates and Pizza Hut buffet dates and cinema dates with Theo and me having popcorn fights in the fire exit. No-one took anything seriously, everyone was getting their heart broken every week. But I know, looking back, even with just a few year's more experience, I would have been able to spot some warning signs. 

Instead we played hide and seek in the wood and then made a make-shift barbeque to cook sausages and plastic cheese. We got sunburnt and buried bottles of WKD we'd found outside a petrol station. We thought we saw a puma in a forest. The photos I have are of us hugging and running and playing chopsticks on the piano and some guy's bum. 

Miraculously, even after all of those Friday nights, nothing had been ruined. Only a cracked avocado green toilet seat my parents couldn't stand the colour of anyway would betray that endless summer once August slipped into September.

Because without much warning, we were in school again. And it was more fun than ever now the weekends had to be jammed full with every party we could think of. Theo and I sat next to each other in all the classes we could. The group that had felt so in-flux when we started the summer was now cemented in months of phone calls, GCSE subject changes to be near each other and mix tapes. The broken tent, gig ticket stubs and bottles of empty vodka wrapped in socks (to stop them clinking) beneath my bed were relics and souvenirs of what would become the best summer of my life.

The heat, that infectious excitement, it passed like wildfire and didn’t finish until Theo's birthday, the fifth of November. All 22 of us took up half of a restaurant to celebrate his 16th. We ordered the house wine, threw bread sticks at each other and paid in pocket money. At that time Theo never took off his cap, and I can still remember his trademark curls hidden under a baseball cap from the other end of the table.

I didn't get to speak to Theo very much that night. I knew he was sad, I knew he wasn't having the best of times, but I remember thinking, if I can't speak to him because he's surrounded by people that care for him, he can't be lonely. It could only be a good thing to have so much company. He must see he is loved.

And then ten days after that night, he was gone.

Theo’s decision, whether it was final or a call to arms to those around him, I will never know, and I will never understand.

It was ten past nine on a freezing grey November morning when my form teacher told me someone called Theodore had died. I flashed through my best friends. It was okay - I didn't know anyone called Theodore. But of course, she meant Theo. And I knew, right then and there, in a way you can only know when it is absolutely final, that it was suicide, and that it was over.

While we had all been playing at being drunk, being messed up and being heartbroken, Theo had felt it more keenly than any of us could realise, and in a way we could never fix. Back then, we assumed it was the array of things we knew about. But really, I have no idea. If Theo's death taught me one thing, it's that each person you know has a world of struggles within them, and blaming one person or one catalyst isn't fair on their memory or the years of experience they did manage to amass. It hurts, ever so much, to admit that even as my best friend, I still have no clue what Theo was going through, but it's also the truth. And the only way to do his memory justice.

All of a sudden we had to stop playing. 

I ran around school trying to find my brother. No one wanted to go home to their empty houses, but no one wanted to be in the god-awful darkened classroom we were given to cry in. After all the bereavement therapy and assemblies, our group when it was united just reminded me of the one person that wasn't there, and all the reasons why. 

The weeks that followed now blur into one long endless stretch of sugary teas, running the shower to disguise more crying every day and sleeping with the light on every night for a year. I did not want that darkness.

I have almost no recollection of the next few months. Where summer remains vivid, coloured with sangria and grass stains, that winter melds into one long sadness, with few things to punctuate the time after Theo. 

I do know that instead of guest lists, I came home with the funeral order of ceremony. I handed it to my Mum. She was in tears at the kitchen table so I hugged her. It was the first time since Theo died I'd seen her cry.

All she said was "It's just such a waste".

When we went back to lessons, an empty seat waited for me in History where Theo would never be again. I stood in the doorway to the classroom, determined not to cry before I dealt with one of the final, natural reminders of the friendship Theo gave me. Seeing me in the doorway, my tears, my friends tried to rearrange the chairs so I'd be sat in the middle, but there was still an empty seat. I truly try to think about Theo more than that empty chair and everything he left behind, but it gets harder every year. 

In a way none of us tried to stop, we never recovered from that loss as friends. I was never again as careless or hungry for fun as I was that summer. As a group obsessed with endless silliness and play and nothing getting too serious, the connotations had grown too strong: hanging out and having fun with those same people never felt right again. Instead, we drifted back to the groups we had started in, now nearly a year before.

That was almost ten years ago. 

Unlike many of the friends I made that year, I never lost touch with Theo. We never fell out, my perception of him never changed. Our friendship never grew up, I never got too frivolous for him, he never got too serious for me. He never told my secrets, never left without me, never forgot to drive me home.

I try to think of him every day. I try to not think of those empty spaces and instead think of the full ones. I don’t make friends so fast, I don’t have so many. I cherish every friend I made that summer, and it’s an absolute life joy to have made it to their weddings, to see them have children, to see their faces begin to age, to see them meet new people we never added to guest lists. 

I wish I could have shown Theo that back then. I wish with all my heart he could be here for different times. Times he could have had any haircut he liked. Harder years he could have grown out of. Better years to sink into.

And some days I forget to remember Theo. But I think he would have been okay with that by now.

If he is still out there somewhere, I don’t know whether to think of him as nearly 21 or barely 16. But I think we would have been friends still.