The Fable of Chill
What if being less anxious and honouring our need to create are one and the same?
It’s below freezing here in Northumberland for what I believe is the tenth day in a row. There’s a light dusting of snow in places, enough to shimmer the world and make the sidewalk the most dangerous place you’ve ever set foot.
The world looks beautiful and dangerous in equal measure.
Everything in me wants to get outside and hike through this perilous paradise, but I need to preserve myself.
You see, tomorrow morning, I’m hopping on a flight to Lanzarote! I’ll be spending five days taking classes to get my PADI scuba certification.
If you’ve read my past few articles, you’ve probably grocked that I like seeing the world in different ways.
What could be more different than 18m under the sea?
I’ve dreamed about learning to scuba since I was a little girl. This autumn, I did a taster day while on a trip to Oludeniz, Turkiye… and I caught the bug.
This new hobby should be good for me for a lot of reasons:
I’m overweight, and scuba will encourage me to stay active so that my lack of lung capacity doesn’t kill me. Plus, the scuba sessions themselves burn about a bajillion calories
I’m remarkably bad at taking holidays, like many of my fellow Americans. Hopefully, a hobby that— whilst possible all year in Northern England— requires complicated and expensive equipment and a determination to accept freezing your arse off, will encourage me to take advantage of the fact that getting to warmer parts of the world from here is less expensive than taking Amtrak from New York to Philly.
When I do manage to go on a holiday, I’m horrible at actually relaxing and fully enjoying myself. I’m that person who compulsively needs to see everything. I want to eat every local food, explore all the castles, spend time in any museums I can find, embarrass myself attempting the local language with waiters, shop in each market that shows up on Trip Advisor, and walk like 35km a day, which is about 30 more than I usually walk… which leaves me an exhausted and burnt out mess after two days of holidays. Pair this vacation style of waking up early and needing to be active with my husband’s style, the more classic English bar crawl adventure… and many of my holidays leave me needing a vacation from my vacation. I get home and I’m freaking exhausted. This is not a good way to live, especially when you have a wonderful yet demanding job like I do. Having a specific reason to go to a place, like taking a course, should, in theory, keep me from spiralling out and feeling like a failure if I am unable to take in everything a place has to offer.
The steady breathing necessary underwater to keep your lungs from collapsing is meditative. That’s positive.
You also can’t strain yourself too much before or after a dive. Which stops both my other half and I from doing things we are sometimes prone to do like impromptu tattoos or skydiving. Getting on a plane 12 hours after a dive can kill you. Good motivation to not do that.
TL;DR— I’m hoping scuba will encourage me to chill out a bit.
For I could use some chill.
I have been many things in my life. I’m proud of that, overall. I’ve had more adventures and experiences than most people I know. My highs have been extremely high, and my lows have been devastating. Successes grand and failures damning.
If I were to write an autobiography, it wouldn’t be dull.
But I’ve never been chill, which I find frustrating because it’s, in many ways, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be.
People who navigate life without a care fascinate me. I worry so much about everything all of the time, endlessly, anxiously pondering every scenario before I take any action in an attempt to be 100% certain I’m helping as many people as possible and making the overall best decisions… and yet there are people out here doing things without a single damn thought. Consistently. Utterly unbothered by whether their action is going to affect their own next day of life, let alone anyone else’s.
Here I am, agonising over whether the smallest decision (should I brush my teeth before or after I take my vitamins?) is going to set my future self up for success while the never-cares are just… doing stuff.
It baffles me. It infuriates me.
When never-cares are empathetic and successful, I aspire to be them.
When never-cares are pieces of shit, I want to scream. How dare they? How are they walking through the world with such low blood pressure and joy whilst causing so much damage, and I’m over here self-flagellating for fifteen minutes over whether I smiled widely enough at a cashier when I thanked them?
The crux of it is this: how much more could I do with my life, how much more could I write and create, if I could be more like them?
Could I be more time-rich if I cared a little bit less?
I’m constantly concerned about time. I don’t feel time-rich in my life at the moment. I mentioned earlier that I’m overweight— I’d love to change that, but finding time in my day to do so has been unsuccessful. Even as I strip back things like doomscrolling from my cadence, the ability to create a plan where I will have the proper amount of energy and time to address this, consistently, has eluded me.
I know that if I was less scared and worried, I could find more time to do things that will make me happier, healthier, and more creative because I wouldn’t be spending energy on things that aren’t serving me.
But would it be shitty of me to stop considering other people?
Where’s the line between caring too much and not enough?
It’s a hard balance and one that seems to affect almost every creative person I know. The ones it doesn’t affect are usually known as mavericks no one wants to collaborate with, mostly because they’re assholes.
I don’t have a solution for this one. Though I’ve calmed my mind quite a lot through a consistent meditation practice (eight years!) and becoming older and overall more secure in myself, I’ve got a lot of growth to do in this department.
Putting our own needs first is not a natural thing to do in our modern society. This is yet another thing that is often even more difficult if you’re socialised as a woman.
And creating art, writing, etc is rarely acknowledged as a need. It’s a want. Or even a nice-to-have. A stretch goal. Priority 4.
Today, I decided that I needed to write. So, here I am, writing.
There’s probably other stuff I could and should do that would be more useful to society and my loved ones. I need to go clean up the dog shit from the back garden before my mother-in-law arrives to dog-sit so that I can go scuba. I can see the piles through the window of my office as I sit here and type. They’re frost-coated and gleam in the sunrise, which is kind of pretty but also distracting.
I’ll get to it. It will be done in time. But much like I needed that leftover chilli for breakfast to fuel my body, I needed to fuel my soul.
Yesterday, I decided to fuel my soul as well. I knew there were numerous chores in need of completion before our holiday, but when my husband asked if I wanted to go out for the afternoon, I decided to say yes. I had barely been out of the house for a few days due to workload and the cold, so I knew a change of scenery would revitalise me.
This man surprised me by bringing me to one of the largest second-hand bookstores in the county, Barter Books in Alnwick. It is my absolute heaven.
Thousands of used books, from rare to mass paperback line haphazard shelves covered in poetry.
The building itself is an old train station… and as an autistic person, that’s always a win.
There’s even a cafe that does delicious oat milk lattes.
Is there a better place on earth? Unsure.
The day somehow managed to improve even more when we took a walk past Alnwick castle and then went to a 400 year old pub with a killer smokehouse menu.
I enjoyed myself all day. I felt rejuvenated and inspired to tackle some editing I needed to complete for my main job and finish writing this piece. That’s not usually how I feel on a Sunday morning.
Is it possible that creating space to feed your soul makes you more chill and creative?
This is the fifth substack post I’ve created the time to write, and no one has died or even yelled at me! Society hasn’t crumbled, no one is disappointed… and each time, I worry less.
Maybe it’s okay for me to chill, for me to enjoy.
I’ll let you know how the scuba holiday goes.
In the meantime, I hope you give yourself some grace and space today. Allow yourself to do something you love, without judgment. Treat the desire to create as a need.
If you want, tell me about your experience in the comments. I’d love to hear <3
At first glance, I thought your title read “The Fable of Chili”. I pretty quickly realized my error, but chuckled when chili was indeed mentioned.