3 years ago this was me. Our baby girl was just over a week old and after an equally long break, I was back working through production comments on my book Storytelling in Design.
After years of working on it, it was n e a r l y finished. Yet I remember this point. I was so, so close to just throwing it all away and writing to my publisher that I just couldn’t do it, that the book would have to wait. It was that hard and I was that exhausted but I knew that if I put it down, then I’d never pick it up and finish it again and it’d all be for nothing.
Our first daughter would sleep on her own. When she was just born in 2017 I started completely re-structuring the book. This little nugget – nah ah. She was on us, or rather on me 24/7. As soon as I put her down she would scream. I’d worked really hard to complete the book before she was born but she was a tiny one and I was induced 3 weeks early because of it. So here I was, a baby in hand or at my boob working through production comments one handed during the day and the middle of the night whilst I was feeding her. All on pretty much no sleep and with all the raging hormones and emotions that you have just after birth. It was brutal.
It took until early December 2019 until it was all done and a lot had to give in the version that was sent to print. After so many years of working on the book, where I’d sacrificed a lot, I wasn’t happy with it and I was really, really hard on myself. So much so that the day in January 2020 when I held the first physical copy of the book in my hand I just felt empty and that feeling stayed with me for a long time.
But then comments from people about the book started coming in. I saw the book out in the wild and slowly but steadily I started to feel a little proud. I’d actually written a book. A real physical book.
It’s taken me until this year to properly start writing again and I’m really enjoying it. Right now I’m spending all my time working on coaching and workshops related to my book and I’m really enjoying it. I even have a working title for my next book, and have started working on it ever so slightly. We’ll see where it all ends. Or rather, where this chapter that I’ve just begun takes me.
