Hannah Lily

So if I’m being honest, I think the beginning of my story is probably a fairly common one. I did some school-driven arts, theatre and music but never thought (or perhaps didn’t have the confidence/risk appetite) to make a career of any of it. After a few, very fun, false starts I threw myself into the warm blanket safety of a corporate job after university. I was quite good at it, I overall enjoyed doing it and other people thought I was successful, which was nice.

I never felt like it was THE ONE, or a calling, but it stretched me intellectually, paid me good money and I was surrounded by clever people who kept me on my toes.

Then I hit my late 20s and, having firmly relegated creative pursuits to hobby status, a weird thing started happening.

Ideas started taking up camp in my head.

Big, weird, messy, very odd and creative ideas, small ideas, freaky ideas. Ideas that were part of long-standing creative practices and ideas that joined practices together in ways I hadn’t seen before. An intimidatingly large range of ideas.

Several of those ideas just lived there, very stubbornly, and wouldn’t go away. I know it sounds a bit weird, but the best way I can describe it is they were sitting on chairs in my brain, taking up valuable thinking space and saying “nope, we’re not leaving until you do something with us”.

This was very unlike the ideas that used to come to me when I was younger that would come up and leave without me much mourning their loss. I might start for a second and then very quickly just think naaaahhh and rarely, if ever, think about it again. My favourite example of this was a comedy food blog called ‘Cumin Ma Poussin’. I never wrote this, and the world’s probably much better off for it.

Perhaps my brain was like “no you’ve pulled that trick too many times, now you have to do something about it”.

So I tried to heed these ideas and experiment with some. I was very excited to develop a side hustle as up until that point felt like I was missing out on a millennial movement. I worked on my evenings and weekends and made some progress with two of the ideas (a theatre app and a blog, if you’re interested) and actually it went pretty good… for a while… until it started going badly. I’ll call this THE GREAT STALLING.

I found THE GREAT STALLING strange and frustrating because I had the support of friends, family and even my colleagues and I was already having some modest success.

I have some theories as to why this happened. I’m sure I will do another post about it at some point, but long story very, very, very short: burnout.

My problems that ensued were such:

1. The ideas STILL WOULD NOT LEAVE

Rather than scratching my metaphorical itch and being able to go back to daily corporate life, they just stretched and leaned back in their chairs (now recliners) being like “see, you’ve experimented with us and you like us, we’re not going anywhere.”

2. I don’t feel like I could completely leave my job for my ideas

Not at this stage. Sure, living off my ideas is a dream (‘a’ meaning, one of many), but I know what a business idea looks like and these ain’t it. They could be monetised in the future, but it would mean a. committing to one only to be able to be good enough to really specialise and compete (the others wouldn’t have that) and b. create an insane pressure that they and I have no interest in at this stage.

What they and I need is time, patience and an experimental mindset. So, I decided that I needed a creative sabbatical.

What a creative sabbatical you ask?

In my head it’s like taking a career break to go travelling, but instead my main focus will be exploring my ideas and developing my creative practice.

Beyond that, I’m not entirely sure, I’m making it up as I go. This whole thing is a bit of an experiment.

I would love to know if you’ve done something like this, are doing something like this or have thought about doing something like this. Or just say hi in comments – it would be great to have some company on this adventure.