#2: The wilderness years
Life, Death and High Heels
“If you don’t know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.
Terry Pratchett
I’m sure you’re wondering why its taken me nearly 4 years to get The600Project back up on its feet again, since that fateful August day in 2012 when the hair brained scheme first crashed and burned. 4 years? Where is your entrepreneurial spirit sir, I hear you shout! It’s a good question. And one I need to answer. What was I doing for that amount of time, and why relaunch The600Project now?
Life
And so, the following monday morning I was on the phone to Highbury Community Nursery, with my bank card in hand, reading the shiny long number across the middle, handing my hard earned £600 over to the nursery manager on the other end of the phone. Anything for the kids, right? Absobloodylutely. The pain of having lost the £600 fun fund was short lived: my duo of fun was right there in front me, one swaddled in a little blanket in the moses basket, and the other, his bewildered big sister uncertain of this ‘thing’ that was stealing the limelight, poking him in the face.
If truth be told, I think I forgot all about The6ooProject or the promise of what could have been. I absorbed myself in fatherhood. And I got my head down at work to “provide” for the family.
Death
Although I couldn’t have been happier when surrounded by Lydia and the kids, I couldnt shake off a general malaise. That same feeling I had had back on the tube that morning after the Olympics had finished was back again. At that time, I couldn’t put a finger on what was causing it. I had a great family, I was doing well in my career in the city and probably enjoying at least 50% of my job (well, every job has its ups and downs— if you like more than half of what you do, surely you’re on to a good thing, right?)
My general sense of uneasiness at that time was probably exacerbated by the ill-health of my wonderful mum, Dot Ward. She had been very unwell for the best part of 20 years and around Christmas 2012 my Dad, my 2 older sisters and I noticed the change — she was deterioating badly. Over 2013 mum was regularly in and out of hospital. Her cards were marked. I spent a lot of weekends at the car hire firm in Kings Cross, picking up my sisters across London and making the journey to visit mum, usually in hospital, up in Northampton. Although we always clung on to hope, deep down we weren’t expecting mum to see out Christmas.
But mum persevered and battled, and in the early Spring of 2014, things seemed to be getting better. Mum started to get stronger both physically and mentally, her eyes started to shine brighter. She started to dream again: of going back to work, of being well enough to drive and regain her independence, of spending quality time with the grandchildren whom she had missed so desperately the past year. The weather was getting warmer. The last weekend we saw her, she was full of life and dreams. We had started to hope.
Her death shouldn’t have come as such a shock, but it did. On the afternoon of Monday 24th March, mum died in Dad’s arms in the conservatory. At the time, I was at my desk in the city. After sending an e-mail to my client, I headed for a physio appointment. In my delirium of deep tissue sports massage, I could hear my mobile phone constantly buzzing away in my suit pocket on the floor. It was only when I looked at my phone leaving the appointment an hour later that I knew something terrible had happened. I had about 20 missed calls from my Dad and sisters. Where was I? Mum had had a heart attack. I rushed to Euston to get a train up to the hospital and amazingly managed to catch the same train as my sister Emma. We sat there next to each other holding hands on a crowded train leaving London, packed with commuters standing in the aisles, hoping for the best. Half way up, Dad called to say that mum was dead.
I won’t go into all of the detail of the rest of that day or the two weeks that followed up to the funeral, but needless to say it was the defining point in my life up to now. Seeing my mum lying on that hospital bed, feeling the warmth leave the beautiful hands that once stroked my hair whilst she sang me to sleep, had a profound and lasting impact on me. I struggled coming to terms with the notion that a lady so full of love, compassion, courage and life, who gave the most brilliant hugs when you walked through the front door and left again, would soon be reduced to a handful of ashes.
If my entrepreneurial ambitions and The600Project had been side-tracked by the birth of my second child, then now, over a year later, they were the last thing on my mind.
Although dealing with death and loss can only be described as utterly shit, grief has the potential to be transforming: it has the power to awaken your soul and allow you to re-align yourself with your deepest values. If there are any silver linings to be had from the death of someone close to you, it is letting the grieving process take its course and grabbing whatever positives you can from the process. Whilst grief is a very personal thing, I’ve tried to distill the outcomes of my thought process below:
Lesson 1: Love and Friendship is key
Death tends to put life into a very simple perspective — acutely bringing into focus what is important, and what is not.
In those two weeks ending with the funeral, my Dad, sisters and I experienced immense kindness, generosity, love and support from friends, family and colleagues. We leaned on that love and friendship over those 2 weeks and it sustained us, like a bloody big warm hug. It was probably during that time that I properly understood that the two most important things in life are love and friendship. If the pursuit of a career and the promotions that went with it meant working long anti-social hours long into the evenings at the expense of spending quality time with family and friends (as mine often did), then, as I saw it, that was antithetical to the meaning of life!
Lesson 2: Pursue your passion, follow your heart OR at least be open and curious to allow yourself to discover what your passion might be
Looking back at it now, the weeks and months that followed mum’s funeral were grim. I wasn’t present. I was depressed. I wasn’t functioning well, both at home with my wife and kids and at work. I couldn’t find joy in anything, everything was dulled by an all encompassing emptiness. I wanted to switch off the lights and sleep all day. A few months after the left hook of mum’s funeral, just at a time when I was starting to pull myself together a bit, I was suckerpunched again by the death of my nan. I was back to square one again.
It’s taken me a long time to get to the bottom of the cause of that emptiness which, in hindsight, I think was the malaise I had been experiencing before mum’s death, but now multipled by a thousand. It was more than the fact that I simply missed my mum. That was undoubtedly a huge part of it: I missed the sound of her voice, her hugs, the way she expertly gave counsel whenever I had a problem, being able to phone her to ask how long should I stick the chicken in the oven for or how long did you have to boil an egg for to it still be dippy in the middle: from the sublime to the ridiculous she was no longer there. But it was more than that. I had an overwhelming urge to lead a more fulfilling life, a more adventurous life — a life that my career was not enabling. I started to think that my career was acting as a defensive tackle to fun.
My mum had loved her job. To her it wasn’t a job, it was a calling, her reason why she was here. She was an incredibly gifted teacher who had a passion for helping underprivileged children from sink estates in a primary school system which often failed them. When mum had two major organ transplants back in 1993, the doctors said that the operation was successful but that she should probably ‘make plans’ for 5 years time. Year after year and for 15 years more than originally anticipated, mum outlasted her prognosis. I remember the doctors saying that she should never stop working — it was her work that was giving her the energy to keep going. Mum’s work had a positive effect on her health and happiness — it was her work that sustained her and gave her meaning.
It made me think of Dicky Fox in Jerry McGuire, waking up and clapping his hands every morning in anticipation of the day ahead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyxWWYeXKBw
I certainly didn’t clap my hands or jump out of bed each morning at the prospect of going in to the office. I doubt many people do. But why do we settle for that? Why do we normalise and accept a career that is “not too bad” when we spend the majority of our lives doing it, 5 days a week? Before mum’s death I would have probably been happy to settle for it in return for the decent paycheck and prospect of partnership. But my definition of success and happiness was starting to change. I was starting to connect the dots between that morning on the tube after the Olympics, the loss of my £600 fun fund, and how I was feeling now. It was finally dawning on me that whilst I enjoyed parts of my job (particularly the bits working with startups and entrepreneurs) and whilst I liked my colleagues, I was not passionate about a large majority of the work I did. I needed more adventure. I needed more fun.
Lesson 3: Life is short — follow your heart
A few months after mum’s funeral and having come to the realization that I was not leading a fulfilling adventurous career that I found fun, I had spoken with my Dad about my thoughts and he told me not to make any drastic changes in the first year or two following mum’s death: tough it out and make a decision when things had settled down — sound advice indeed. Good old Dad. Around that time I also come across the career change organisation Escape the City and went along to an evening talk on “How to Live a More Fulfilling Life”, which for me actually reinforced the idea of hanging on in there. One idea in particular that I took away that evening was the idea of being more present in my life and first trying to bring my authentic self to my job. Being more me. The next day I saw the following quote which resonated with me:
“The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”
Marcel Proust
Surely I was on to a winner here. Perhaps I didn’t need to change my career or take drastic action, I could just try to be more me and bring my core values to my job. I was keen to get involved in charity work on the side, and after a year of helping children’s charity Street Child United John Wroe, SCU’s wonderful CEO, asked me to become a trustee. But, after a while, no matter how much enjoyment and reward I was getting from the charitable work I was doing on the side, and notwithstanding trying to bring more of my values to my role at work, the malaise was back again. That gnawing feeling that a large part of my day job was not aligned with my core values or providing much adventure or fun was leaving me deeply unfulfilled. As much as I had tried to make things better, I was not living the dream.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Steve Jobs
High Heels
Come December 2014 Lydia and I had purchased a house that was a real doer-upper in East London, biting off far more than we could chew. The place was in far worse a state than we thought, and rather than renovate it room by room over a few years as we had thought we would, we found ourselves having to move into the local Travelodge with Millie and Henry whilst the house was gutted bare and renovated top to bottom, walls, floors, ceilings, electrics, plumbing… the lot. Work was incredibly stressful during those two months and I was working long hours to midnight most evenings whilst also trying to project manage the renovation. Plus I had committed to running the London Marathon in April 2015 for a charity which help people who suffered from Primary Biliary Cholangitis (the condition that my mum had had the past 20 years) and was trying to get training runs in! All in all it was an incredibly stressful time with too much on my plate, and I hadn’t quite got through the grieving process.
Dad during these past 6–9 months had been noticeably absent. He was keeping himself busy up in the village outside of Northampton, but I was aware that we hadn’t been seeing much of him of late. He came down to help strip some walls at the new house one weekend in February 2015 and mentioned that he had something to tell us, but that it had to wait until me and my sisters were all together. He was being very mysterious about it and it triggered a lot of anxiety in me. That feeling deep in the pit of your stomach that stops you from being able to breathe properly, the same feeling that grief makes you feel. I was worried, what did he have to tell us? Dad was approaching 70 — he wasn’t in the greatest of health… the brain started going into overdrive. Panic stations!
In early March, we took mum’s ashes back to Ireland to bury with her parents in the family grave in Tipperary, and we arranged to meet up back in London for a meal on the 24th March 2015, one year to the day that mum had died. We would raise a glass and celebrate mum’s memory. It was that night in a pub in Bermondsey that Dad told us his news… he wasn’t ill. Phew!
He hadn’t met someone else either. Tick — what a relief.
No. He was transgender and was transitioning to become a woman.
And there was me and my two sisters, on the 1 year anniversary of our mums death, being hit by another freight train, from out of nowhere. Boom.
The more it sunk in, the more it started to make sense. The longer than average nails, the black and white photos of his on-stage drag act when he was in his early twenties (his drag act was named Burly Chassis, which was frigging genius!). I don’t know why we didnt cotton on sooner to be honest. I remember when I was 17 sat on the sofa late one evening at home watching TV when I heard my mum scream upstairs. I grabbed the kitchen broom and leapt up the stairs, two at a time, and ran into mum and dad’s bedroom, ready and prepared to whack a mouse or whatever other little creature had shocked mum. On entering the bedroom instead of finding a mouse, there was Dad, laying under duvet, with his arms behind his head, with his newly pierced nipples on show.
My best friend’s Dad was having a mid-life crisis around the same time too, but he bought himself a motorbike. My Dad, whom I love dearly, got his nipples pierced.
(Repeat) Lesson 3: Life is short — follow your heart, live your dream
Death and grief affects people in different ways, but for all it is a great change agent. Knowing that your own mortality is inevitable, and potentially not that long away, spurs you into action. Whilst the meaning of following your heart or living your dream means very different things for me and my Dad, I am in equal parts both (i) incredibly proud of him if, whilst at the same time (ii) incredibly angry at him for the way he managed the process. Nonetheless, what he is doing is incredibly brave. More importantly, he has shown me the way, as a good father should do. He has shown me that you must be true to yourself. You must amplify those quieter voices at the back of your head, and not let the louder voices of reason and fear slowly kill you.
We have clearly both had the same gut reaction to mum’s death, which can pretty much be summarized neatly by “Fuck it, life is short, live your dream”. Whereas Dad’s journey the past 2 years through grief and the loss of his wife and mother has given him the sense of urgency to express his true gender identity and wear glorious high heels, my journey these last 2 years, from losing my mum and nan and to some extent losing the idea of a dad I’ve known all my life, has reinforced my sense of urgency to live a more adventurous and impactful life, not just at the odd weekend every few months when “normal” life allows it, but on a daily basis.
A few months following Dad’s news of his transgenderism, he was diagnosed with cancer, with a tumour the size of a tennis ball on his right kidney. When he was out of hospital and recouperating after having had the kidney and tumour quickly removed, I spent 4 days “looking after him”. The sad reality was I was so busy at work that I spent those entire 4 days in the study on his computer, logged into work and working til the early hours each morning. I barely saw him, let alone was able to look after him. He has since been given the all clear and, so far, so good.
But now more than ever, those words are ringing in my ears louder than ever: Fuck it. Life is short. Live your dream.
Fuck it. Let’s do this!
About Me:
Hello! After the best part of nearly 4 years, The600Project is back! I’ve decided to start this blog to tell my story: the story of what has happened since the devastating realisation that nursery deposits trump entrepreneurial dreams, and to share the journey with you as I try to resuscitate The600Project. I’m just an ordinary bloke. 33 years old. Still in full time employment… still in London… still dreaming of being an entrepreneur. With a brilliant wife and 3 lovely children at my side, I’m embarking on a 3 month startup course with Escape The City to develop a powerful new startup toolkit, network and mindset to help me identify and execute exciting opportunities over the next few years as I transition into entrepreneurship.
Follow The600Project… from the highs and the lows, from the ridiculous to the sublime, my insights to trying to be an entrepreneur whilst having 3 kids and a full-time job, and generally, life doing its best to get in the way!
