Verbalized: Life + Food + Travel

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On promises and plans

Sometimes I find myself so full of things that I want to say, but so unable to find a way to say them. I’ll open up a blank document, position it precisely in the centre of my screen, and stare at it expectantly while attempting to sift through the swirl of words in my head. After a few minutes of this, I’ll get frustrated and head into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee, an activity that’s intended to help clear my head but usually ends in the release of that pent-up creative energy in some trivial and unnecessary task like a complete reorganization of my spice cupboard or an alphabetical categorization of the tea collection.

By the time I return to the computer – coffee in hand, unnecessary housekeeping successfully completed – the blank document has begun to look somewhat threatening, so I close it and move onto something else. A few months slip by, months laden with a strange and heavy combination of happiness and loss, life-changing decisions and a few steps towards the edge of my comfort zone, and by the time I decide that it’s time to write something again, my entire life is looking a little different. As it turns out, it’s hard to sum up different in a couple of paragraphs, at least not in any great detail. Different is good, but also complicated.

Back in March, I finally acted on an idea that I had been turning over and over in my mind for months on end: I gave notice at my job, and two weeks later I marched out of the office for the last time. Part of me wanted to jump up and down in the street while grinning wildly, while the other part of me – the cautious, overly analytical, highly change-resistant part – felt like vomiting right there on the sidewalk. I settled for a compromise: Walking home with a smile plastered to my face, then calming my cautious side with a glass of champagne.

A few days later I launched Sara White Design, which felt more like the beginning of an entire new chapter in my life than it did the birth of a business. Of course, there were more factors at play here than just the urge to be entrepreneurial. Several months ago – on New Year’s Eve, fittingly – feeling frustrated and pent-up in Victoria and dissatisfied with the direction that I saw my career heading in, I made a promise to myself. A big promise. And in the months that followed, all of the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place, one after another, until I saw myself walking out of that office building in a blur, pointing my career in the exact direction I’ve been wanting it to go in, and carefully formulating plans to guarantee that, as of this fall, life is going to be looking a lot different for me.

Postscript
More promises, but of the less vague and life-altering type: Because I actually really enjoy writing once I force myself to get past the intimidating blank document, I’m going to start posting here more often. No, really, I am.