On looking back & moving forward

A big birthday and the benefits of slowness

So here we are at the start of February already. My birthday happens to coincide almost exactly with the New Year so I've always gone in big for the 'new start' feeling that's practically baked into January – I love thinking about and writing out my goals for the year, reflecting on the year just past and the new one yet to come, now my age has ticked up another number.

And maybe it's because I'm a winter baby, but I actually quite like the slightly dour grey vibes of January – it can come as something of a relief after all the intense energy of December (which I'm absolutely here for but also sometimes it's...a lot!) I kind of feel like the whole month is a gradual winding up of the wheels as our next ride around the sun picks up speed.

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

My eldest is also a January baby and this year he's reached his first 'milestone' birthday, hitting double figures for the first time. Truthfully he seems remarkably unbothered by the 'milestone-iness' (is that a word?!) Unlike me.

I don't have a ton of memories of my childhood (there's probably a lot to unpack in that fact, but hey, that's for another day). I do, though, clearly remember turning 10. I felt palpably more grown up, with secondary school gradually heaving into view and my primary school years coming closer to their end.

Age is just a number I know. But this one felt significant.

And I have the same sense of an important marker now – only this time it's a decade of being a parent. It also feels like a particularly potent yardstick for looking back over everything that's happened in my working life in those years.

Back in 2014, I was still early in the journey of my documentary 'magnus opus'. I'd done the bulk of the filming for 'The Atom: A Love Affair' prior to and during my pregnancy but it would be another five years on from the end of my maternity leave before it finally premiered in November 2019.

In that time I obviously edited the film (alongside two wonderful film editors, a phenomenal composer and some amazing post-production wizards who made the whole thing look and sound gorgeous for the big screen). But I also had a crash course in crowdfunding, selling shares through equity investment, navigating the complex world of tax credits – and the grind of seemingly endless funding applications.

99% of which were unsuccessful (maybe a topic for Jess Taylor aka

Loadofolbobbins

'You Didn't Win This Award' eh – HARD relate to all the posts there).

I was also trying to keep my hand in with an increasingly uninterested and unwelcoming TV industry (much good talk about family friendly practices that could accommodate me as someone living outside of London and wanting/needing to work part time that just evaporated once we got to talking about actually hiring me). I ultimately took a big pay cut to work part time for a small but lovely production company near where I live in Brighton. But despite loving my colleagues, there was a lot about that experience that was pretty negative.

And then came 2020. And with it the pandemic, the birth of my daughter and the much-altered release of the film as a completely virtual event. I came back from maternity leave at the end of that year, though 'back' didn't mean back to an actual job, it just meant the end of my maternity pay (I work through a limited company which meant I wasn't entitled to either furlough or the self employment support payments in the pandemic, but did at least mean I could get actual maternity pay rather than just the basic statutory maternity allowance).

The company I'd been working for in Brighton was in no position to give me any more freelance work thanks to the pandemic. And in any case, I wanted to concentrate the precious work hours I had childcare for on getting the film I'd spent a decade making out into the world.

And so the last three years, during which my son morphed from a little kid into a much bigger one, have been spent booking screenings with all sorts of good people – universities, community groups, government agencies, even a hook up with one of my favourite podcasts (the now defunct and greatly missed Sustainababble – you can listen to hosts Dave & Ol interviewing the mighty David Roberts from

Volts

here if you want a flavour of what it was like).

Me, interviewed by Brits

Set out like that I can't help but think – ‘Wow, you took your time!’ Ten years to make and release just one film. Put like that, I'm nobody's poster child for productivity!

Then again, it took as long as it took – I had a lot of life business happening too (including other difficult personal stuff going on off stage which I'll maybe share about some other day). And mainly it was a constant, ongoing struggle to raise the money to make the film. Honestly, I never did raise all of it and am still paying down the last credit card bills even now.

I've also come to feel – especially since I've been in distribution and sharing it with the world – that it's actually a better film precisely because it took so long to make. The enforced slowness meant my thoughts and feelings about the story I was telling had time to deepen and evolve and become much more nuanced - as well as to respond to events in the wider world that were happening at the same time. It wouldn't have been the film it is if it had been madein half the time.

So it's perhaps no surprise that I related so much to this lovely thoughtful piece from

Tara McMullin

on How to Feel Good About Going Slow

How to Feel Good About Going Slow

Tara writes:

Ben Franklin said, “Time is money.” But what else could time be? What if time were practice? Connection? Care? Love? How does redefining time outside of a financial equation change our perception of it? How does it change the way we plan or our expectations of how time is spent?

And:

Now is better than later, and faster is better than slower. Our culture is teeming with stories about urgency, time, and productivity. What happens when we start to let them go? 

Over the past couple of years, whilst externally working on booking screenings for the film, I've been internally working on figuring out what comes next. This too has been a slow process. And at times I've felt frustrated with myself for taking so long to settle and choose a new focus and direction. I think I had such a clear, laser-focused goal (“finish the film!”) for so many years that I've found myself slightly unmoored without that. So how good was it reading this from Tara:

after experimenting with different ways to use my time, I’m noticing how much I’ve practiced letting things marinate—or maybe ferment is the better word—and how much more comfortable waiting has become. I like that.

I like it too. I do have some sense of my future direction now. But a lot of it is still definitely in the marinating phase. And that's ok.

And when I think about the next ten years (apart from feeling disbelief at the thought of my son as a 20 year old!!) I don't feel like I have to rush. But I would like to be more in community. The process of making my film involved lots of brilliant collaboration at points. But was also in many ways a pretty isolating journey.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

For the next phase I want to reach out more. Make new connections. Find fellow travellers. And also document the journey more. I'm going to aim to write a weekly chronicle of what I've been doing workwise every week here on Substack. And I'm looking forward to being able to look back on what I've achieved this time next year. Never mind in ten years. Let's see where this goes eh.

Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on X /Twitter & at LinkedIn

Life stories website – coming soon...