Yesterday afternoon I stumbled across a quote that stopped me in my tracks.
“Worrying is the worst use of imagination.”
Like so many quotes shared online, I’ve no idea where these words originated. But yesterday they landed differently.
I made a cup of tea, opened my notebook and started writing. Not with a plan. Just with curiosity.
Then, later that evening, I turned the final page of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
It was strange.
The novel seemed to echo so many of the questions I’d spent the afternoon asking myself; as though my notebook and Matt Haig had somehow been in conversation all along.
Maybe that’s coincidence. Or maybe it’s simply what happens when an idea is ready to find you.
Either way, this is what I wrote…
I’ve always had a vivid imagination. Long before anxiety found me, imagination was where I felt most alive. It lived in stories scribbled in exercise books, poems tucked into notebooks, songs that made me feel bigger than my world, and an endless yearning to create, explore and understand.
I was excitable.
Curious.
Passionate.
Life felt full of possibility. And then life happened. Not all at once. Just enough earthquakes that, somewhere along the way, my imagination quietly changed jobs. Instead of dreaming, it started protecting me. It became brilliant at scanning the horizon for what might go wrong. Rehearsing difficult conversations before I’d had them. Imagining disappointment before hope had a chance to speak.
It wasn’t trying to sabotage me.
It was trying to keep me safe.
But yesterday I found myself wondering…
If my imagination is powerful enough to rehearse disaster, isn’t it equally capable of imagining possibility? What if it can do more than protect me? What if it can rewrite a whole life?
I’ve noticed something else recently. It’s not during the chaos that I disappear into books. It’s afterwards. When the noise settles.
I’ve recently come home from a few wonderful days in Cardiff with my eldest daughter. The twins are back from London. Everyone has gradually slipped back into the rhythm of their own lives, and I’m left trying to remember what mine looks like.
Those moments have always felt strangely uncomfortable. Not lonely exactly. Just… unsettled. Exciting. Overwhelming. Sometimes both within the same breath.
I’ve often assumed I disappeared into books because I wanted to escape. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I wasn’t escaping at all. Perhaps I was searching.
Books have allowed me to explore safely. They’ve carried me into lives I couldn’t yet imagine living myself. They’ve lent me courage, perspective and possibility when my own world felt heavy. Maybe every story I’ve ever loved has quietly been collecting evidence. Evidence that other lives are possible and that reinvention isn’t reserved for fictional characters. That ordinary people can wake up one day and decide to write a different chapter. Perhaps that’s why reading has felt so important lately. Not because I’m trying to disappear from my own life. But because somewhere, beneath someone else’s words, my own imagination has been waking up.
There is a shift stirring in me. I don’t know where it’s come from. Maybe it isn’t one thing at all. Maybe it’s everything.
The years that have stretched me.
The grief that has softened me.
The exhaustion that has humbled me.
The joy of slowly (very slowly) building a camper-van called Mara.
The sea. The books. The conversations. The tiny moments that don’t seem important until one day they quietly gather into something bigger.
Whatever this catalyst is, I don’t want to miss it because I’m a tiny rock stuck between pebbles.
Go me! Free-writing in my dressing gown on a Tuesday afternoon. Funny how inspiration has a habit of showing up when we stop demanding it.
And yet… I still feel unsettled!
Am I afraid of failing? Or am I more afraid of discovering that I might actually succeed? Is it change that frightens me? Or am I finally more frightened of remaining exactly where I am?
I don’t know.
I just know that this needs to be written.
Documented.
Because if I don’t write it down, I’m afraid I’ll dismiss it as just another passing thought.
One final thought before I close.
Life’s earthquakes shook the foundations. Its eruptions covered everything in ash. For a long time, I mistook the ash for the ending. Then I remembered that some of the most fertile soil on Earth is born from volcanic fire. Perhaps that’s true of us too. Perhaps the places that look barren are quietly becoming the very ground from which something new can grow.
Maybe this shift I’m feeling isn’t about becoming someone new at all. Maybe it’s about remembering someone I’d almost forgotten. The woman who dreamed before she learned to brace herself. The one who believed possibility was worth following. I don’t think she’s disappeared. I think she’s been patiently waiting beneath the ash, hoping that one day I’d remember she was still there.
I don’t know what grows next. But for the first time in a long time I’m beginning to imagine it.
Field Note 001
The road ahead is always travelled twice.
First in the imagination.
Then for real.
I’m not sure where this Substack is going either. Perhaps that’s the point.