When cleaning leads to an epiphany

The little box of secret wishes

Recently I was sorting out one of my many cupboards of miscellaneous, semi organised junk that are dotted around the house - part of the snowball effect of moving my treasured red Chinese cabinet into my living room. The red cabinet had been in what was my office but is now my mum’s room since she moved in due to ill health. It held my files and printer and all the boring but essential stuff required for running a business and living an organised life.

Now positioned in a more accessible spot for when I’m working in the living room - with the added bonus of offering a landing strip to the cat when he jumps down from the mezzanine/most expensive cat bed - the cabinet was due a sort out if it was to serve me well.

One thing led to another and suddenly I was sorting all the cabinets in the vicinity, which contained an array of notebooks and journals - both used and fresh, more on that later - envelopes, Christmas cards, stacks of Amazon plastic envelopes that I save in case I ever need to re-use them (and then forget I have when I actually need one), press cuttings from my books, boxes of family photos, maps of Paris/Rome/London etc.

I almost got hijacked by the box of family photos but got away with only Whatsapping a couple of them to my kids - Ella in a NASA astronaut’s suit aged three, Johnny sitting terrified on Santa’s lap, aged two. I had a brief moment of madness where I thought I’d ‘quickly’ categorise the photos by year/decade/child and organise them into neat, labelled boxes. But then I had a flash of me losing months of my life to such a task and I reigned it in.

I did spend a few minutes putting my journals into chronological order and writing their dates on the covers - Jan 2020-July 2020 and so on. As a prolific diary keeper with dreams of one day becoming successful enough to warrant a memoir that people might actually want to read, my diaries/journals serve as my memory. If that pipe dream doesn’t come true, then at least my kids will one day be able to read in chronological order the erratic and repetitive thoughts and feelings their mother felt the need to document year after year.

I also found a little lidded box, mustard coloured and square, one of those cloth ones from IKEA that I bought to store tiny Lego heads in a decade and a half ago. It was now stuffed full of folded scraps of paper with scribbled notes on them, dating back about ten years. My ex mother in law back in LA used to encourage me to write down my wishes/goals etc in the “I am” style and then tuck them away out of sight.

Manifesting may currently be having its moment in the mainstream, but I was doing it back then in the late nineties/early noughties and ever since, even if I keep it on the down low so people don’t think I live in fairyland. The trick is to write or imagine what you want as if it already is, hence the ‘I am’.

“I am a successful author”

“I am a top stylist”

“I am designing my dream home by the sea”

“I am travelling to South Africa, Paris, Italy…”

You get the picture.

Well it’s all there in that little box, a decade of my dreams and wishes both in my career and my personal life, scrawled onto whatever paper I had to hand. Lined sheets torn from a child’s school notebook, graph paper likely pilfered from my son’s desk, hotel stationary, one luxe creamy piece embossed with Astier de Villatte which I must’ve got when my Paris wish came true (say what you will about manifesting but I got a job that took me to Paris all the time).

Some of it is cringey as you’d expect. But what struck me most is how my goals and wishes haven’t really changed much - family health and happiness, specific career successes, travel, love (renewed or new), money (more, always more). Just your run of the mill, perfect life wish list.

The volume of optimistic notes I wrote for 2014 and stuffed in the little box is telling. It was a challenging time and I was clearly in full on manifest-better-things-overdrive. I was writing my second book, I had started a big new job for Anthropologie that I was struggling to cope with, my dad was dying and my marriage wasn’t doing great. And so I wrote a lot of these notes to future me, my handwriting big and flowery and enthusiastic:

“2014 is the year I find my passion for life again!”

”Goals/Dreams/Wishes 2014!”

And an 8 point list headed simply 2014 which included a few things I did in fact make happen:

Point 1: Second interiors book (Ten years on I’ve written five)

Point 5: Buy a house by the sea. (I’m writing this from a mezzanine I designed in the house I bought half a mile from the sea. It took a few years but I got there).

Point 8: Work with amazing global brands to create their shoots, making £x/per year. (I did get to design amazing shoots for globally recognized brands and the money was often very good although never consistent).

But there were just as many points on that particular wish list that didn’t come true. A few are no longer on my mind, but interestingly, many more still are. There are 2 or 3 that would certainly carry over to 2025’s feverishly scribbled notes if I choose to write them, to be squirreled away in the little box and marvelled at in another ten years, when I may or may not have made them manifest.

One thing that’s been a revelation is seeing that for ten years at least, I’ve been writing about wanting to rediscover or reignite my passion and joy for my life and my creativity, something I’m pretty sure I spoke about in my intro video here. I’ve been blaming my diminished zest for life on mid-life hormonal changes for almost five years but it’s become apparent that this feeling has been with me for far longer.

Yet looking back on that very same decade, I have been creative and I have had some wonderful times filled with joy.

I don’t know how to reconcile this.

Does it only seem joyful looking back, rose tinted glasses and all that? Or am I searching for some state of being that doesn’t really exist? How can it be that all this time I’ve been wishing I was more creative while my creative output has at times been prolific? Is it just the curse/blessing of the artist? We’re never satisfied, always longing to be better, always striving to reach our potential but never feeling like we have.

It’s actually a beautiful sort of pain, the longing. You’ll either get that or you won’t. It’s impossible to explain.

And it turns out I’ve missed it.

Today I feel immensely grateful that once again I feel like I have more to do, more to give, more to create. Today it doesn’t feel like I haven’t reached my potential, it feels like this is the job.

Today it doesn’t feel like the striving and the wishing and the failing is a hardship or just a step towards something else. It feels like this is the job. This is the bit that matters.

Today I’m grateful for my restlessness and the feeling that it’s time to get up and try again. I’ve not been feeling that way in 2024 except for fleeting moments (curiously when I was laboriously re-finishing and re-painting the exterior of my house for a month in the Spring, I was buzzing even though I was an emotional wreck in other ways).

Six months ago, two months ago, even a brief but terrifying dip a month ago, I couldn’t see a way out. On not one of my scribbled wish lists did I ever write:

“I am ending a relationship and losing all my money because of it”.

“I am a full time carer for my mum and therefore I cannot work as much”.

“I am depressed and lonely and feel like my life and career is over”.

Who would wish for those things? But for some reason, today, reading those notes written by an optimistic me from the past made me realise it had to be like this.

Ending a relationship was brutal but had to be done.

Caring for my mum has been such a blessing in ways I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say, I have no regrets.

Feeling deep depression and loneliness forced me to ask for help and even more importantly, made it crystal clear that my current friendships had to be nurtured and new ones developed.

I’ve spoken before about something Ekhart Tolle says about accepting the ‘is-ness’ of life and it has been resonating deeply with me for the last couple of days. There are so many things I feel like I should be doing career-wise, especially now that some of that zeal for life is returning, but I’ve had to accept that right now is not the time to focus on that.

I still have my wish list, my unfulfilled career goals, products to design, workshops to teach, books to write, podcasts to host, interiors tv shows to pitch (yes it’s still a dream of mine because I have good ideas!), places I want to visit with my kids.

But I’ve had to loosen my grip on them all and trust that there will be time to make them a reality, if they are meant to be. I have always felt like I don’t have enough time. Like it’s going to run out and I won’t have done all the things I want, so this has been really, really difficult.

Until suddenly it became very easy.

In the same period where I’ve started to feel inspired by life and work again, I’ve also fully accepted that I can’t give my career and my dreams my all right now. Some of the ideas will have to wait. Today I might want to write an outline for a new workshop or book or product, but all I’ll actually do is walk around the park with my mum, take her to the library, fill out a shitload of local council forms and make a nice dinner.

Tomorrow I might want to write a press release for my new wallpaper collection, but I will probably only go for a run, do some laundry and wash my mum’s hair.

I think I’m finally learning to be patient. Or to let go. Or to just live in the moment, even if the moment isn’t what I’d pictured. This isn’t me giving up. It’s quite the opposite. Of course I still have hopes and dreams but they will have to wait a little bit longer. I’ve never felt more in the present moment even though the present moment can be a painful place to hang out.

As the year end draws closer I will of course be looking ahead and thinking about what I want to do/achieve/create in 2025 - I think it’s in my nature - but I’m not sure I’m going to write a list this time. I might try living in the ‘isness’ of my life and see what comes of it.

Thanks as always for reading. Please like or restack this post if you enjoyed it as it really helps boost my readership. And you know I love to read your comments x