The decade I didn't see coming

You know, I said I wasn’t going to do this.

We’ve all seen people humblebragging in these retrospectives, and I didn’t want to be that guy. But sometimes it is important to look back, and today is the last day not just of a year but of a decade. A lot happens in ten years.

I thought about different ways to characters the 2010s in my own life. ‘The decade that everything changed’ would be fitting, but arguably even truer about its predecessor. ‘The decade I found my way’ seems a bit too smug and presumes that my journey is over, which it isn’t.

In the end, I think that the best way to describe this decade is to call it ‘the decade I didn’t see coming’.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about the decade in my personal life. If we were to take the decade as a whole, it has been a disaster for the literal and human worlds – from racing climate change to Brexit to the object in the White House. For these purposes, I’m going to ignore the wider world and selfishly talk about me.

When the year ticked over from 2009 to 2010, I was in a bad way. Not at that very instant: I was at a party in Cholmley Road and was having a great time. But I was in a bad way, whether I acknowledged it or not. AT the age of 26, I had the strangest nagging feeling that my best days were behind me. I told myself that was okay: I’d had a whirlwind of a time in that decade, leaving home in 2002 and having adventures I’d never dreamed of. I think I told myself stuff like ‘no complaints here’. But the rot was there, gnawing.

I had a terrible job. The problem wasn’t so much that it was dead end (it was), the problem was that it was unremittingly harsh and unpleasant with no possibility of ever becoming less so. I won’t say it was the worst job in the world because I’m sure others have much worse experiences. But it was, for me, a pit. I’d become convinced that I was stuck there for life. The management of this major retail chain had a very good line in convincing people of their own lack of worth, to the point where – terrifyingly – I started to actually doubt whether I’d ever actually achieved both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. That purple and orange hell got inside my head.

Then came the tipping point. An unfortunate romantic choice, as these things often are. Looking back I can’t explain it. But she mesmerised me for a while there, more than any man or woman I’d ever been with. But she wasn’t entirely well, sadly. I say this because I much later discovered that my own experience fitted into a pattern which she repeated over and over. Looking back now, I feel sad for that woman and I hope she managed to break that cycle.

To put it simply, she blew hot, she blew cold. She loved me then hated me. She was the sweetest person and then a demon. She thoroughly buggered up my head and then dumped me by text for someone else who worked in the same place. At roughly the same time, my (very lowly) supervisory role was eliminated from the org-chart, busting me back to the lowliest level, a fact which the withered hag I worked for took great pleasure in reminding me. November 2010 saw me doing some really, really dumb things.

I got home from hospital and decided to go back to work immediately. Than God I did, because that made the 21^st November a thing which happened. The universe hangs on a string of co-incidence, and never was it clearer to me than that day.

I woke up to a text message from my old pal Brendan, telling me to apply for a copywriting job at his company. I was sceptical – I had almost no experience – but he assured me it was worth a pop. Later that day, I was at work shelf-stacking and my old friend Jamie passed by. He’d just started a copywriting job at that same company and suggested I go for it. I thanked him, feeling a strange sense of moment. Two in one day?

I was working 8-5 that day, and at 4.55pm I was about to call it a day, but decided to finish up what I was doing on the shop floor. My friend Felicity came in… and told me to apply for a copywriting job at the same company (she worked in PPC advertising but had heard about the vacancies). I felt the world seem to shift, as if the universe had just started paying attention. I told Felicity about Brendan and Jamie. She said she was going to wait for me to finish. She waited and took me to the pub, then spent the next three hours talking me up and convincing me I could do it. Ten years later, I still remain thankful that she did. Cheers, Flee 😊.

I didn’t actually apply the next day. I had a late shift and a CV to write, and no internet at home. I applied on the 23^rd instead, sitting in a pub on my laptop. On the 24^th, I got a call which turned into a phone interview. They told me I passed. I had an interview on 1^st December.

I can’t tell you much about that interview, except for a few salient points. Some degenerates tried to throw a bottle coke at me on the way in. It missed by about a foot. If it had hit I think I might have lost my nerve. My ankles were bloody rags even when I arrived because of the cheap faux-posh shoes I had purchased. I remember seeing the vast hordes of candidates. I remember bits and pieces of the five-hour practical and theoretical interview which followed. I remember that it was starting to snow as I walked back outside at 5.15pm. I don’t think I’ve ever been so emotionally, intellectually or physically exhausted. I can’t tell you exactly how I got back to my apartment on Wokingham Road, stumbling through the snow in a shirt and blazer, cold blood covering my ankles. I remember almost moaning like a zombie before I got in, and the relief at my heated apartment and being able to remove those hellish shoes.

I got the call the next day, whilst I was at work. I ignored protocol and took the call. After an agonising moment of blathering, they made the offer.

The pivotal points of our lives are rarely clear to us as they happen, but at that moment I saw two futures stretching out. I knew what happened in one of them. I jumped wildly for the unknown.

I left the purple and orange hell just a couple of days later. I started my new job in my new career on 13^th December, one month exactly after I had cause to go to hospital due to my own recklessly. That fast, life turned around.

What shall I say of those early months? I was employed on a temp contract. Though they aimed to keep us for a year, they could have dismissed us without fault at any time.

And I was determined. I was not going to let this slip away. I worked harder than I ever have in this life. I came in early, I went home late. Every night I sat reading about SEO, design trends, copywriting practice, anything and everything I could. There was no job I wouldn’t take on, no lunatic client I wouldn’t try to talk around if I thought it would impress the bosses. Where I was offered a permanent contract on 16^th June 2011, I felt a relief and a joy that was almost unparalleled.

I learned and I worked and I learned some more. I was 27 that first year. Many around me were fresh from university, but in some ways, I felt I had travelled the better road. I knew how bad things could be.

The world turned and turned again. The rain fell on the just and the unjust alike. I began to develop a sense of self again, and at some point I discovered a burning desire to see the world. I started travelling whenever I could afford. I met a lovely lady who was everything that the aforementioned woman wasn’t. For some years, my rise out of the pit I had once been in was steady. Things were shaping up.

Then disaster struck.

The year 2016 will probably not be remembered as a great year for human dignity. The Americans voted a toddler into their highest office. My own countrymen embarrassed ourselves with the Brexit fiasco and then cycle of ever-worsening Prime Ministers. But for me, it was a particularly crudworthy year. On January 31^st, I came down with a pretty serious gastric infection. Eye-witnesses say that when I collapsed, I nearly took out a tumble dryer. I couldn’t tell you because I lost consciousness and when I came around I was covering in the thickest sweat I’ve ever felt (which wasn’t there a minute before). Still, I got to see the inside of an ambulance, which was pretty cool.

Anyway, I was off work for a week. I went back in feeling much better on 8^th February. My employer invited us to watch a high-production video explaining how the dark days were behind us and the gruesome storm of buyouts, illegal restructuring and lunatic rebranding was over. We were back, bay bay!

Two days later, my entire department was informed that we were being made redundant.

Not that our jobs were redundant, you understand. But they believed that they could save money by outsourcing to the north of England, where some poor buggers with very limited employment choices would be forced to accept lower pay and conditions. Now, it was finally admitted to me that the Board didn’t actually believe this would save money in the long term, but it would provide the illusion of activity to keep the creditors who now owned the company happy. If I sound bitter… I kind of am. Understand me, I’m grateful to that company for all the skills I learned, and for the years there. But it was a sour pill to swallow that we would all be paying for very obvious financial blunders which we had warned them against and which they had committed anyway.

They weren’t prepared, of course. They wanted us to keep working with clients throughout our last three months, and had to ask us to train our own replacements as despite planning it for half a year they hadn’t got anything in place for training. And all the while, they were insisting on the corporate happy-babble about how great things were.

I was the last out. 6^th May 2016, which for the record remains a good day in my head. Truthfully, I should have moved on about a year before and leaving at least gave me that closure.

But what to do next? Well, naturally I took a few days to compose myself and then set about the task of moving on. I did some freelance work, but really I needed another proper job. But for a couple of months, I found that my interviews were going… well, but something was missing. Feedback was always good. Usually the stumbling block was that I was too experienced (and one assumes therefore too able to sense bad practice). But there was something missing. I came away from interviews feeling irritable even though they went well. It took me a while to figure it out.

Truth was, I had been skipping from one large company to another for over ten years and I was sick to the back teeth of corporate bullshit. I was pissed at these people because I was tired of hearing a load of happy-clappy rubbish and knowing that when push came to shove it would all unceasingly be about profit. I not suggesting that in a largely capitalist society one shouldn’t care about profit, but god damn it, there should be something else.

So I started applying for things which mattered: charities, scientific institutions, advocacy groups, Higher Education. With my particular skillset, I knew full-well that I’d be doing the grimy marketing side of things, but that didn’t matter: as long as there was some glimmer of doing anything which could be considered decent or noble, I could live with that. The interviews went well. I felt better. And very soon, I had a job. I had the job.

Let’s just clarify here: I know people who have by any wealth-based metric left me in the dust. People who have done far better in this world in the way that this world demands. Good luck to them, they’re cool by me.

But that isn’t me. In 2016, returning to the same university where I had studied for my own degrees, this time to help promote the institution for future students and researchers, felt very much like coming home. As an added bonus, the working environment is much more comfortable. But that really is an aside. It’s not what I’m doing so much as why I’m doing it. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s perfect and that I don’t have bad days. I’m not going to say that every last single thing that the university does is absolutely noble. But I’ll say this: it feels a heck of a lot better to be helping an institution which you know can do good in this world than to be helping one you damn well know can’t.

I’ve continued to travel. More so, in fact. As far as I’m concerned, a little skill and a lot of luck has given me the opportunity to travel reasonably often. And if you don’t do it when you have the opportunity… then when?

I didn’t see any of it coming. Truthfully, after that awful November of 2010, every day feels pretty much like a bonus. I don’t know where the journey will lead in the next decade any more than I did ten years ago. I don’t know if I’ll be ready for the events to come.

But the journey… I’m ready for that at least.