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Today is the first anniversary.
It’s been a full 365 days since I was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer.
Thankfully, a year on, the future looks bright. I was lucky.
While I lay in a hospital bed, I had a lot of time to think.
As I’ve written previously, I’d come to a decision that I was going to stop doing the things that I was associated with prior to being sick.
I wasn’t going to be paid to write.
I wasn’t going to work as a creative within an advertising agency.
I wasn’t even going to do any ‘creative’ work, as a copywriter.
I wasn’t going to spend hours on Twitter.
I wasn’t going to be afraid to try new things and (probably) fail. If I did, I would fail happy, as Steve Chapman says.
I was determined to reinvent my life, to start afresh. I still am.
Yet, I’m not wondering if I actually have done so. Not fully.
Last week, while attending The Lab, I was taking part in an experiment and we were tasked with asking one another what it was we really wanted to do.
I said I wanted to retire.
Why retire?
Some people, when they retire, retreat into a shell. They go mouldy, as I put it last Friday.
Others start new things. It’s a release. That’s the kind of retirement I wanted.
It’s the kind of retirement I need.
So, it’s time to retire things. Starting with this blog.
I started this blog when I was bored at my last full-time advertising gig. It was a way to consider what I was up to and what within the industry was catching my eye. To be honest, not enough to sustain a blog, and so it’s become some sort of mish-mash of nothingness.
I have a domain that I don’t use well. It was my portfolio site, once upon a time. Except I no longer have a portfolio. I’ve retired it. So I’m going to use that, as a fresh page to do thinking out loud, to consider areas of which I know nothing but are of interest to me. To learn, to think, to suggest, to document. To possibly get called an idiot by those who know better (and surely by those who don’t).
It’s time to retire. To put the past in the past, to move on and begin that new chapter, free from the shackles of what I was. Because I’m no longer that person. I no longer want to be that person.
More than anything, this can help me move forward with things. To become defined by something new.
As of now, I’m officially retired.
Goodbye.
Thank you for reading this blog.
If you did.
Be well.
purplesime's ponderings 