The big jump off

I was on the tube this morning having battled my way through a veritable winter wonderland on the way down to the station. As ever, I passed out for most of the journey, my sleep on this occasion aided by the few pints I drunk last night and the kebab which I consumed which by the morning seemed to be eating me. Waking up, catching myself snoring as the doors opened for Farringdon, I heard one bloke – a design type, remark to an asian guy with a Craig David hat, a stream of advice as he headed for the exit:

“You’ve got some good ideas man, you should go for it. You’ve got the right attitude to make it work, so just do it man.”

I remember thinking ‘good stuff’ at the time. A good thing to support other people and to get fired up by a stranger’s ideas. A good thing to recognise something of yourself in someone else and want to see them realise something that maybe you realised a long time ago.

Then I spent the day in a dreadful funk. My public-sector work is particularly taxing at the moment and I feel the weight of responsibility on my narrow shoulders. The much maligned tightness in the chest from fear of failure and anxiety about my ability to make good on my newest ‘pull rabbit out of hat’ challenge. It’s ridiculous, because today I kept thinking, ‘well fuck it’, you don’t need this. There are other options open to me right now and maybe I need to make some kind of definitive action to stop the consideration and begin the action. Blot my copybook so badly that I can’t go back and am forced to press forward into the unknown.

The best way I could think to do it today, was to stand up, pull my old-style CRT monitor off the desk and throw it through the fairly thin glass of the window to my left, watch it sail down ricocheting off the walls of the central courtyard of my art-deco office block, down the couple of floors to smash in a million pieces, alarming the PAs out for a sneaky cigarette. But no, that’s not a good plan, and I thought hard about rent cheques, not burning bridges and not being seen to have gone mad in front of some people I count as friends. I quelled the urge.

Still, I think it’s probably pretty strong evidence that I should be well on the way onto something different – for better or for worse. Compulsions and bad moods like today and the recurrence of certain dreams, all point in the same direction and only a fool would argue with signs like that. Yes, it’s time to take a few risks. Time to get away from the inertia and time to move forward towards full time design work terror. The final frontier of the big jump off. As the dude on the train said: “you’ve got the right attitude to make it work, so just do it man”.