In 2007 I was put on gardening leave for 3 months (This is standard in England. If you're head-hunted to work with another company, you're often asked not to come back to work again the day you hand in your notice i.e. you're expected to go home and garden. It does have it perks though because you do get paid for the whole time you're on gardening leave). Always the busy-body, I didn't know what to do with myself so to calm my anxiety about what on earth I would do with 3 months off work, I came up with a project. Inspired by an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show (I can't remember what the show was about) I came up with an idea to create a magazine, Verj Magazine, for women who are on the verge of .... whatever .... a nervous breakdown, a promotion, a change in life's circumstance, or the mundane...like eating a piece of cake that has way too many calories.
Being me, I wanted it to be big, to reach others, to find a way for others to be involved. So I fleshed out the concept, emailed friends and friends of friends, told them what I wanted to do and asked ordinary women to send me their articles with musing about whatever they were on the verge of. I enjoyed it, and was and still am grateful that so many people participated, and devoted time and effort to write and re-write articles and graciously allowed me to edit and publish them. Still others visited the Verj site every month to read the articles, to live vicariously through others and in some cases, to see themselves in others' stories.
But what started out as a hobby with a big vision quickly became an overwhelming endeavour. When I started my new job three months later, I was still editing Verj which meant I was working ALL the time -- evenings and every weekend from morning till night. I didn't know how to stop or to scale back, mainly because I hate stopping anything that I've started but also because I didn't want to disappoint those who were contributing to Verj and who were reading it.
A lot has happened since 2007. I've had two other jobs since then and came up with two new concepts that required all my time. But how do you give more when you have no more time? I couldn't decide how to scale back Verj or whether to close it down but the Universe had its own plans -- the site went down and I lost all the files for the Verj site. I had deleted them by "accident" (I don't believe in accidents. I think everything happens for a reason and the Universe made a decision for me that I had trouble making myself. In order to get my new project off the ground, I had to stop Verj as it was then). I'm still working crazy hours and once again find that my various projects and interests need more time than I have.
So I'm stopping. And starting again. Experimenting with going with the flow, taking things easy and rediscovering my love of writing -- just for the sake of it. No deadlines to meet, no one else's articles to edit but my own (and I'm not doing much of that either, so beware of typos and grammatical errors!), no pressure. I'll write what I want to write, when I want to write, a public journal of sorts for the not-too-private musings of a woman who all to often finds herself seeking the meaning of life in every moment -- or venting about some annoying, or positively infuriating thing that's happened. I don't know how many verjes I will find myself on as I start over on this new, hopefully more "organic" path. Right now, I'm the verj of making dinner, watching TV and talking a longish soak in the tub!
