Go your own way
It's all a question of self-confidence
“But do I really HAVE to go to Sunday School?” I moaned, or something very similar, I mean, it’s a long time ago.
Pic: Shane
“Why don’t you want to go?” Mum countered. “All your friends are going.”
“No, they’re not. None of them are there. And we have to sing hymns.”
“Well, you’ve got a lovely voice, darling. I think you should at least try it.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe another term?”
“Another term! But that’ll be Christmas, and that’s ages away!”
When you’re in single digits, one school term can feel like a decade.
“Oh, go on with you, I think it’s good to make friends.”
“But I’ve got friends. I don’t need any more.”
Mum could be stubborn, as indeed could I, childhood lessons from an expert in the pastime, me thinks?
“Honestly, do until Christmas, and then you get to go on the trip.”
“What trip?”
Mum wanted me to follow whatever norm or crowd she’d prescribed to, I clearly had other ideas.
Equally, she’d clearly tired of this attempted negotiation by an eight or nine-year-old, and relied upon something like a made-up trip to pique my curiosity. This was another one of her baseless claims when she couldn’t think of an actual reason or argument. Reality went right out the window in what I suppose these days we’d call fake news or something.
Her greatest fake news, which seems small fry now but at the time used to agitate me greatly, was when we went walking as a family on holiday and we’d stop along a cliff path in the middle of nowhere, halfway to maybe as it goes, and out would come a snack, usually a mint chocolate Jacob’s Club biscuit (remember those, kids?), and a red tartan flask that was still in her possession when she died many years later, with three plastic cups: orange, blue, and a sort of purple colour.
In each, she’d pour a hot drink, and I’d pray for tea, as I couldn’t stand the bitter taste of the strong coffee she made.
“Oh no, Mum, is that coffee?”
“No, it’s tea.”
“Well, it smells like coffee, Mum.”
Dad would look the other way, avoiding teagate altogether.
“Well, I can tell you it isn’t, darling,” Mum would sharply argue.
“What is it then?”
“It’s coffee-tea.”
“Coffee-tea?!”
And so this was repeated until I was in my teens, and my taste buds had been beaten into submission.
Fortunately, my whinging ways removed me from Sunday School with far less than a term to go. I think this tête-à-tête is one of my earliest memories. Why must it be this, I don’t know. But if I meet my maker with this story, I can’t imagine the divine maker of all things being particularly impressed by Sunday School draft dodging.
That stubborn little kid never really went away, if I’m honest.
He just got older, started talking into a microphone for a living, then carried a camera, and got paid for asking awkward questions.
I knew how to go my own way.
But I don’t think going your own way is exclusively the territory of artists and freelancers and people who work from kitchen tables in their dressing gowns.
Some of the most singular people I’ve ever met have spent thirty years inside the same organisation, and done it entirely on their own terms. It’s less about what you do and more about whether you’ve ever stopped to ask: Is this actually mine, or am I just going along with it?
Photography taught me something about this, certainly not immediately, and not in any blinding flash of revelation. More like the way a photograph itself works, i.e. you don’t always see what you’ve actually got until you look at it later, in different light.
I started making and taking pictures because I was intrigued by what I saw when the film came back, as it was when I started.
I’ll be honest with you, and I’ll whisper these words to a degree: in case any of those early clients were listening, there was no plan, no strategy, nobody telling me it could become anything. And because of that, I made every mistake available to me, in whatever order I fancied. I was winging it.
But they were my mistakes. And that, it turns out, matters more than I would have thought at the time.
The coffee-tea years don’t last forever, thankfully, and I mean that quite literally as much as anything else.
At some point, something just clicks, if you’ll pardon my photographic pun. Not dramatically, not in a way you’d necessarily notice at the time. More like you catch yourself mid-nod, going along with something, and for the first time you actually stop and think, hang on, do I even want this? And instead of talking yourself out of that thought, as you’ve probably done a hundred times before, you just... follow it somewhere.
It might be something enormous, or it might be what you order for lunch.
You realise you don’t need to follow the crowd, you can go your own way. My father-in-law, for example, always orders after his wife, because he chooses the same.
“I’ll have what you’re having, dear,” he’ll say.
It’s become a bit of a game, really, because I can see my mother-in-law plotting as the order goes in.
She orders something, and he orders the same. She shuts the menu. Then, as the waiter is walking away, she calls him back.
“Oh, sorry, I’ve just changed my mind, can I have the ‘X’ instead?”
I’m not trying to out my father-in-law, the chances he’ll ever hear this are as likely as me ‘insert wildly implausible moment’ here.
We follow the crowd instinctively, for all manner of reasons, for ease, for vindication, for applause, for safety, for love, for safe harbour, for lack of imagination, for fear of offence, for… we could be here a long time.
And I’ve done it in my creative life, with radio, with photography. I spent years wondering whether what I was making was good enough, valid enough, the right kind of thing, before eventually getting bored with that particular anxiety and just getting on with it, mistakes and all.
I suppose as the show now officially becomes called HALFWAY TO MAYBE, formerly Reflections, that’s what this piece is about.
Nobody handed me a certificate. I just decided, one fairly unremarkable afternoon, that I probably knew what I was doing. More or less. And I’ve been making glorious wins and f**k ups ever since.
Self-belief, I’ve come to think, is not the thing it’s sold as. It’s not a switch you find and flip. It’s not a destination you arrive at and then unpack your bags. It’s more like, and forgive me for a photographic cliché, it’s more like a photograph you’re still developing.
You can see something emerging, something that looks like it might be good, but you’re not entirely sure yet, and the worst thing you can do is pull it out too early and ruin it by undercooking it.
What I do know is that the moments I’ve trusted my own instincts, even when they’ve made no obvious sense, those have been the moments I’m most glad of. Not always because they worked out brilliantly, because honestly, sometimes they didn’t. But because they were genuinely mine.
A very good friend of mine, you know who you are, and I know you’ll be listening, because I shamelessly told you this was partly about you today, has just parted company with his full-time, pay-me-at-the-end-of-the-month, company-pension life.
His last day at the firm ended with a short laptop exchange, like something out of a Bond movie where he hands the detonation codes over to the person stroking an evil-looking feline, in exchange for a modest whip round from the office, and a Marks and Spencer’s sandwich, and then, he was gone, wondering what the f-stop he’d just done. It’s similar to a story of mine I might share one day, the only suited job I’d ever had.
But he’s free. Free now to go his own way, in his case, creativity. I think there’s a sense of wonder and awe that he’s now his own boss, mixed with the terrifying realisation that he could end up hunched over a sticky table in some Montmartre café that smells of Gauloises and existential dread, surrounded by other people who used to have pensions, all nursing a single glass of house red, collectively bemoaning the fact that nobody understands their art, and at least one of them is seriously considering whether an ear is a price worth paying for posterity.
That eight-year-old in the Sunday School negotiation didn’t have a strategy. He just knew, somewhere, that this particular path wasn’t his. And he said so, repeatedly, until someone believed him. Or got tired of arguing. Either way.
I’m still doing more or less the same thing, just with better vocabulary and occasionally a decent lens.
As for go your own way, there is a slight aside to this. It’s the name of a Fleetwood Mac song from the album Rumours, which my first real love bought for me the day we split.
You never forget that first heartache, do you? Like a first exquisite red wine, that first exquisitely painful heartbreak will never be tasted with equal palpable feeling. She’d marked that track on the album sleeve with a thick black marker pen, which at the time seemed rather gratuitously cruel to me. Perhaps uncalled for.
I didn’t take the record out of the sleeve for a long, long time, but when I did, out came a note, which had the words, ‘I still believe in you, now you just need to believe in yourself too.”