Telling the story too soon

on worrying about saying something you’ll later regret

I recently revisited a script I wrote for a talk Laurence and I did maybe a year into starting Soul Farm. Reading it was painful. How foolish we were, I thought. Young and naïve. We were essentially invited to share an inspirational story about leaving a desk job for the good life and weaving in our home educating family lifestyle. 

Even at the time, the premise felt uncomfortable. We didn’t know what we were doing and hadn’t yet lived through the hard bits. We’d taken the leap but hadn’t yet landed - we didn’t know what was to come. 

The reality is that while the farm has grown in ways we are so grateful for and couldn’t have expected, we’ve had to continue to freelance and do other paid work around it. The distance to the farm and the way it grew during the pandemic have made it difficult for the children and me to spend as much time there as we’d hoped. 

The balance that we imagined we’d both have to share the paid work and time with the children hasn’t really materialised. Laurence has been able to be around more than he would have been had he stayed in his design agency job. That said, all the worry about money and keeping everything going hardly matches the stuff in this script from 2019! 

It would be easy to say that we told the story too soon. That we should have put off giving the talk and waited until we’d had a couple more years under our belt. In a sense, I think this is true. The discomfort we felt was a cautionary instinct to speak with less assuredness and more holding things lightly. 

I’m not sure that would have made the story we were being asked to tell as appealing, given the format of the evening. But it may have avoided the distress I felt almost immediately after being too vulnerable with our hopes in front of a large group of people whom I wasn’t sure were my people.

Yet I didn’t feel this way when I shared the same ideas on my blog and on Instagram despite speaking to many more people in those spaces. Perhaps there was potential there for more context. People following my writing, or even just glancing those squares, could see that we’d just been trying lots of different things and they could get a feel for the values that all of our decisions were coming out of. When people interacted with our story there, it felt like relationship whereas that talk felt like transaction. 

In recent years I’ve struggled to show up online the way I used to. When the kids were babies I was writing almost everyday. I threw out words with enthusiasm and conviction, and a whole lot less self-consciousness than I feel these days. That may partly have been to do with being in my 20s versus being 37.

There are lots of threads I could tug at to explain what’s brought me here. I don’t think my cautiousness is necessarily a bad thing. I’m more careful because I care more, for myself and for the people I love. But the outcome is that I’m often so worried that I’m going to say something I’ll later regret that I don’t say anything at all. 

I worry that I’ll be telling the story too soon, which translates into not telling the story. I have sometimesI wondered if that would be better all around. I wonder if writing about my life and about ideas I’m grappling with is attention seeking or navel gazing.

But I like reading other people’s stories. My life is richer for hearing their perspectives, for walking a little way with them, even or maybe especially when the path is quite ordinary. And I believe that the world gains something from hearing mine. 

Writing or speaking from the messy middle, it’s always going to feel too soon to tell what I’m telling. Sometimes I’ll say something and later change my mind. Living in fear of that means expecting and attempting to project perfection. I think we can all agree there’s enough of that in mothers’ spaces on social media.