Been trying so hard to hold on to who I was before. How I did things before. But, in so many ways, “before” no longer matters.

On 24th March, when I heard the announcement that we’d being going to Level 4 lockdown in NZ, I had a very clear sense of there being a most definite “before” and “after” - especially in relation to my work. Not that the work I did before wasn’t “good”, but just that it’s the work I would do from now on that would have much more relevance in this new world of ours.

Much of the struggle of the last two weeks since lockdown began has been an unconscious desire to hold on to what was, because at least I knew what “was” looked like. Thing is, “was” is gone.

It’s always scary to let go of something/someone/your self when you got no new thing/one/self to go to. I wanted to re-imagine/re-think/re-create myself in response to what is so obviously a deeply changed global landscape, but I was scared. So I held on for grim life [a turn of phrase perfectly suited to those days] to how I’d operated before, and couldn’t move forward. Instead I felt in limbo, inside the blue parentheses of 6 April [Day 12].

My friend Johnny said to me on the phone this morning, “all of the past is yours, and of your own making.” He was referring to the old patterns/the old stories we all tell ourselves.

It occurred to me this afternoon that he was completely right, and also that if the past was all of my own making, then ALL OF MY FUTURE IS TOO.

Just gotta let go the old stories to allow room for the new ones to be made.

Hashtag watch this space.

[Let go 2020 is available as a limited edition studioprint]