Enjoying the caravanning life in Scotland © Susie Kearley

I’ll be 50 this year. It’s sobering. I might be dead in another 20 years. I feel I haven’t lived enough! I need to make the most of the next few decades.

Our Western culture forces most of us to earn to live, and live to earn. As a result, I feel I may have spent too much time chasing career progression and money. Not that I had a choice when I was young. My parents insisted.

By the time I was older and in a position to make different choices, I was deeply invested in the treadmill of the 9-to-5.

I’m glad I abandoned employment in my mid-30s to go freelance, though. I’d liked to have done that from the start, but my parents wouldn’t let me while I lived at home.

It’s a catch 22. Once you have commercial rent or a mortgage to pay, you need the security of a regular income. So playing at being a freelance writer with no contacts and no track record is probably not a good idea unless you have support, and my parents weren’t supportive. They just wanted rent and they wanted me out of the house for the day.

Now I’m approaching 50, I feel I spent too much time working in whatever jobs I could get. My dreams were abandoned along the way, except one. The writer thing worked out eventually, but it was 20 years later than I would have liked.

Trying to follow a career path

I always felt I was meant to be a writer, but I wasn’t allowed to pursue that line of work in my youth. A proper job in writing would have been okay, but the local paper wouldn’t employ me.

I wasn’t allowed to dance either. Mum had ideas that I should be a secretary like her, I think. But she only did it for a few years, then quit to raise children. It wasn’t a life sentence for her. I don’t have kids. My career is a bigger part of my life.

Anyway, I ended up trying to forge a career in marketing, which wasn’t a disaster, but I’m just not the dynamic type and I struggle to manage people when they decide to not bother coming to work and stuff. So trying to climb the corporate ladder wasn’t a huge success and my pay was mostly diabolical.

Fortunately, by my 30s I was married, so my husband supported me when I decided to pursue the writing dream.

I started pitching to magazines and writing articles. It worked. My freelance career took off. To be fair, being older and having internet access probably improved my chances of success, compared to my early ambitions at the age of 16. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t have killed my parents to let me try.

Life’s short

Life’s short. I was slow to get my act together.

It took me 30 years on this planet to get some confidence and start standing up for myself. Even then, I failed to stand up to the medical profession and as a result, for the past 20 years, I’ve been struggling with a chronic health problem caused by unnecessary antibiotics that I didn’t want to take. There’s no treatment and no cure. Actually, for the most part they say my problem doesn’t exist, which as you can imagine, is marvellous.

The condition does limit what I can do in life though, because so many things cause flare-ups.

As a youngster, I loved to watch dance on the TV. Before writing for a living seemed like a good plan, I wanted to be a dancer, but I wasn’t allowed lessons.

I felt so sad about this that I tried taking ballet lessons in my 40s. I choked back the tears all through the first lesson. I felt it was too late. It was pointless in my 40s. My worst nightmare of a life trapped in an office had already come to pass. I needed those lessons 35 years earlier.

Anyway, I pulled myself together, stopped whimpering and tried to learn ballet, but I didn’t have the same passion at the age of 46. I was stiff, not very good, and never likely to be. It all felt a bit pointless.

Then the pandemic came along.

Travel… or not

As a youngster I longed to travel. I did travel a bit when we got married, but the health problems made it more difficult. For the past ten years, the freelance writing jobs have kept me in the UK, because I was writing for caravanning magazines about British travel. There’s nothing wrong with travelling in the UK, but it’d be nice to see a little bit more of the big wide world before I die.

2020 was going to be the year that we renewed our passports and travelled a bit more before my husband got too old and croaky. Then COVID-19 scuppered our plans.

My husband has lung damage, so we don’t want COVID-19. The whole idea of travelling the world sounds much less appealing when there’s a deadly virus on the loose. Nonetheless, I wish I’d explored a bit more of the planet. I’ve only taken three short-haul flights in my life.

Now, the climate emergency makes me feel guilty if I take another one anyway. So there’s that. At least my modest lifestyle has been good for the environment. But sadly, it hasn’t saved the world. The planet is still doomed.

Money money money

And that brings me to the next thing. All this time, I’ve been driven by money and still am, to some extent. I like to see my Medium earnings doing well. I like to feel I’ve earned enough at the end of the tax year from my writing, to not feel I should go and get a proper job.

But it’s all wrong. When we spend money on things, it supports the creation of goods and services that create carbon emissions. Unless I’m buying trees, virtually all purchases help destroy the environment. So really, it would be better if I’d never chased money and just spent my life living in a tent. But that sounds cold and miserable.

Now I feel guilty if I spend money on anything non-essential. Even though I’ve spent my life chasing money. It’s really screwed up.

I have a friend who has spent his money on rewilding a former cabbage field in Lincolnshire. He’s planted thousands of trees, dug a massive lake, and created a nine acre nature reserve. That’s one way to spend money that’s good for the environment, but most people’s purchases go some way towards destroying the planet.

Maybe before I die, I’ll spend all my money on trees.

Trying to kill cancer

I don’t know quite how I’m going to embrace this next stage of my life. It’s been 18 months and I’m finally allowed to tell people that my husband has cancer. He wouldn’t tell his mum for all that time, but he has now because he might need an operation for a related condition.

It’s the type of cancer that might just sit there and not do anything. So we’re on a 90% raw vegan diet, taking saunas and supplements, and hoping for the best. Well, we’re actually hoping to shrink the tumour, but that might be unduly optimistic. So far, the test results are heading in the right direction, so we might be onto something.

Approaching 50

Maybe we’ll travel if the COVID-19 situation looks a bit better in the years ahead. I always wanted to explore the Amazon and see the Grand Canyon. It was reassuring to hear recently that Michael Palin didn’t start travelling until he was 45! It would be more eco-friendly for me to take a train around Europe though.

I do wonder if I spend too much time sat in front of a computer. Is this really how I want to spend my time? I feel stepping away from the computer more might be good. But I enjoy being productive and earning a decent crust, so it’s getting the balance right between computing and doing other things I enjoy.

I go for a walk every day and spend more time than most people in nature. I enjoy photography, wildlife, and spending time with my lovely husband. Perhaps I should do more of that as time forges ahead and I enter my 50s. Life feels too short!

We always travel around the UK in our dinky caravan and plan to do that again this year. The caravan is great and gives us freedom to explore the countryside, with a minimal environmental impact, living in a field. And it’s about as safe from COVID-19 as you can get. Demand for caravans shot up during the pandemic. We were relieved to have one already.

© Susie Kearley 2023. All Rights Reserved.