An Instagram DM from a favourite reader.
“Genuine question. Do you ever go through stages in life where it feels like you are stagnating and no-one is getting back to you regarding work? Your email box is empty etc., and how do you cope?”
At first I thought she was trolling me because this is my life, like, all the time. When I get an email that isn’t just an auto mail-out from something that I have been trying to unsubscribe from for six years, it’s a shock. If it’s something to do with work, it is a genuine red letter day. I tend to buy a lottery ticket, as my luck it clearly in.
Particularly in creative industries, although I’m sure it happens elsewhere, you can often feel in a total silo. Your emails ping into a void, it’s almost like you don’t exist. At other times everyone wants a piece of your ass and you don’t have enough childcare to deal with it all and everyone has to eat pasta for a fortnight.
It’s pretty exhausting, mentally. Hence my friend’s question: how do you cope. I tell you how I cope, and that’s by recalling the medieval principle of The Wheel of Fortune. Hardcore Spike fans will remember me talking about this a few years ago, but it is worth revisiting if, right now, you feel like you are just shuddering with toxic energy, bordering on paranoid.
The Wheel of Fortune is much what it sounds like, it is a physical idea of the random cruelty of fate. In illuminated medieval texts, it is a literal wheel, often presided over by Fate, a blindfolded woman.
Sometimes you are at the top of the wheel, everything is getting the green light and people say, bright with angry jealousy, “You’re everywhere at the moment.” You stay here for an unspecified amount of time before being dragged down with wheel, then squashed under its merciless progression, feeling like a piece of utter worthless shit for a while, before being yanked inevitably up the other side back towards the top. Put “medieval wheel of fortune” into google images if you want a laugh. I love medieval pictures of people, they always look so lunatic, falling headlong from great heights with their terrible haircuts.
And wheels turn within wheels. You can live through a full turn of the Wheel of Fortune in a single day - you’re up, you’re down - while your whole life Wheel of Fortune turns its revolution more slowly, but not necessarily evenly, or at the same time as everyone else.
The important thing to remember is that everyone is on their own Wheel of Fortune. When you are at the bottom of yours, it’s pretty beastly witnessing someone else reach the apex of theirs, (Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak immediately spring to mind here), but never fear! Just as night follows day, Summer follows Spring, the revolutions in your wheel will crank into life and you will be hauled from your abyss back up to something resembling success. And your rivals, just as inevitably, will be sucked into their own beastly drama, their vortex of doom. All will feel well.
Just don’t get too comfy.
On this subject, and I know this isn’t a very fashionable thing to say, but I do hope Kwasi Kwarteng is okay.
Tell me, where are you on your own personal Wheel of Fortune? I’m pretty sure I’m either on the way down or on the way up. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
Also known as "this too shall pass"
Comes up on my social media feeds sometimes, being explained by Tom Hanks.
Things going shit...this will pass
Things going great...this too shall pass.
Nothing is great all the time and nothing is crap all the time. Really its our attitude that makes all the difference.
I say this when I am feeling quite low and out of control, and am really reminding myself.
How funny. I’m reading Cecily by Annie Garthwaite (saw it in the library and have a daughter of same name so HAD to borrow) - literally just turned paged to a nice little reference to the wheel of fortune (book set in 1400s). This feels like that thing where whenever you learn a new word suddenly it pops up 3 times a day.