I Kept Trying to Begin Again

What happens when you’ve changed direction enough times that you stop trusting your own enthusiasm?

What do you do when you’ve changed direction enough times that you stop trusting the feeling that you want something?

I don’t mean changing your mind once or discovering that a particular idea wasn’t for you. I mean having enough genuine enthusiasm for enough different possibilities that eventually the enthusiasm itself starts to look unreliable. You can want to make something of your own very badly and still have no idea what form it should take. After a while, every new idea arrives with its own little shadow: yes, but you thought the last one was it too.

I think this is a particularly difficult place to find yourself as an artist, especially if there isn’t an obvious route you are trying to follow. At some point the question stops being only what do I want? and becomes can I trust myself when I think I know?

I know this problem because I spent years living inside it.

Invisible Strings Studio exists now, but it did not begin with a plan for a Studio. It grew, almost incidentally, out of me trying to understand this question in my own life. Tarot became part of that because thinking harder kept returning me to the same explanations. The cards gave me something else to respond to, and that changed what I could see.

So this isn’t really the grand story of how I built Invisible Strings.

It’s the story of what happened when I stopped treating all my previous attempts as evidence that I couldn’t stick with anything and started asking what they might actually be telling me.

Last April, that question led me to an old diary from 2021.

I can't remember why I'd opened it and I don't think I was looking for anything in particular, but I started reading and had the slightly horrifying experience of discovering that apparently 2021 me already knew quite a lot of the things I thought I'd only recently worked out.

There were things I'd written down as though I'd finally understood them, only to have apparently forgotten them completely and rediscovered them four years later. There were also things I liked about myself in there, ways of thinking I'd lost contact with and things that had once felt important enough to write down but had somehow disappeared from view.

It was incredibly annoying. There is something particularly irritating about realising you've already had the revelation you're currently congratulating yourself for having.

But it bothered me more than I thought it should, because this wasn't just happening in my diaries. I'd spent years doing versions of the same thing in my actual life.

I've always wanted to make something of my own. The problem is that I've never had a particularly clear idea of what that something was supposed to be.

I've had lots of ideas. An almost unreasonable number of ideas, actually. I've started things, made websites, written things, designed things, learnt things and become completely absorbed in things. I'm excellent at the moment when an idea first appears and suddenly I can see an entire world inside it. I can imagine what it might become, how I might live inside it, what my days could look like if this were the thing I finally built my life around.

Sometimes it doesn't work, which is straightforward enough. Much more confusing is when something works perfectly well and I still don't want it anymore.

Eventually I'd find myself back in the same place asking what now, and for a long time I assumed the problem was that I needed to get better at sticking with things. This seemed reasonable. I could look around and see people who had picked something and kept doing it for long enough that it had become their work. I had creative friends who seemed to have a much more straightforward relationship with what they did. Not necessarily an easier one, but the basic form was there. They wrote. They painted. They made music. They knew what the thing was and could get on with the considerably more practical problem of making a life around it.

I didn't seem to have a thing.

Or perhaps I had too many things that briefly looked like the thing.

So every new beginning came with this enormous rush of possibility. Maybe this one. Maybe I'd finally found the thing I could stick with. Maybe everything I'd tried before was simply what I had to go through to get here.

Which is lovely the first few times. After a while it starts to feel slightly suspicious.

I'd been completely convinced before. I'd made the plan before, bought the domain before, imagined the future before. If I'd felt so certain last time, what exactly made this feeling more trustworthy?

I think that was the part that got to me. It wasn't only that I kept changing direction. I was starting to lose faith in my own enthusiasm.

Something feeling alive wasn't necessarily useful information anymore because I knew how this went. I'd follow it, get excited, build something around it and then, sooner or later, find myself wanting something else. Perhaps I was simply very good at beginnings. Perhaps the mature thing would be to stop treating every flicker of interest as meaningful and learn how to keep going after the exciting part wore off.

So I tried that too. Quite a lot.

I made plans. I built routines. I tried to become more disciplined and consistent. I told myself that everybody gets bored eventually and that wanting to make something of your own doesn't mean you get to enjoy every minute of making it. All of which is true, which made it very difficult to know when I was giving myself sensible advice and when I was using perfectly sensible advice to talk myself out of something I actually knew.

This is why finding the diary landed somewhere tender.

There it all was again. Things I'd understood and forgotten. Parts of myself I'd lost and rediscovered. Questions I apparently hadn't managed to leave behind despite everything I'd done in between.

Maybe I wasn't continually discovering new things about myself.

Maybe I was going round in circles.

So I got my tarot cards out.

I'd been experimenting with a different way of reading around this time. I've always been more interested in tarot as a reflective practice than a predictive one, but I'd started staying with the cards for much longer. Instead of laying out a spread, interpreting it and trying to arrive at an answer, I'd pull a few cards and see what caught my attention. Then I'd ask another question, pull underneath one, notice something I hadn't expected and follow that instead. Sometimes another card would appear and completely ruin the interpretation I thought I was forming, which usually turned out to be the interesting bit.

I loved reading this way. It felt less like asking tarot to give me an answer and more like entering a conversation with something that had the useful advantage of not being my own brain.

So I put the problem on the table.

Why did I keep returning to the same things? Why could I understand something about myself and then apparently forget it? Had I actually been moving anywhere, or had I spent years circling the same ground while telling myself each new beginning was different?

The first three cards were the Three of Swords reversed, the Hanged Man reversed and the Four of Swords reversed, which wasn't exactly encouraging.

There was pain in there that hadn't entirely gone anywhere, and the Hanged Man reversed felt particularly familiar. I could see the part of me that knew something needed to shift, thought about it endlessly, but somehow remained suspended inside the problem anyway. Then the Four of Swords reversed brought in this restlessness I knew very well too: trying to stop, being tired, never quite settling before something started pushing again.

It looked, frankly, quite a lot like the story I thought I was telling.

But there was another card in the reading.

Strength was upright.

I can't remember whether the word came directly from something I saw in the cards or whether it appeared while I was sitting there looking at them, but somewhere around this point I suddenly had another image for what might have been happening.

A spiral.

I know. It sounds dangerously close to something written over a picture of a sunset, but it changed the question enough that I couldn't quite dismiss it.

A spiral comes back around too. If you're inside one, I imagine it might feel remarkably similar to going in circles. The same landscape keeps returning. The same questions appear. Things you thought you'd dealt with turn up again and have the audacity to still be relevant.

But you aren't standing in exactly the same place.

I'd been assuming that progress meant leaving things behind. I would understand something, deal with it, move forward and ideally never need to think about it again. Every return therefore looked like evidence that I hadn't really changed.

Except I wasn't the person who'd written that diary anymore. My life had changed. I'd lived things she hadn't lived yet. I could see things in those pages that I couldn't possibly have seen when I wrote them.

Perhaps the interesting question wasn't why am I here again?

Perhaps it was what can I see from here now?

I liked that. I also didn't entirely trust it, because it's a lovely idea, isn't it? Everything is a spiral! Nothing was wasted! All those times you thought you were repeating yourself were secretly growth!

Very convenient.

So I went back to Strength.

Strength is a strange card because it isn't really about strength in the way we often use the word. In the Rider-Waite-Smith image, a woman stands with a lion. Her hands are around its mouth, but she doesn't appear to be wrestling it into submission. There is something much calmer happening between them.

And I started wondering whether I'd been looking for change in the wrong place.

Perhaps the evidence wasn't that I'd finally defeated the things I struggled with. Clearly I hadn't. They were all over the table. Maybe something had changed in my relationship with myself while they were happening.

I could recognise things now that I couldn't recognise before. I could sometimes stay with something I would once have immediately tried to fix. Even the fact that I was sitting there asking the cards to help me look at the pattern felt different from desperately asking them to tell me what to do about it.

I hadn't necessarily become someone who no longer got lost.

Maybe I'd become someone slightly more able to notice where she was.

And once I thought about it that way, all those previous attempts started looking slightly different too.

Not better, exactly. I don't want to turn this into a story where everything secretly happened for a reason and nothing was ever wasted. Some things genuinely didn't work. There were things I poured enormous amounts of time into that went nowhere, things I wanted and then stopped wanting, things I probably held onto for too long and other things I abandoned rather dramatically.

But if I stopped asking which one I should have stuck with, I could ask different questions.

What did I keep moving towards, even when the form changed? What did I keep moving away from? Why could something feel so alive at the beginning and become so heavy once I'd built a structure around it? Why had some of the things that worked perfectly well been the things I most wanted to leave?

And underneath all those different versions of my life, was there anything that kept surviving?

That was a much more interesting way of looking at my history.

It also changed the question I was asking about my enthusiasm.

I'd been treating excitement as either trustworthy or untrustworthy. Either something feeling alive meant I should follow it, or my history proved that I shouldn't believe myself because I'd felt exactly the same way about things I later left.

But perhaps those weren't the only options.

Maybe following something didn't require me to promise I'd want it forever.

Maybe an idea could be worth following because of what it allowed me to discover, make or become while I was inside it. Maybe changing my mind later wouldn't automatically make the earlier desire false.

I wasn't quite ready to believe all of that yet, but I could feel the question opening.

And this, more than any business idea or name or plan, is where Invisible Strings really began.

I didn't know I was making a Studio. I definitely didn't know what would eventually live inside it. I was sitting with a pile of tarot cards trying to understand why I seemed incapable of sticking to a life I'd chosen, and beginning to wonder whether I had misunderstood the problem.

If all the changing direction, resistance, excitement, exhaustion and returning contained information, then perhaps I could stop treating my history as a series of failed attempts to find the right thing and actually look at what it was telling me.

So I kept pulling cards.

The Hanged Man reversed had been sitting there looking like stuckness, and I wanted to know what was underneath it.

I pulled the Emperor.

Then the Knight of Wands.

I looked at them together and almost laughed.

The Emperor likes order. Structure. Authority. Things having a proper place and staying there.

The Knight of Wands is already halfway to somewhere else.

And suddenly I was looking at a conflict I'd been living inside for years.

My first thought was also the most obvious one.

The Knight needs the Emperor.

He needs to calm down, pick a direction and learn how to bloody stick with something.

Which was interesting.

Because that was exactly what I'd been telling myself.

And I was beginning to wonder if I'd been trying to solve the wrong problem.

---

This is the first of three connected essays. Read part two, I Was Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem, next.