A few weeks ago I went on a retreat. It wasn’t your traditional yoga retreat, although that was part of it. Instead it was a week of reconnecting to yourself, saying goodbye to the things that were holding you back and dreaming of what was possible in the future. I turned up exhausted, broken and overwhelmed, I left with a burgeoning feeling that anything was possible. A feeling that has only grown as the weeks have passed.
One of the moments that really struck me on this retreat was when we threw stones into the sea. If you’ve ever been on any sort of self-development retreat you’ll know that there’s always a moment when you have to burn something. It’s become a bit of a cliche but it’s a cliche for a reason - seeing a list of anything that’s made you angry, let you down or kept you stuck, go up in flames is very cathartic. This was similar.
Earlier in the day we’d written down all the “roles” we’d acquired during our lifetimes - whether that was job titles, relationship status or the names others had called us - and now we had the chance to get rid of some of them. Rather than burning them though, we selected three stones and used each stone to symbolise a role we wanted to let go of. We picked up each stone in turn and gently whispered a story to it. We told that piece of hardened earth the story of the word we wanted to release - what that word had meant to us and why we needed to let it go. And then we hefted those stones into the sea as hard as we could.
I don’t know why it felt so good but every single one of the women on that retreat did a little hop of glee as they watched their stones sinking. There was something magical about letting go of a word that had been dragging you down without you realising it.
The final stone I threw into the sea that day stood for the word “journalist”. I’ve always had a funny relationship with it. Back in the early days of my career I didn’t consider myself a “journalist” because I’d gone straight to writing for a B2B website rather than doing a journalism MA. After a few years I started to feel comfortable calling myself it but many of my colleagues disagreed. This was the early days of digital and the phrase “not a proper journalist” was flung at anybody who wrote for the web rather than for a paper. I was the first person at the Guardian to write a piece which garnered more than one million page views - and at the morning meeting that day another journalist questioned whether it counted because it wasn’t “proper journalism”. I didn’t contradict him because deep down a part of me feared he might be right.
When I went freelance I thought I’d give up on being a journalist altogether, that I’d just do coaching and maybe some consultancy. But two days after leaving full-time employment I was on the sofa at Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan introducing me as “journalist Harriet Minter”, I had a column in Psychologies magazine and a radio show - so it sort of stuck. It’s on all of my social media, it’s how I introduce myself when I meet someone for the first time and despite my complicated relationship with it (and the fact that journalism makes up less than 5% of my income), it’s somehow become a safety net for me. Until now.
When I threw “journalist” into the water I created a vacuum. If I was no longer defined by this word, then what was I? Who was I?
We’re so often taught to fear empty space, to want to find answers instantly so that we don’t have to linger in doubt. A month later, I don’t think I’ve found a true answer to either of those questions and I’m fine about it. In fact, being in that limbo space is turning out to be truly joyful. Interestingly, writing has become easier since I ditched that word and I’ve sent out more pitches this month than I have done all year. There’s power in not being defined.
There were two things that made releasing that role and all that came with it possible. The first was that I did it with a group of women, all of us hidebound by powerful words that we wanted rid of. Divesting myself of a job title is one thing, but that day I saw women let go of what it meant to be a “slut”, a “people-pleaser”, even a “mother”. The second thing was that it was done as a ceremony. It wasn’t a quick, spur of the moment thing. We put thought and time into it, we honoured what those words had given us and what we’d given to them. I think it can be easy to whizz through endings but if we really want to be released into the next stage then we need to treat them with respect.
As we all gallop towards the end of the year, I wonder how we can say goodbye to 2022 and all that it’s contained with something a bit more thoughtful than a few fireworks and a drunken rendition of Auld Lang Syne. It could be as simple as telling your friends the highs and lows of the past twelve months, toasting to both. Or maybe you want to whisper your deepest fears into a stone and hurl it into the ether. That works too.
If you’d like a bit of ceremony to let go of 2022, then I have an offer for you. As part of Substack I am introducing a paid subscriber tier. It starts at £5.75 a month (or the price of a London gingerbread latte) and it will include one extra piece a month where you can ask me for help with anything AND regular Zoom events. I’m not promising that these events will be monthly (because they won’t be) but to kick off I am offering an end of year letting go and a new year calling in ceremony (allowing you to also experience the joy of a few days without labels). You can become a paid subscriber by clicking the button below.
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“There’s power in not being defined.” Hear, hear. My mother spent our entire childhoods exhorting us to not label people. She believed one missed so much with that narrow modus, and stunted one’s ongoing, ever-changing understanding. It was anathema to her to think one would cursorily ‘pin down’ the dynamic being that is a human.