This Is What Living Feels Like
So, if you read this blog at all you know I have worked in IT and IT project management, and volunteer for the Queer Up North festival each year. what I don’t think I’ve mentioned much is that over the past couple of years I’ve become steadily more dissatisfied with working in IT, and have been looking for something else. Unfortunately, I’ve never worked out exactly what else I’d be happy with.
I think I’ve worked it out now, though. The title of this post is a lyric from Picture of a Man by one of the artists at the festival, this year: Our Lady J. When I heard it this year, a shiver ran down my spine:
But it is here among the dead that I find life,
And it is here in the ashes that I find where I am going —
And it is here, and it is simple, and it is old and it is right.
It is here that I find —
This is what living feels like.
Working at Queer Up North I felt alive. Rushed off my feet, for sure, but alive, knowing I was working with a group of like-minded people helping create something that simply wouldn’t exist had we not done it. It was exhausting: the shortest day was eleven hours, the longest nineteen. I saw my house each day to grab a coffee and shower, then grab a clean shirt in the evening. And I loved every minute of it.
And whilst doing all of this: I had a thought. My organisational, project management and business management skills are transferable. What (apart from fear of change) is stopping me?
So I’ve decided — nothing. Enough with the IT. Time for something that I can be happy doing. OK, it’s going to be a compromise on the income front. But money shouldn’t be the only reason I do what I do. This is going to mean quite a few changes and disruption. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I have no real plan at the moment.
But what I do know is it’s time for a change. Because I like what living feels like.



