A Life's Work

…or the knowledge I have been avoiding for the past ten years…

It was 2014, and I didn’t know what to do. For the past three years I’d been dealing with severe illness – in and out of hospital, months at a time off work. The life I’d previously built for myself of a prestigious career, of physical endurance in the mountains, of mini dresses and high heels and dinner parties: all of it had fallen apart. I was lost, my bearings and sense of direction were entirely gone.

I was flailing around, and in the middle of that I bought a book, by the monk and psychotherapist Thomas Moore. It was called A Life at Work: The Joy Of Discovering What You Were Born To Do. I opened it. I read chapter one, which was aptly called ‘Getting Nowhere’, and then, so the position of my bookmark tells me, I gave up.

I forgive myself for that. I understand.

At the time I could barely eat and sleep regularly. I was quite heavily suicidal, most days, and managing the exhaustion and danger of that took all of the effort I had. The book, with its disquisitions on ‘deeper purpose’, ‘qualities of the soul’, ‘vocation’ and all the rest was too complex for me to read, let alone act on. Instead, I knuckled down to the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: physiological basics, and safety.

Here’s Maslow, for those who don’t already know him. It’s a 1954 model – but it holds pretty true. And it pleases me that this version of the pyramid (which I’ve stolen from verywellmind.com) comes in the form of a mountain.  

That was 2014. I was at rock bottom. Slowly, though, over the next few years, I began to climb out. My health gradually improved. My energy came back, both for daily life, and for the actual mountains. I moved from being able just about to hold down a part-time role at work, to being back in the flow of things, achieving a lot, and receiving plenty of praise for it. I also started to speak up about illness and health, and about all we take for granted until we lose it.

Those were bruising, painful years. But I came through them. And as gradually I emerged back into the sunlit uplands, the question of what I was really meant to be doing with my life returned.

Malvern Hills, May 2018. A happy place to be.

‘A life’s work.’

It sounded pretentious. It was surely unnecessary.

In fact, the whole idea intimidated me. So I dithered. I wrote in my diary (a lot). I did my best to ignore the nagging sense that ‘being Kate in the world’ required me to make some big changes. I tried to come up with a life plan that was, well, less strenuous, and more mainstream.

I was, though, putting off the inevitable, and by 2019 I couldn’t do that it anymore. I vividly remember the conversation with Matthew. It was a couple of months after the Nanda Devi disaster. We were driving down through France on our way to the Alps. I’d actually just been offered a promotion at work, and I’d accepted, despite knowing it wasn’t what I wanted to do. And then I found these words coming out of my mouth:

‘I think I’m going to leave my job. I’ve learned so much these past years. I want to communicate and share that.’

My intention, I told him, was to write, speak, and coach on topics of resilience, recovery, and post-traumatic growth. There would be a memoir that combined mountain adventures with the internal mountains I’d faced, fallen down, climbed, fallen down again, and reclimbed. I’d apply to the various speaking bureaus. I’d do some journalism as well.

I talked for quite a while, and when I finished Matthew said, ‘That sounds right. It sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’

That was the plan. Agreed. Rubber stamp. But life doesn’t go to plan. Three weeks later Matthew died. I was flung headlong into a new experience of life catastrophe. I was merely surviving – back to physiological basics and safety. I put the life’s work on hold again.

---

And now it’s April 2024. It’s now nearly five more years on from that conversation. It’s ten from my purchase of A Life At Work. (I know that because I heard of the book recently, went on Amazon to buy a copy, and discovered that I’d done so a decade before. This time I actually read the whole thing.) Finally, I’m ready to make the move.

So.

As of now, I will be building ‘a life’s work’ out of everything I have experienced and come through in the past fifteen years. Catastrophic grief. Severe illness, and - unusually for someone with my set of symptoms - recovery from it. Addiction (yes, I know, I’ve tended to keep that one quiet). A major Himalayan mountaineering disaster. Career disappointments. The realisation that the world often does not give us what we want, however hard we may work for it. The strength to find, and re-find, purpose and direction – to move onwards, not in bitterness, but with empathy and conviction.   

At the meta-level, I’ll be offering to the world what I most needed through these years: profoundly honest acknowledgement of hard realities, and guidance through them, not on the basis of theory, but from someone who has actually done it. Plus stories.

Very practically, I’ll be making my living writing and speaking about these topics, and coaching individuals who are similarly making their way through hard things. We all have hard things.

(A side note: this is not therapy. I am not a therapist, though I may take that route at some point. I am, however, a trained coach, and a member of the International Coaching Federation. I know how to do this safely and well – in addition to having experienced it from the inside myself.)

If you’d like to talk about it, or if you’d like to help me in some way – contacts, opportunities, advice – do comment below or drop me a line at kate@katearmstrong.net. There’ll also soon be a new website.

And – here’s the caveat – I’m fully aware I may fail. This is definitely not the most reliable way of paying the bills. I may, very practically, need to divert my path every so often. But I’ve known for a decade that I needed to find my ‘life’s work’. I’ve known for over five years that this is it. I could fight that knowledge for another five years, another decade, the rest of my sentient life – but I’m not going to.

Here's the commitment, borne of fifteen years of doing hard things: I’m going to take the first step.

And, yes (again) there will continue to be stories.

Kate xx