Stories That Take a Lifetime

Drafting at my desk in the sunroom 😍

I didn’t quit my job because I hated it.

There was a drawer full of outlines I’d been carrying from home to home since I was a kid, and they had started to feel heavier than any team meeting, or safe career ever could.

For decades, the stories lived in notebooks, half-finished drafts, late-night rewrites, whispered “one day” promises. There were a few that grew up alongside me. They changed when I changed. Learned restraint, learned grief, learned how to breathe. They weren’t fast. They weren’t efficient.
But they were mine.

So I took an opportunity to do something, some say brave, while others are laughing at this stupid thing.

I gave myself some time.

To write like it mattered.
A year to treat the stories Iheld as more than a hobby smuggled into evenings.
A year to try — to really try — to become the writer I’d always quietly been.

And for a little while, it felt possible.
I even published a book 🫶

I wrote every day. Playing with structure, pacing, voice. I revised scenes I’d loved for twenty years and let them die when they didn’t serve the story anymore. I wrestled with plot bunnies and kept going anyway. I learned the business and marketing side reluctantly, painfully, because I knew stories don’t survive on passion alone.

I thought the hardest part would be the writing.

I was wrong.

The hardest part was realising that while I was building something slowly, carefully, with intention, the market was - or is - being flooded.

Not with better stories.
With more stories.

Books written in days. Sometimes hours. Series released faster than I could revise a chapter. Art, blurbs, keywords optimised by people who weren’t writers so much as operators. Content factories stretching the skin of creativity.

And here’s the part that hurts to admit: some of them are succeeding.

They’re visible.
They’re prolific.
They’re everywhere.

And I am… (mostly) invisible.

I watch algorithms reward speed over soul. Volume over voice. I watch readers drown in choice, unable to tell the difference between a story written by someone who has lived with it for decades and one assembled to satisfy a trend.

I don’t hate AI.

That’s the inconvenient truth.

I understand it. I work in tech. I know tools evolve. I know every generation of artists faces disruption and reinvention. I know the arguments about “using it ethically” and “adapting or dying.”

But knowing doesn’t make this ache smaller.
Because this wasn’t just a career experiment.
It was a wager on my younger self.

On the girl who loved stories and didn’t yet know how cruel markets could be, or how fragile dreams become once they have to pay.

What devastates me isn’t that AI can write.

It’s that it has changed the terrain so completely that there may no longer be a path for someone like me - someone who writes slowly, deeply, obsessively. Someone whose work is shaped by time, not prompts.

There’s a grief in realising that the thing you were hoping for your whole life might have vanished just as you arrived.

I used to believe there was room for everyone.
Now it feels like a race I never agreed to enter.
And the finish line keeps moving.

Some days I feel foolish for trying at all. For stepping off solid ground for a year of faith and stubbornness. For believing that a story grown over decades would matter in a world optimised for output.

Other days, I feel quietly furious.

Because stories aren’t widgets.
Because speed isn’t the same as depth.
Because something irreplaceable is being drowned out by noise, and we’re pretending it’s progress.

I don’t know what comes next.

I don’t know if I’ll keep trying to publish, these stories will retreat back into the private space in my sunroom where it was always safe. I don’t know how to compete in a market that rewards abundance over care.

What I do know is this:

I didn’t waste my time.

Even if there’s no path forward that looks like success, I honoured something sacred to me. I proved that my daydreaming and sunshine could become real, that it deserved my full attention, that I could choose creation and surround myself in the luxury of mastery at least once in my life.

And maybe that has to be enough.

The world is just changing faster than my stories were ever meant to be written.

And somehow, heartbreakingly, I’m still here - holding onto sentences that will take a lifetime to voice.

I’ve entered a new role in tech. Not as a defeat, not as an admission that my stories didn’t matter — but because their souls still have to find their voice. I’m putting the notebooks and manuscripts back in my desk drawer where they lived for so many years, not because I’m finished, done, but because I’m not sure I have the heart to keep offering them to a world that doesn’t hear them, or anything, above the noise right now.

Maybe this is a pause, not an ending.
Maybe one day I’ll open that drawer again and feel something.
Hear something other than silence and sorrow.

Until then, the stories can rest.
They’ve waited before.