Reflections on my changing direction as I launch my new website

‘It’s like you’ve been knocked down every time you’ve tried to get up,’ said my therapist yesterday as I took her on yet another whistlestop tour of the catastrophic things that have happened to me. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few months and, though she’d got the gist of the main events, I needed to fill in some gaps in the narrative in order for us to see the patterns and to think about how to address the issues that remain. Though I’ve worked so hard to recover, I’m seeing her because I’m aware that there is still work to be done, but I was grateful when, at the end of the session, she said ‘it’s like you don’t want to be working on it anymore.’ And I nodded because I don’t. ‘I just want to be allowed to live,’ I said.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the difference between working and living this summer. It’s always been one of the great privileges of my life that I have been able to turn my passion for writing into my livelihood. ‘Find a job you enjoy doing,’ said Mark Twain, ‘and you will never have to work a day in your life.’ There’s a lot of truth to this; much of my work doesn’t feel like work at all. But, in the last few years I’ve been forced to acknowledge that it has come with a cost. Find a job you enjoy doing and you might find that you’re also inadvertently working 24/7 and earning peanuts, that the boundaries between how you make your income and what you do for fun have become so blurred that you’re forgetting to invoice customers because they feel like friends and that when someone asks you about your hobbies, you realise you’re just talking about your job.

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You also realise that your work identity goes with you into every room as if you’re a Barbie doll wearing one of those dresses printed with books (I’ve got two!) and that you come with the accessories of the trade as standard - perhaps a cute typewriter and a notebook with a pen behind your ear. (Tick!) Perhaps, like me, writing has become so much part of your online identity that you almost think Writes is your actual surname, so often are you introduced this way. Then, if you work as a facilitator of writing, you also encounter the knotty issue that your work is actually to nurture and uplift everyone else’s writing and that, if you’re not careful, their needs start to come before your own and that you’re immersed in words all day long but your own creative output is dwindling. You might also find that you’ve become successful not at being a writer but at running a business and are surprised to find that you’re now a part-time web designer, marketing guru and publisher. It’s a funny old business, this writing life! Do all of that whilst constantly under personal stress, whilst masking neurodivergence and trying to recover from trauma and you will eventually burn out.

When I took a sabbatical from The Writers Workshop in 2025, I was forced to confront some of these conundrums. Tired of the hustle and of the constant need to optimise every opportunity for business growth and exposure, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be a writer anymore. There were some dark times in that period. Stripped of my professional identity temporarily, I had to look at myself in the mirror and wonder who I was if I wasn’t an over-achieving, over-giving public facilitator of writing. I was also lonely and had to consider that some of the lovely people that I’d got used to spending my days around were not really friends but were actually colleagues and customers. I also realised that, as a single parent who couldn’t easily go out in an evening, I’d created work that was a substitute for a social life and that, though it had served me well, it wasn’t working for me anymore.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot too this summer. After thirteen years of single (and latterly lone) parenting, I now have older teenagers who are increasingly living their own lives and my evenings are gradually becoming empty spaces. I do have friends (and lots of them) but they’re so used to me not going out that they forget to invite me to things. Most of them are married and socialise as couples. My friends and I catch up for coffees as if we’ve still got toddlers round our ankles. ‘I feel like don’t really have a social life,’ I tell them and they inevitably say, ‘but you seem to be out all of the time!’ And then I remind them again that what they’re seeing is literary Barbie in a printed literary frock standing in front of a microphone of an evening and that, though it looks like fun (and it is), they’re seeing me on Instagram at work!

I did return to some of my old work and old identity last year following my sabbatical but I’ve been more selective about the work that I do and aware that I am still in transition. One random day last year, I changed my Instagram handle from @Beverleywrites to @whatbeverleydidnext, feeling that something new was coming but not yet sure what it was. I maintained the wellbeing practices that I’d developed on my sabbatical, beginning each day with breathing and stretches, with time outdoors, with tarot and journalling and art, finding that these activities allowed me to tap into my intuition and helped me to steer my course. I also started writing again and not just in a small way. In the last academic year, I rewrote my novel, created a poetry collection, wrote and performed new poems as a performance poet and I’m currently halfway through a non-fiction project that I’m so in love with that I can’t wait to be alone with it whenever I can. It turned out that by slowing down, I was actually more productive as a writer than I’ve been in years. I’ve been writing so much that there have been times when I’ve looked at my Instagram handle and wondered whether I should just change it back to Beverleywrites because there’s no question that she does and that a writer is who she is. Or is it?

Back in therapy, the therapist asked me recently ‘who is the Beverley who isn’t the writer?’ and for a while I was confused by the question, so wedded am I to my professional identity. Then I thought of the friends who never read anything I write and of my kids who, though they know me as a writer, mostly see me as the person who cooks the tea and listens while they tell me about their passions, and I realised that I am more than just a writer. I’m a person who enjoys making art and being in nature and wild swimming, a person who would like to be an earth mother but who is bored by cooking and gardening. I’m a person who would love to be in a relationship but who can be happy alone. I’m a person who has been dealt some unimaginably tough cards but some good ones too. Someone who is incredibly resilient and who still looks for the good in people and in life, who can find light and joy in the darkness, who, if she was still nimble, would literally cartwheel in the graveyard. Beverley is still a work in progress but she’s doing pretty well. She’s been discussing joining a band and has recently agreed to take on a lead role in a play even though she’s never acted before! No question, Beverley is brave.

But who is she professionally?

When I was drowning in flip charts a couple of weeks ago, trying to plan my workload for the new academic year, I happened to bump into a coach socially who had trained with RD1st (who certified me as a coach back in 2012). Having bent his ear informally for some time, I asked if I could pay him for a double session as I needed an outside witness as I tried to unravel my identity crisis and find a new path. It was incredibly helpful to have someone help me to untangle my thoughts and, whilst working with him, I remembered that before I lived with the identity of ‘writer’, I was a trainer and a consultant, a teacher and a coach. That before I was forced to work around caring responsibilities, I travelled and made a decent living working for national organisations. I realised that what I have been unconsciously doing recently is unpicking the threads of my work and life and separating them back out, learning (belatedly) about boundaries and becoming clearer about which things are work and which things are life. I’ve realised that writing shouldn’t be my whole identity and that I don’t want it to be my main source of income.

Writing will always be my passion but my ambition was never to build a literary empire. I took on the mantle because I saw that it was something that Sheffield needed and because serving others has been my modus operandus for decades. But really, I always wanted to be known for my own creative output, to have my own words seen and heard. I want to be a writer and part of the wonderful writing community I created, to be amongst people who want to talk about writing as my peers and not with me as the ‘matriarch’ or ‘Queen’ or ‘Fairy Godmother’ that people have described me as in my local writing world. Recently, I’ve been telling people that I feel like I’m alone at the top of a pyramid but, now I think about it, at times it has felt more like an inverted pyramid with me at the bottom supporting everyone else and lacking support myself. No wonder it had to crumble!

‘Sit with it for a while,’ advised the coach wisely, but he’d barely left the room before I had rebranded and rebuilt my website, separating out the strands of my work into clear services and income streams: Facilitator, Coach, Host and Writer. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d also changed my domain name. I’m a creative. I could have come up with any name - something dramatic - but I didn’t. I changed my domain to Beverley Ward. It was a small shift but, like many small shifts, it felt seismic. It signals a return to who I am, to an integrating of a whole self. It’s a coming home. Beverley Ward is a lot of things and she can offer lots of services. Writing is just one of them.

Soon, I’ll be advertising a few workshops at The Writers Workshop but mostly I’ll be coaching, training and hosting and I’m excited. I started out this Substack planning to tell you about my new coaching identity as a Slow Coach (had to have one catchy name), but as so often happens, I went off-piste, which kind of links neatly with my brand. Because maybe it’s about the journey after all. To be continued…

In the meantime, if you want to find out more about what I’ll be doing and how you can work with me, take a look at my new website.

And, if you’re a writing friend who wants to go out in an evening, or who wants to sit and write and talk about writing, let me know! You don’t have to pay me. I am available for fun!

First published on my Substack Cartwheels in the Graveyard. Head over there for more musings.