Reflections on the hardest year of my life

I recently wrote a celebration and thanks piece about my book. All that I wrote is true – but now for the other side of the coin.

Last year was hard. Not just a little hard, but hard. Very hard, stupidly hard.

I started a full-time Master’s degree, while still working full-time as a local Youth for Christ director, then was offered a publishing contract for a new youth ministry book. All that sounds quite cool eh? No. No it wasn’t, it was stupidly hard.

Let’s start with the MA. I wanted to set myself up for a PhD, so needed to finish quickly and finish well. It was important to me to achieve a distinction, however, my first essay received a lower mark than I hoped meaning all my others needed to be brilliant. As a full-time student, living three hours off campus and juggling a very busy full-time ministry job, I had (at most) half the time the other students had and no regular access to the library.

This meant long trips away, a lot of driving, sleepless nights, hours of photocopying, and very little time to reflect properly on each assignment. I had to learn a new way of writing and adjust myself to a marking scheme that I wasn’t conversant with.

Then the book. I’m massively pleased with Rebooted, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity, however I needed to write it alongside all my essays. By the end of the year I’d written over 300,000 words, and in quite different tones. Moving easily between ‘book tone’ and ‘essay tone’ is impossible! It’s like drumming to two different beats in two different time signatures. This is even harder when you want your heart to truly be available in a book that you’re hoping people will emphasise with.

When the book was released it became quickly apparent that there is little to no market for youth work books in the UK. So, then began 9000 miles of driving to promote it in person. Hours on the motorway, speaking to small rooms of people I didn’t know. Very little familiarity or comfort living out of my little rusty van.

Adding to this we moved house, my blog crashed and had to be rebuilt from scratch, and I was frantically trying to raise £5000 sponsorship doing Britain’s Largest bungee jump. Some close friends also had some very real struggles that really needed me to be present in.

I had these rare opportunities, however, so I poured myself into these experiences. Poured myself!

The breakdown

When I received my dissertation back on the MA, I had actually achieved a very high grade and earned a Distinction. There was so much relief that I actually wailed out loud. I’ve never done that in my life before. Then came the breakdown.

By the end of the year I melted down completely. I couldn’t read more than a few words, I couldn’t write anything – I couldn’t even piece together short sentences – I had a constant headache, my short term memory was shot, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t hold on to the threads of a conversation – even with my wife. I had walked right into a textbook stress-induced cognitive breakdown.

For someone who had always been ‘smart’, losing this part of myself was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. I really didn’t know who I was anymore. My identity felt lost. It lasted for about three weeks before it started to get a little better, and it has taken me most of the year to get past it completely. This was the second time in my life that I experienced real burnout, and it turns out I was no more prepared for it this time around.

My health got worse. I have a difficult condition where my body doesn’t absorb energy from fats naturally, which means I have to eat very carefully – and I need to eat quite a lot. I lost a lot of weight and had a dangerously low BMI. Similar to being obese, being dramatically underweight places a lot of strain on a body.

Finally, (phew), I’ve had insomnia for most of my life, so was living off three to five hours of sleep a night.

Full circle

The biggest thing that took a knock in my life was my ministry. I wasn’t nurturing people well and I took my eye off the ball in a number of projects. For the sake of my book and my degree, my heath and my ministry suffered. Praise God, both are now recovering well!

The results of this season have amazing! I have loved meeting people and I’ve grown hugely as a person (and mostly as a husband), and now – through a lot of life changes and hard work – my health is at an all-time high.

I was given an unconditional offer to study for a PhD. An offer, however, that I’ve decided to defer for a year, oddly enough!

I’m now refocused on my local work, my health, and the shape of my heart.

So, this is a gentle warning, please brothers and sisters, take care of yourself!

Before I did all this, I always wanted to be an author – and I’m guessing I’m not alone? I just wanted to share this little story as a window into that process.

Of course, writing a book is doable, and it’s incredibly valuable too, but please look after yourself! What I’m doing with my young people will have a more lasting impact than my book ever could, and I want to be doing this when I’m old and grey.

I’ve found very little prestige or romance in being an author, and my greatest joys and successes still come from being a local youth pastor.

If you want to write a book, do a degree, or step into a parallel adventure – don’t just wing it, think seriously about how it will fit into your life.

Thanks 🙂

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash