Why I quit my perfectly good publishing job and stepped out into the unknown

A tale of capitalism, creativity, and psychedelics

A few months ago I requested a meeting with my line manager and told her that after nearly five years, I had decided to hand in my notice. I was working for a publishing house in a lovely office in Central London, five minutes from a very good street food market. I was earning a respectable salary—not loads, but enough to live on and save a bit and go on a few holidays and buy food from the aforementioned market for lunch. I had a near endless supply of free books. My colleagues were excellent, my line manager among the most excellent (and I’m not just saying that because there’s a chance she might be reading). I didn’t have another job to go to. What was I thinking?

Oh, many things.

One of them was that it was past time for me to face up to the fact that being creative is among the things I need most in this life, and my job was not fulfilling that need. I was not working in editorial or marketing or design—I was producing sales reports, raising invoices, updating Excel spreadsheets, mailing reading copies, arranging for pallets of books to be moved from one warehouse to another, and so on. There is, I understand, a particular type of brain—a logical, methodical, A therefore B therefore C type of brain—that finds this kind of work deeply satisfying. Unfortunately, I do not possess one.

And it wasn’t just that the work didn’t suit my unmethodical brain, it was that there was so damn much of it. Ask anyone in the publishing industry and I’ll wager they’ll tell you there is always more to do than hours in which to do it. Stress and overwhelm is the baseline, not the exception. This is not okay, ever, for anyone, but perhaps it is slightly more palatable if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, as many in the industry are.

I was not only lacking in passion, I was hardening into a jaded cynic. One of my main struggles with publishing was all the capitalism. Obviously, it’s a for-profit industry, not a pure, benevolent one with no reason for being but to enable people’s creativity and to distribute art to a world in need of it. But there is a difference between knowing this and bearing witness to it every day of the working week.

Treating books as product, as stockholding, was having a deadening effect on my spirit. And it was personal, too—uniquely so. When my own book came out, it was with an independent publishing house with whom the publisher employing me had a third party sales contract. You don’t need to know what this means in practice. All you need to know is that as a result, I could access behind-the-scenes information of the sort that authors are not supposed to see: how many copies of my book had been ordered, and by which shops; how many hadn’t sold at all, or had been returned or pulped; how many had been bought (or rather not bought) by the reading public each week. I knew what a warehouse record looked like for a book enjoying healthy sales, a book earning its keep, and I knew my book did not have a record like that. I could see minus numbers. I could see the stock figure sitting unchanged for weeks on end.

The fairy-tale scenario for a debut novelist is a tightly-fought auction, a six-figure book deal, instant bestseller status and a full-time writing career. This is, of course, rare—far rarer than the industry’s obsession with such authors would have you believe. But it is also rare for a debut novelist to be able to see, in cold, hard numbers, quite how far short of the fairy tale they have fallen.

Of course, I could have avoided looking. But if you’re reading this as a writer on Substack yourself, you’ll know all about the magnetic pull of the metrics. It’s so hard to pretend they aren’t there, even when you’re fully aware that obsessing over them brings you nothing good. So I obsessed over them, and felt bad about them, and in the process I came to understand my own first novel not as an achievement, or the fulfilment of a childhood dream, or the product of years of hard work, but as a collection of disappointing figures on a screen.

I knew this was not healthy, and I knew that I did not ever again want to have this kind of insider knowledge about a book I had written, assuming I was lucky enough to one day to publish another.

And so I knew, during and after and even before this, that I needed to quit my job. But the problem, first of all, was that there was a pandemic. Then the problem was that we were trying to buy a flat. Then the problem was that Roberto, my partner, was having a career break of his own and we couldn’t both stop working at the same time. And always, the problem was that I didn’t know what to do instead. I didn’t much want to sidestep into another part of publishing—at least, not enough to make the requisite efforts or sacrifices. I’d been hoping writing would rescue me, but it hadn’t. I didn’t have any other ideas.

Then, about a year ago, I took magic mushrooms for the first time.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say it was like having years of therapy all at once, but that’s genuinely the best way I can think to describe it. I had what was essentially a religious experience, and then, two days later, I was back at my desk, back in my inbox, back at the spreadsheets. It all felt a bit hollow and meaningless when forty-eight hours beforehand I’d been weeping euphorically to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, feeling like I’d encountered God. And at some point that day, out of nowhere in particular, a very simple, gentle truth landed effortlessly in my brain. If I’m not happy, I can leave.

It all seemed so obvious. Maybe I didn’t need to have my life planned out in advance. Maybe I could take a risk and trust that it would pay off. Maybe I could lean all the way backwards, hold my nerve, and believe that I would be caught.

I’m hesitant to share this because it sounds like such a stereotype. Take psychedelics, drop out. That’s why you shouldn’t risk it, children—drugs will make you reckless! They’ll make you throw away everything you’ve worked for! But those warnings, I believe, originate in fear. Not fear of a population made reckless, but of a population invited to question why they continue to participate in systems and obligations that make them unhappy, purely because that is what is expected of them, or because they fear the consequences of not doing so. Probably this is no small part of the reason that psychedelics were made illegal all those years ago: governments clocked on to the fact that such questioning, on a mass scale, had the power to do significant damage to the status quo. ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ is not a recipe for economic growth.

Seven months passed between me having my realisation and acting on it, so it is perhaps the most unreckless reckless decision ever made. In that time, I made plans. I did my tax return. I waited for Roberto to go back to work. And then, in May, I finally did it. I’m aware that it is an incredible privilege to have been able even to consider doing it, that my situation—savings, partner, no dependents—made it feasible for me in a way it isn’t for others. I’m also aware that there was no guarantee I would ever have woken up to that privilege, or to what it made possible.

It’s a fitting name, ‘magic’ mushrooms. I knew the world had magic in it, and I knew I was looking for it. But I’d only ever had little glimpses before, and frustratingly few of them. Then, for a couple of hours one Saturday afternoon, I was steeped in it, permeated by it. After the mushroom trip was over it seemed imperative that I continue my search—that I keep doing the work of opening myself up to magic, creating the conditions for it to appear before and within me. That’s what I’m trying to do when I walk in nature or go swimming in cold water, when I lean against a big old tree, when I sing, when I play the mandolin (badly), when I lie on my back and look at the sky, when I listen to choral music, when I research the history of my family, when I meditate or sit quietly in a church. And sometimes, in doing such things, I find it. As

Katherine May

writes in Enchantment, ‘The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. […] It becomes valuable when we value it. […] The magic is of our own conjuring.’

A rainbow on dewy grass (plus pylon, tower block, litter. You can find magic anywhere.)

It’s no coincidence that shortly after my mushroom trip I started this Substack newsletter. In an early post, I declared:

If there is a spectrum of experience in this life with mystical psychedelic trips at one end and, say, filling in spreadsheets at the other, I’d like more of my experiences to be weighted towards the psychedelic end.

What I meant, but could not yet explicitly say, was that the work I was then doing did not leave me space to look for magic. There is nothing of the numinous in a spreadsheet, at least not that I have ever found.

But I know I can find it—sometimes, to some degree—in words. Not just find it, but reflect on it, try to communicate it. And that is why I’m taking a punt on making words my livelihood. I’m hoping, eventually, to do freelance editorial work and to teach. And in the meantime, I’m writing and writing and writing, hoping and believing that if I tell myself I am a writer, and act accordingly, I will make it so. I don’t expect to live a life in which I consistently find my work enchanting and awe-inspiring and magical. But I do want to avoid living a life in which I consistently find my work to be the precise opposite of all those things.

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There are some great people here on Substack exploring topics relevant to this piece. If you’re curious, check out:

‘Finding Meaningful Work: I Thought I Failed But Maybe I Didn’t’ by

Don Boivin

of Shy Guy Meets the Buddha

‘Work That Matters’ by

Maia Duerr

of The Practice of Life

‘Two Years Ago I Quit My Life’ by

Anne Boyd

of Audacious Women, Creative Lives

By the way, psychedelics aren’t a panacea, and nor are they for everyone, and nor are they the only way to experience magic, or awe, or the numinous, or whatever you want to call it. For other ideas, try:

‘Why awe matters’ by

Katherine May

of The Clearing

‘Reading is a psychedelic drug, and medieval monks knew how to do it best’ by

Ellie Robins

of How to Go Home

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