Season 2, Episode 2:
For the best experience I’d recommend listening, but if you prefer to read the automated podcast please see below: this is an automated transcript using Otter so please don’t take the spellings/grammar too seriously!

In this episode, I’m sharing:
-Why my memory bank is so important
-What it is that’s make me question my sense of self right now?
-The values + beliefs that help me navigate my life
The transcript
Welcome to episode 2 of The Happier Creative podcast. I’m your host Ruth Hoskins, thank you so much for tuning in.
The Happier Creative is a podcast that’s part memoir, part an essay on creative life and part guide to help you upgrade your life through allowing more creativity into it.
I’m here to help you explore how you live and work creatively as we navigate lockdown and beyond. I believe that creativity is a tool to help reduce anxiety and help us live and work better, whether we work full-time as a creative or have a creative business or we want to bring more creativity into our lives for a simpler, more joyful life.
In today’s episode I’m searching for the answer of self identity. Because, right now, do we even know who we are anymore? It’s something to explore if you’re nodding along thinking about this time we’re living in and trying to navigate our crazy lives together. 
Firstly, I hope you’re safe and well. Dunno how you’re managing this school / work / life juggle. I’m broadcasting this from my new writing space – my bedroom! I’ve set up a desk looking onto the garden, it’s really sunny in the mornings and it’s nice to look out at the grass, trees and flowers. And I just love watching our garden birds. I fully appreciate not everyone has outside space; this is our first proper garden and I’m feeling thankful for the space every day. 
My husband Tony has set up himself on the front drive in our yellow campervan Annie.
So we’re now both set up with spaces we can retreat to once we’ve done the home schooling activities. I’ll share some photos in the show notes if you’re like me and love to know what people’s homes look like! 
As I’m broadcasting this from my bedroom too and hoping the kids won’t come in and distract me. They just seem to have that knack of knowing exactly the worst time don’t they?
I don’t know about you but I’ve felt really reflective, wanting to find the right words to articulate how I’m feeling in the hope it might soothe some of you. I’ve spent a few weeks asking myself, who they hell even am I? 
It started off in my work but really it applies to life. And as I so often do, without my parents alive to help remind me of who I am, I’ve dug into my greatest possession to get some comfort and make sense of everything and that is my memory bank.
The first memory in my bank is this. It’s 1986. I’m 10. I’m soaking up a French food market in a village by the Atlantic Ocean – a real happy place for me; I’m holding my dad’s hand as I take in the exotic rainbow of produce, the foreign, heat-splattered sounds feel exciting to me; the opulent displays of jams, marmalades, honey. Uh. Amazing. 
My dad’s shirt is unbuttoned, his large moobs protruding but he doesn’t care because, well, he’s like that! He stops to smack his lips at almost every stall as we sample as we go, using his (extraordinarily embarrassing) French.
I sit on a crate of prickly pairs and have a splintered bottom. We stop at an Oyster Hut; for 1 franc we buy a dozen oysters with a small glass of white wine to share. I feel so grown up as I sip the wine and let the oysters slide down inside laced with shallots and lemon juice, the omnipresent ocean roaring behind us as the salty molluscs awaken my taste buds.