Season 2: Episode 4
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!

Welcome to episode 4 of this season 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 a collection of essays on creative life, to help you think about and explore your own creativity and artistry as well as if you’re growing, or thinking of growing a business based around something you love to do.
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 looking at the time-old art of radically rebirthing your life and why now is the time. I’ve seen lots of people talk about how to do this, but I’m not going to give you any kind of blueprint today – I don’t believe in blueprints no matter what people say – but I’m going to share how I’ve done this time and time again, post really shitty times and talk about how it’s made me feel.
For me, the scarier life gets the stronger the F**k it moment is!
So, if you’re into baby steps this might not be the podcast episode for you. I’m sharing my experiences of jumping in head first and showing you how have some of the greatest gifts have come to me in this way. Of feeling compelled to take huge leaps of faith even when it feels as scary as hell.
To put it in some context; the world has changed. You know, I know, we all know. And I don’t want to reinvent the wheel on that story, it’s being told to us in a myriad of ways every day. Instead I wanna touch on the aftermath, the future, to help you get a glimpse of possibility. In my first episode of this series you might remember that I talked about how I’d found hope and courage to look ahead to the next chapter, well, today I kinda want to expand on that by looking back at all the times I’ve done it before.
And I know from the many conversations I’m having, people are actively seeking more simplicity, more travel, more flexibility once we can all move again, so radical rebirth feels pertinent and never more important however it might look like for you.
For me, I kinda have cancer to thank – quite honestly – for giving me some of the richest, and most rewarding experiences of my life.
When I look back at it now it’s mad in lots of ways, but at the time, sitting through endless chemotherapy sessions, re-starting life again without my parents, which felt especially sad having being born into an orphanage and with no siblings to share this grief with. 
I can clearly remember the deep-rooted traumatic experience of being with my mum as she died and having to go straight into the chemotherapy ward for my own treatment knowing she’d gone, wondering how far behind her I’d be. 
But this isn’t a sad story, I’m painting the picture so you can imagine my state of mind and it might be something you can relate to right now: sad, traumatised, confused, anxious, unsure, frightened. Whatever you’ve been through these feelings are all entirely natural when we’re living in such a scary time.
For me, I can describe it as looking over the face of a kind of cliff, realising I could properly just lose my shit or I could say FUCK it and take extreme action. Big trauma for me required big action, that’s what my instinct told me. Baby steps wouldn’t be enough.