Writing Down the Life You Want: What Happened Three Years Later
- Georgia Clare
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
I described a man in a white linen shirt walking on a beach. Then I forgot I had written it.
Three years later this was my life, and it took me a while to notice.
We got to the beach early, while it was still cool. The tide was going out and the sand was still dark where the water had left it, and there was a sailing boat sitting out on the flat blue water like someone had just plonked it there.
I sat down on a large smooth rock with my journal on my knees, which is what I do most mornings wherever I happen to be. He took his shoes off and walked down to the waterline.
I looked up.
A tall man with a close-cropped beard, walking barefoot along the edge of the sea in a white linen shirt.
And something in me went very still. And I got goosebumps.
The thing I had written down and forgotten
About three years ago, maybe a bit more, I did an exercise called a Power Life Script. It comes from Peggy McColl, and the idea is simple enough. You write out your ideal life in the present tense, as though it has already happened, and then you record yourself reading it and listen to it daily.
I did it in the way you do these things when you are desperate. Half hopeful, half embarrassed, mostly not believing it would work and that nothing would come of it but doing it anyway because doing something felt better than doing nothing.
I described a lot of things in that script. Relationships, finances, health, my everyday life.
But I also described a man walking along a beach beside me. Tall. Close-cropped beard. A white linen shirt. We were walking hand in hand.
I had not thought about that visualisation in years. It had gone completely, in the way that things do when your life gets busy and full and stops being an emergency.
And then there he was, right in front of me, at the edge of the sea, wearing the shirt.
I sat on that rock and just stared at him.
Not crying exactly, but with a full grateful feeling in my chest. I was also doing the arithmetic. Working out how long he had been in my life. Realising that we had walked on a beach together before, more than once, and I had never made the connection. That I had been living inside a page I wrote when I had nothing, and I had not even noticed.
What I asked for when everything was falling apart
The beach was the romantic one. There is another one that is quite a bit older.
We were living in Thailand. The marriage was in its final stage, though I didn't know that yet, not really. I had not decided to leave. I had not found out about the betrayal. All of that was still ahead of me and I had absolutely no idea.
What I did know was that I was ill. The stress had got into my body the way it does. I was not sleeping properly and I was not eating properly and there was a permanent tightness in my chest and sick feeling in my stomach.
I remember standing in that beautiful apartment feeling like I had run out of road and was teetering on the edge of a cliff, my feet just hanging over the edge.
It was hot, and the air conditioning made a noise, and there was a view of the pool set against the lush green of the jungle I could not enjoy. That is the thing about being somewhere beautiful when your life is coming apart. It does not help. If anything, it makes it worse, because you feel obliged to be grateful and you are not, and then you feel like an ungrateful woman on top of everything else.
I spent a lot of that period managing. Managing my face, managing the conversation, managing how much of it I let my daughters see. I was very good at it by then. I'd had a few years of practice.
And in the middle of all that desperate sadness and pain, I had a picture in my head. I don't know where it came from. It wasn't a plan, because I had no plan, and it was not a decision, because I had not made one.
It was just an image, and it was this.
Sitting at home in France on my brown leather sofa, in front of my log fire, holding a glass of red wine, feeling calm.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
Not a big house. Not revenge. Not somebody coming to rescue me, and not being proved right, which honestly I would have taken at the time. Just a fire and a glass of wine and the absence of that tightness in my chest.
I want to be clear about how unlikely that seemed. Calm was the least believable thing on the menu. I could imagine surviving. I could imagine getting through the next six months, because I had got through the last six. I couldn't imagine how it would all work out.
I held that picture anyway. I came back to it on the bad nights and held it in my mind. I saw myself there, remembered how the room smelt and the cosiness of my favourite blanket wrapped around me.
And then it happened
I live in France now. There is a forest behind the house. I have a wood burner that I light from mid to late October, and I sit in front of it in the evening sometimes with a glass of wine, and I am calm.
It took quite a few of those evenings before I saw it. Before I realised one night this is the picture I held on to in Thailand when I could not see a way out. This is exactly it, down to the detail.
It had gone past me completely. Many times.
I saw it again yesterday, sitting on the rock, with the journal on my knees, because the linen shirt was so specific that it forced me to look back at the rest.
That is the part I keep turning over. Not that it came true. The fact that it came true and often I've been too busy living in it to notice.
Nobody warns you that arriving is this quiet
When you are in the worst of it, you're braced for a moment. You assume the change, if it ever comes, will announce itself, be dramatic. There will be a door you walk through, a day you would circle on a calendar, some clear line of before and after.
That is not how it was for me, and I don't think it goes that way for many people.
What's more likely to happen is that things improve in pieces too small to stand out. You sleep a bit better one week. You stop thinking of all the things you could have said. One Thursday you realise you have not thought about him all day, and by the time you notice it, it has actually already been true for days.
There is no ceremony. Nobody tells you.
There is a second reason it slips past, which took me longer to work out. When you are in crisis, you are watching for rescue. You are looking up and out, waiting for something to arrive from somewhere else. So when the change comes from inside your own ordinary evenings, you are facing the wrong way.
By the time the good thing turns up, you have usually stopped checking.
I think that is why so many women I hear from feel like they are still waiting, when from the outside they have plainly already got there. They asked for something two or three years ago, got it, adapted to it within about a fortnight, and are now measuring their life against a standard that has quietly moved.
You get used to your own progress at an alarming speed.
The line keeps moving
There was a time, in the first couple of months and years back in France, when I was doing things I had never done in my life.
I booked the car in for a service. That sounds like nothing written down. I was fifty three years old and I had never once organised a service on a car, because it had always been somebody else's job.
I had new windows fitted in the house. I chose them, I paid for them, I was there when the men came. And when the last one drove away and the house went quiet, I stood in the middle of the living room and looked at what I had done all by myself and felt so proud.
At the time, each of those was a mountain.
Over time they became less. Just admin. The kind of thing you do on a Wednesday between other things, without any feeling attached to it at all.
That is what I mean about the line moving. You clear a bar, and then the bar quietly relocates itself, and you go back to feeling like you are not doing very well. Because the thing you have just achieved has been reclassified in your head as normal, and normal does not count.
I do not think there is a way to stop that happening. It is probably how people manage to keep going at all.
What you can do is write things down while they still feel enormous, so that later on you have proof. A note from the week the windows went in, written by a woman for whom that was an enormous thing, is worth more to you two years on than any amount of remembering. It reminds you of how far you have come.
What I actually think about imagination
I do believe our minds create our reality. I want to say that plainly, because I have spent years being careful about how I say it, and who I say it to.
When I was in that apartment in Thailand, almost nothing was available to me. I could not change what was happening. I could not change him. I could not see a way out, and I could not have written one down, because I did not have the information yet.
The one thing left to me was my imagination.
That sounds like a consolation prize. It is not. Of the six mental faculties, imagination is the one I would keep if I had to give up the rest, because without it nothing happens at all. Every house you have ever stood in was imagined by somebody first. Every decision you have made started as a picture of a life you were not yet living.
I could not build my way out of Thailand. I could picture a fire in a house in France, and a woman sitting in front of it who was not braced for anything.
And that picture did work. Not passively, in the way it sometimes gets sold. It worked the way a compass works. It's not magic. But you do have to look for the opportunities that are presented to you once you have the image in your mind of what you want.
It meant that when the marriage ended, and everything had to be divided, I already knew what mattered. We sorted it out between us, without lawyers arguing over the details. He took what was in Thailand. I took the house. On paper I am not sure that was the shrewder deal, and it did not much matter, because I had been sitting in front of that fire in my head for a long time and I knew exactly which side of it I wanted to be on.
Somebody without that picture would have looked at the same choice and weighed it differently. She might have taken the money.
You cannot walk towards a place you have never pictured. And you will not recognise the right thing when it arrives if you have never described it to yourself.
Smaller things happen too, and I mention them knowing how they sound.
Flying back from France last month, I got to security at Bergerac and one of the staff walked over and waved me to the front. At the other end passport control was heaving, four flights in at once, and as I turned into the hall a woman opened a new line and put me at the head of it.
Small things. I would have called them coincidence a few years ago and thought no more about it.
What I notice now is that I am the sort of person these things happen to, and I was not before. Something changed in what I expect, and the world started matching it. You can call that a shift in attention if you prefer, or you can call it what I call it. The result is the same either way, and I have stopped needing to argue about which it is.
"She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that's one of the reasons why they did." Zelda Fitzgerald
If you want to try this
You do not need a course or an app, and you do not need to believe anything in particular.
Get a notebook and write down what you want your ordinary Tuesday to look like. Not the big achievements. The Tuesday. What time you get up, what you can see out of the window, whether the house is quiet, who is in it, how your chest feels at four in the afternoon.
Write it in the present tense, as though it is already true. It will feel foolish. Do it anyway.
Be specific about the details. This is the bit I would not skip. General things are easy to write and impossible to recognise later. Calm is general. A log fire and a glass of wine is specific enough to spot when it turns up. A tall man is general. A white linen shirt and a close-cropped beard is not.
Date it. Then put it somewhere you will find it again by accident in three years.
That last part matters more than I realised. The whole reason yesterday happened is that the description was detailed enough to catch me out. If I had written that I wanted to be happy and in a good relationship, I would have read it back and still felt happy, but no sense of amazement and wonder. No certainty that this was meant for me.
And if you have done something like this before, at any point, go and find it.
Look through the old journals, the notes app, the back of the diary from the year everything went wrong. Read what you asked for when you had nothing.
You may find, as I did, that you are already sitting in a good part of it and have not looked up.
The bit I keep coming back to
I was the woman in that apartment. Ill, frightened, with no plan and no idea what was coming.
She wrote down a fire and a glass of wine because it was the most true and peaceful thing she could imagine wanting.
What actually turned up was way beyond what she'd imagined. Not the France part, she asked for that. The rest of it. A man walking barefoot at the edge of the sea, in the exact shirt, on a weekend he arranged as a romantic surprise, whilst she sat on a rock with her journal because that is simply what she does now in the mornings.
I wish I could go back and tell her.
Since I cannot, I will say it to you instead, in case you are somewhere near where she was.
The picture you are holding on to at the moment, the small unglamorous one that feels impossible, is probably closer than it looks. And when it arrives it will not announce itself, so write it down while you still remember exactly what you asked for.
Then go back and check. You may be further along than you think.
Continue Exploring
Your Literary Prescription
One of the things I love about literature is that it holds on to things for us. A book you read at thirty is still sitting there at sixty-five, waiting, with a line in it you were not ready for the first time. Some of the most memorable stories are about people who pictured something better long before they had any way of reaching it.
If you enjoyed today's article, I think you'll enjoy these Literary Prescriptions on Book Quote Therapy:
Hope – For the stretch where you cannot yet see how anything changes, and all you have is a picture of something better.
Ordinary Magic – For noticing what is already there, particularly the parts of your life you have stopped seeing.
Waiting – For the long, unglamorous middle, when nothing appears to be happening and something is.
Sometimes the words we need don’t give us all the answers.
They simply help us ask better questions.
Also new: If you enjoy the blend of literature, reflection and practical ideas in these articles, you may also like my newly rewritten Quote Therapy. Completely revised and expanded from the original 2024 edition, it combines inspiring quotations with original stories, all set in France, and reflections that explore how the right words can quietly change the way we live.
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If you're navigating love, change or new beginnings, my guided meditations offer gentle support to help you reconnect with yourself and move forwards with greater confidence.
If you'd like to create your own daily rituals, the Inner Peace Toolkit brings together meditations, journalling, affirmation art and reflective resources designed to help you build a calmer relationship with yourself and your future.
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