A letter
Something from the near past to help with the near future
Last night, as I was doing the customary new-leaf clean and declutter, I stumbled across a letter I wrote as part of a project called Letters of Resignation, for two artists, Rohanne Udall and Paul Hughes, when the duo was known as Chatum Tanning. It was early 2021; I was 29 and had not yet passed my probation of my new job. I was getting to know my new kitchen — one of the two best kitchens I’ve ever had.
Because I was a recipient of the letters, my physical copy was addressed to me, so I shall copy that here, but insert your own name should the message inside feel appropriate. It was originally commissioned for Siobhan Davies Studios, so the target audience is people working in/adjacent to contemporary dance, but I don’t think sunk cost fallacy is exclusively for them. Next week, I’m going to do some 2025 ~goal setting on Zoom with friends and this letter from the past will be really useful for shaping the session.
I hope you have a happy new year. Mine will involve listening to the Bad Gays podcast cover the Mitford siblings in a way I suspect will be interesting for the non-horsey among us, and also going to the same party I went to exactly a decade ago. I do not have a shift tomorrow morning at a bookshop to suffer through on too little sleep, for which I am grateful.
March 2021
Hello Salome,
I hope you’re well. Giving up’s not easy, but sometimes seeing the thing through is worse. We’ll get onto that later.
I’ll launch into instructions before introducing myself: over the course of the next few days, we’ll be making something. You’ll be making something. I propose a loaf of bread. I’ll provide the recipe Felicity Cloake gave in her Guardian column for a wholemeal loaf, which takes after Dan Lepard’s method. It’s not labour intensive; the kneads are short bursts, only a few seconds at a time. Here’s what you’ll need:
400g strong wholemeal flour (it is better when it’s strong or very strong flour)
50g strong white flour
2 tsp easy blend yeast (which is one sachet)
Half a 500mg vitamin C tablet, crushed up (I have never used this, in fairness)
2tsp fine salt
3tsp brown sugar
400ml warm water
50g melted butter
Gather your ingredients the day before. If you don’t want to make bread, that’s totally fine; I suggest making something or doing something else, like tidying your room, organising kitchen shelves or making your bed while putting a load of laundry on. Something that can be done in 20-25 minute bursts, that tangibly changes when you’ve done it. I want you to feel a small sense of completion.
***
I first made this loaf when I was living in Glasgow, working my first arts job. I extended my overdraft to move up there and leave home to pay for the deposit and so on; being low on funds doesn’t leave you with much money to make new friends. You can keep friends if you’re broke, but I’ve found it’s hard to make new ones when things are tight in a new city where you don’t know anyone.
Netflix and cooking were my activities, then. I learnt to try things out. Admittedly, I did learn that most things I wanted to eat basically involved heating oil in a pan, adding garlic and onions and eventually a tin of tomatoes. But!
My friends wanted me to come back down. There were times it felt pointless and I think my confidence took some time to recover. Across the various teams and organisations based in the same arts centre cum office building as me in the centre of the city, there was only me and one other girl in the café/bar who worked there and weren’t white.
Working in the arts can be exciting and dynamic, and you can inadvertently make other people at parties feel boring when you describe what you do. But I’ve been online in ways I probably wouldn’t have done if I didn’t think I needed a ‘presence’ to secure freelance gigs. And some of my friends have used those same years we’ve had to build up savings instead.
Anyway, recipe:
1. Tip the flours, yeast, vitamin powder, salt and sugar into a bowl and mix well. Add 300ml water, and stir in well, then pour in the butter and work in well. You should have a soft, sticky dough: if not, add a little more water. Cover and leave for 10 minutes.
2. Tip out onto a lightly oiled work surface and knead for 10 seconds, then put back in the bowl and cover. Repeat twice more at intervals of 10 minutes, then leave the dough to rest for 15 minutes.
3. Flatten the dough into a rough rectangle about the length of your baking tin, then roll up tightly, and put into a greased tin, with the join facing downwards. Cover and leave to rest in a warm place until it has doubled in height (at least 1½ hours).
4. Pre-heat the oven to 220C. Bake the bread for 20 minutes, then turn the temperature down to 200C and cook for a further 15–20 minutes, until the crust is a deep brown, and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Turn out onto a cooling rack.
When you total it up, it’ll take about 3 hours or so to go from ingredients to loaf. I recommend doing it in the morning; by the afternoon you’ll have something to savour or critique, but something of your own making nevertheless.
Ten seconds is an unsatisfying amount of time to knead dough but three lots of 10-minute bursts will give you some time, even accounting for handwashing.
Some suggestions for filling in those rounds between turning your dough around:
What is it that you like about the way you work currently? Is it flexible in terms of hours and location? Does the prospect of intercity rail travel when touring excite you? Make a note. Most of what I like, I think I can get elsewhere, but I will miss the prospect of ducking my head into a rehearsal room for a few hours as a producer because it’s hard to replicate. The perfect level of artistic involvement for me as a non-performer: before anyone gets to see it publicly, you’re there while the photos are being taken, while the shape of the piece is being knocked into place.
What’s the worst thing you think you’ll hear when you speak openly about wanting to pause or pivot out of performance? Anticipate it. When I got myself into a decent chunk of debt underwriting a show after we didn’t get ACE funding, I mentioned to a friend I wanted out. She replied and used the term “giving up” in her reply and immediately caught her mistake. But it’s true, I was thinking about giving up! But that’s no bad thing. I had a friend once say that he was not that good at work – guess what? I didn’t care. Our artistic practice isn’t the measure of us; the best people in our lives don’t stick around because we’re excellent at our job.
Do the dishes. It’s going to happen so you might as well.
I’ve timed it and it is possible for me to change my bed within 15 minutes. I can’t speak for you and I don’t want to put undue pressure, but that’s kind of impressive, right? Switching sheets, putting the duvet into a new cover, pillows…it’s a forbidding prospect. But we do it, regularly, and are rewarded by a fresh bed that night.
Leaving is sorrowful, because it’s confronting: we think of pursuits similar to our societal framing of romantic relationships where, if they end by splitting up, it’s been a waste or for nothing.
Here’s a passage from a Wikipedia page. Do you recognise the behaviour?
Sunk costs do, in fact, influence people's decisions with people believing that investments (i.e., sunk costs) justify further expenditures. People demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made." This is the sunk cost fallacy, and such behavior may be described as "throwing good money after bad," while refusing to succumb to what may be described as "cutting one's losses". For example, some people remain in failing relationships because they “have already invested too much to leave.”
Taking a pause, redirecting our attention, having a change of priority…we can view this in terms of betrayal to our past self. The one who sent off a personal statement to apply for a specific course, or made connections in a particular subscene or has managed to convert fannishness into work. But we’re not organisations with a codified set of vision, mission and values to guide us and measure ourselves against – we’re just people, doing people things.
This is not the most lofty of correspondence. I just want you to feel like you can get to work and make something or change something in your immediate environment. When you’re facing all kinds of dilemmas about direction and purpose, we can lose sight of that, I think. But I hope you get the crust you deserve.
Yours,
Salome