Brace yourself for a metaphor.

It goes like this. We have a back garden that I rarely go into. It is for want of trying. But we also have a greenhouse in there and one evening this week my wife and I stood watching a bee trying to get out of it.

The door was open, it had been opened wider to encourage the bee, and that bee was clearly struggling in the heat of a greenhouse in the heat of a hot day. We tried being inside the greenhouse waving our arms at it, we tried being on the outside and tapping on the glass to encourage it to move toward where not only was there a door, but there now seemed to be a draught. A breeze. A big clue that this way lies freedom, that way lies glass.

But while that bee did keep on edging closer to the way out, it would also keep on turning back around and trying to walk up this metal support frame or burrow into that green plant thing. (I’m not big on plants. See above re gardens.)

Eventually we gave up and walked away, the very last option being that maybe the bee was self-conscious and without us watching, it would wipe its brow, pick up its bags and walk out of there just fine.

I hope it did and now I hope this isn’t too obvious, but even if I hadn’t primed you about an impending metaphor, you would have already figured out that I am seeing myself in that bee.

Unless I thought I was the greenhouse. Trying to grow on the inside, completely transparent from the outside. It could’ve been that.

But no, it was the bee, it was the bee’s determination to escape being thwarted by its own inability to see the obvious way out or to not keep repeating the same mistakes.

Only, okay, there I am that evening wishing that it would escape and there I am identifying with the little thing, yet the afternoon was the opposite. That afternoon, I pitched for a commission and was so confident in my ability to do it that I was borderline cocky. I know what this work needs, I told them, I know that I know how to do it.

If you ask me what I think of my writing, no stopwatch is fast enough to measure the speed of which I can change that subject. Yet here I was being asked why I thought I could do this work and they could barely shut me up about it. Afterwards I even wondered if I’d just talked them out of commissioning me.

But in the moment, being asked to justify my being commissioned, nope. Total confidence. There are elements of the brief that I don’t understand yet, that I have no experience in, but overall, here’s a project, it needs this, this and that, and I can do these things, that’s me.

Look, doubtlessly you could do this commission too, I’m not claiming some unique brilliance and, actually, while I appear to have got the work, it isn’t confirmed yet so I can’t presume I have. But total certainty that I could do it, not one pixel’s doubt, that felt uniquely brilliant.

I tell you, it was a buzz.