In October 2006, I was driving down London’s North Circular at 6am toward a job I genuinely despised. The atmosphere was somber, but my mood shifted entirely when I cranked up the volume on Amy Winehouse’s track “Rehab.” As the bassline surged through my Ford Ka, her raw, powerful vocals about finding strength in adversity mirrored my own exhaustion. At the time, I felt trapped in a windowless Docklands office, monitoring stock exchange data on four screens for a salary that, while steady, offered no fulfillment. An admin role that had been sold to me as a graduate media position, but it was better money than my previous job. The moment in Rehab when a man tells Amy he thinks she’s depressed had never felt so close to home. Delving into her storytelling, I was astonished at her unflinching brilliance, but I should have known. Amy and I grew up on parallel tracks. She’d play pool with my brother at our local pub in Whetstone, north London, as a teenager.
Life at that company was stifling. Beyond the repetitive, freezing work environment, I endured harassment from a male colleague who frequently sent inappropriate messages about my appearance. I had spent two years post-university settling for this “sensible” path, suppressing my ambition to be a writer while living back at my parents’ house. My situation became so dire that I found myself wishing for minor car accidents on my way to work just to avoid sitting at my desk for another shift. Then endure a male colleague relentlessly monitoring me – the way I had to monitor those blinking screens, my shift pattern meant I would wake at 5am. He would send me Myspace messages with inappropriate observations about how tight my outfits looked, from two desks behind. Expecting to be paid to pursue my passion as a writer anyway, and perhaps it would look good on my CV if I just surrendered to the grownup notion of a sensible job in finance. (Who did I think I was. Maybe one day I’d be able to clear some of my debt and move out of my parents’ house.
Connecting with Amy’s music changed my perspective. Growing up in suburban north London, I shared a similar background with her; we were both looking for an escape from the ordinary. When her album “Back to Black” arrived that same weekend, I dove into her lyrics and found the strength to prioritize my own happiness. If she could navigate such public and personal turmoil, I realized I could stop wasting my time in a place where I felt invisible and demeaned. A background murmur to keep me focused on the road, i usually kept the radio low. As Amy’s rich voice conveyed the depths of her despair, I stared blearily at the empty road ahead and wondered how I’d taken such a wrong turn. The weekend after I first heard the song, Amy’s album Back to Black was released, and I rushed to HMV to buy the album on CD.
Taking action, I enrolled in night school for journalism, using my salary from the finance job to fund a future in magazines. I reached out to friends, re-establishing the social connections I had neglected for months, and gained the courage to report my manager regarding the harassment in the office. The confrontation proved effective, and the workplace dynamic improved significantly, allowing me to focus on my transition. Soon, my routine shifted from early morning finance shifts to working late nights at newspaper websites, where I wrote headlines and managed digital content while the presses ran nearby. But when I finished there I’d drive straight on to night shifts at newspapers, where I’d write headlines and upload copy on to websites as the printing press whi, before long I was still doing the 6am drives to Docklands.
That pivotal shift eventually led me to leave the corporate world entirely to pursue my passion full-time. Nearly two decades into a career as a journalist, I have recently authored a book documenting how Amy Winehouse and other female singer-songwriters provided the emotional support needed to survive our darkest phases. My new book, “I Hate You So Much Right Now,” published by Blink for £16.99, is a tribute to the power of women restoring one another. Looking back, betting on myself was the most essential decision I ever made. And they gathered me up and placed me right back in the mix for those nights in Camden that fuelled me on, i rang my friends and told them how low and cut off I had been feeling. Nearly 20 years into my journalism career, I’ve written a book about how Amy and so many other immense female singer-songwriters have pulled us through our most heartbreaking moments.
