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Success and failure, winning and losing, endings and beginnings

A year ago, almost to the day, I sent a letter.

It was unlike any of the previous letters I had shared, and at the time, I wondered if it might be the last.

Eight months before, I had returned to a job as a finance manager after spending 18 months working as a professional illustrator and running my business, Thomkat Illustrations.

Towards the end of those months, I’d started describing that time as a career break, an opportunity to take time to do some illustration projects, and that I was now looking for work again as the illustration projects had come to their natural end.

As if that had always been the plan. As if I’d never hoped that running my own business and illustrating professionally would be a permanent shift.

As if the end of those projects was anything other than a gut-wrenching, heart-breaking disappointment.

I told myself I was lucky that I could find work quickly and I committed myself to catching back up, getting back into the swing of my finance career.

But inwardly, I was so desperate not to give it all up, to find a way somehow, to escape back to a life filled with creativity and freedom.

I tried to keep going, illustrating in the evenings and at weekends. Holding on despite the overwhelming and relentless pressure at work. I couldn’t sleep properly, I teetered on the edge of burnout. Panic attacks, more tears, anger, and self-pity than I had felt in years consumed me. Every day, I was sad.

So I paused.

And although I felt hopeless and lost, bereft, like I was giving up on my dreams, like I was being forced to stop the only things that brought me joy, that pause lifted the weight of expectation that I had been subconsciously putting onto my creativity. That it could be my escape from a job that was slowly breaking me.

Within a few weeks of sending the letter, a friend told me about some job opportunities at the company where I had started my finance career over 20 years previously, and two months later, I had started a new job in an old place. And it felt right. Like it was time.

As the months since that letter have stretched into a year, as I have written other letters sharing pieces of my heart beyond illustration alone, another realisation has slowly focussed in my consciousness.

I started to realise that being a professional illustrator might not be the path for me.

Just as The Tale of Tree Keeper Books is just beginning, it’s early chapters full of magic and promise and possibility, the tale of Thomkat Illustrations is entering it final chapter.

I didn’t want to face it for some time. Hoping that I might just be able to keep things going, ticking along in the background, alongside my job and my creative adventure here on Substack and my partnership with

Lydia Saward

and Tree Keeper Books. Because I didn’t want to feel like I was giving up on the business that I named for my children. That had been my dream. I didn’t want to feel like I’d failed. That I had lost.

Google will tell you that in the UK, 60% of new businesses fail within three years, with 20% of those going under within the first year.

The Office of National Statistics reveals that only 42.5% of new businesses are still trading in their fifth year.

I started Thomkat Illustrations as a side hustle in 2019 and incorporated Thomkat Ltd in 2021. Thomkat’s final year of trading will end on 30th April 2025.

Does that make it a success? Or does the figure showing in brackets at the bottom of Thomkat’s P&L this year make it a failure?

I wonder, does everything need to be about success or failure, about winning or losing?

When I visit my mum, we often end our evening playing Scrabble. We have this collaborative way that we play. We cheat a little bit together. We look up dubious words to see if they are allowed, we collude to open up the board, reach as many of the triple word scores as we can and delight in finding great words. Words that are fun and interesting and as long as possible! It is incredibly satisfying to find that you can place ‘milliner’ across a double letter score and a triple word score, use up all your tiles and score 86 points. It is even more fun when your opponent (aka Mum) places ‘ruly’ to meet ‘milliner’ and make ‘millinery’, for 29 points.

When the game comes to an end and we have both scored north of 300 points, with Mum’s score one point higher than mine, it doesn’t really feel like there’s a winner and a loser. We just played. And it was a great game.

Surely the only way to have lost, would have been not to play at all.

And when you reach the end of a story, there is no win or lose, no success or failure, it just means it’s time to close the book.

Bye for now,

P.S. I have some greetings cards and other gifts in stock in my Thomkat Illustrations shop and I will send a set of greetings cards as a gift to any who takes out an annual paid subscription to While I Was Drawing

P.P.S. My journey to explore and celebrate creativity with you feels like a story that’s just beginning. I'll continue writing, drawing, crafting, and sharing this adventure. My mind is full of ideas I can’t wait to bring to life, and my characters and stories will live on in the magical world Lydia and I are building together with Tree Keeper Books.