Six months ago I was a photographer

Not only a photographer, but primarily. That was the plan. Wolfe & Fox would be the business. The Substack would be the content arm of tutorials, challenges, tips for people who wanted better photographs. I had a name for it. Creating With Jules. I had a structure. I had, I thought, a direction.

I published my first post in January.

By February something had changed. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened it wasn’t a single morning when I woke up and knew. It was more like noticing, slowly, that the thing I was writing was not the thing I had planned to write. That the essays about permission and procrastination and the gap between who you are and who you’re becoming were not the supporting act for the photography content. They were the thing.

By March I had renamed the publication.

By June I am writing this.

Becoming is rarely the thing you planned. It is almost always the thing you couldn’t stop doing, even when it would have been easier to stop.

The wild thing about the last six months

I have written about permission and given myself some I didn’t know I needed.

I have written about imposter syndrome and felt it, acutely, every week when I hit publish.

I have written about building in the gaps while building this, in the gaps, on Tuesday mornings before the day started and Sunday evenings when the house was quiet.

I have written about the dream you’ve been keeping private and kept this one private for longer than was probably necessary, because naming it out loud makes it real and real things can fail.

What I haven’t told you yet is that before all of this before Still Becoming, before photography, before any of the current shape of things I looked seriously into becoming a counsellor. There was something I wanted to do that involved sitting with people in the hard parts of their story, helping them find the thread back to themselves. I didn’t follow that path at the time. Life, timing, the particular shape of other things I was carrying.

But it didn’t go away.

What I understand now, six months into writing about becoming, is that coaching is not the alternative to counselling. It is the practical application of everything I have been writing about. It is the counsellor instinct, channelled into something forward-facing. Not sitting with someone in their wound, but walking beside them as they build something from it.

And it turns out that is exactly what I have been preparing to do. Without quite realising I was preparing.

The practice was always the preparation. The essays were always the rehearsal. The writing was always going somewhere.

What six months of writing honestly has taught me

That the dream doesn’t wait for you to be ready. I was not ready in January. I was not ready in March. I am not entirely ready now. And yet here we are.

That permission is not a feeling that arrives before the action. It is a decision you make, and then make again, and then make again on the Tuesday morning when it would be easier to just leave it.

That the people who show up for the honest essay not the polished one, not the confident one, but the one that says the true thing quietly are the people you most want to spend time with.

That widening your story is not a metaphor. It is something that actually happens, incrementally, over months of showing up and writing the uncomfortable sentence.

I have watched it happen in myself. I have seen it in the comments and the replies and the messages from people who read something here and wrote back to say: that was the thing I couldn’t name.

That is what Still Becoming is for. That is what it has always been for.

And now I want to offer a way to go further in.

Introducing The Becoming

The Becoming is a year-long intimate coaching experience for ten to twelve people, built around the dream you are carrying.

Not a course. Not a programme with modules and milestones. Something slower and more useful than that a committed relationship with a small group of people, and with me, built around the specific dream you are working on.

Your dream might be creative; a business, a body of work, a publication you have been meaning to begin. It might be physical; a fitness goal, a way of living in your body that you haven’t managed to reach alone. It might be a life rebuilt after a transition, or a version of yourself you can only half see from here. It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you are ready to stop circling it.

Here is what the year includes:

• Monthly group calls — the inner circle, everyone together, ninety minutes, the dream in the room. By month four the group knows each other. By month eight the peer support is doing some of the best work of the year.

• Bi-monthly one-to-one sessions — six sessions across the year, just you and me. The private work. The thing you couldn’t say in the group yet.

• The inner circle between calls — a shared space for the cohort. Low pressure, always optional, often where the most honest conversations happen.

• A Still Becoming paid subscription, included — because The Becoming begins in this publication, and the publication continues alongside the work.

The investment is £1,000 for the year. The cohort is capped at twelve people. When it is full, it is full.

What you leave with at the end of the year is not a finished product, though you will almost certainly have built something. It is a clearer story about yourself. Who you are, what you are building, and why it matters. And a small group of people who witnessed you doing it.

This is for the person who has been reading Still Becoming and thinking: I want this, but applied to my actual life.

The person who has a dream they haven’t fully claimed yet. Who keeps starting and stopping, not because they lack commitment, but because they have been doing it alone. Who would benefit from someone walking beside them not directing, not prescribing, but present, consistent, honest.

This is for the person who is ready for the year. Not ready in the sense of having everything figured out. Ready in the sense of: I am going to stop waiting and I need someone with me.

There is an application rather than a checkout button. I read every one personally. I am choosing who to spend a year with as much as you are choosing whether to apply.

The application asks three things: what is the dream you are carrying, what has stopped you from giving it your full attention, and what it would mean to arrive at the end of the year with a clearer story about yourself.

There are no right answers. There is only the honest one.

Six months ago I published a post called Who Is Jules? It was meant to introduce me and the photography content. It was the first thing I wrote that nobody read. Which is as it should be. Nobody knew me yet.

Now some of you do. You have been here through the pivot and the uncertainty and the essays I almost didn’t publish. You have written back to say that something landed. You have kept reading.

This is for you first. Before anyone else finds it, before the applications fill and the cohort closes, you are the ones who were here when it was still becoming what it is.

The dream doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. You know that you’ve read the essays. And neither, it turns out, does the person doing the dreaming.

I am ready. I hope some of you are too.