I’m bad at celebrating it seems. Two weeks ago I published the 150th Muse Letter which is a lot of words strung on a line over the last four years, yet if I am honest: I don’t feel particularly excited about it.
I do realise that to write this down is kind of depressing to read and I guess there is a big part of me that wants to pretend everything is amazing. Hurra!
But that would be a lie. Everything is not amazing. There’s a reason I haven’t ordered a cake or made one myself this year like I usually do. There’s a reason this anniversary has been pushed into June when truly, it was in May.
I don’t think other writers would admit to this either. It seems ungrateful. At anniversaries you’re supposed to bring out the highlight reel and celebrate. You’re supposed to market yourself and present your best.
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Yesterday I was lying in bed and this image of me holding up my life entered my mind, like Atlas holding up the world. I’m so tired. I’m just tired of holding it up all on my own.
Because a lot has changed for the better but that’s not always what it feels like. Reaching a goal is not the same as maintaining it. There are patterns running through my life, weaving narratives and story arcs. For a while now I’ve been examining them, the beliefs I operate on and wondering how I can shift them to be less self-sabotaging, less self-consumed and more attuned to reality.
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It seems, I have been living in a feast and famine mentality all my life. I get up, work work work, reach my goals and then apparently I like to abandon/sabotage/destroy/move on and start from scratch again as if it never happened. As if I was walking on sand and my footprints are immediately blown away. “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”, said Hannah Gadsby in their Standup Comedy special Nanette. But I wonder if I am a broken record, repeating a cycle that I could long ago have overcome?
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Last year I started writing about change. After publishing my second book of essays Things I Have Loved – A collection (sort of), I knew that this would be the final theme to conclude the Things-Trilogy.
Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now:
I started this book in the belief that I could write about change, that I could excavate what constitutes transformation, to understand “the process” and figure out how to trust it along the way. Yet I am finding myself in a constant shift of what feels like performing open heart surgery on myself, trying to explain, whilst understanding, whilst doing. Amidst the constant blind spots sprouting every time I choose a perspective, I lose another. There’s always something. In many ways this book snuck its way onto the page, as if remembering a faint dream in the morning, barely feeling its presence. And then later through the day suddenly rushing in, with all its vividness into the forefront of my mind. It was all there – all real.
So I guess in the end this book is not exactly about change but about being alive in one body, one existence, moving forward.
– No wonder I am struggling.
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A friend of mine keeps reminding me: How are you going to celebrate yourself? She likes to send these messages every single time I finish something. And every time my gut reaction is: I just want to rest. I want to do exactly nothing. I don’t want another thing on my to-do list. Celebrating feels exhausting.
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I go through the rest of the Muse Letters, picking out my favourite lines, reminiscing: I was working on a novel two years ago? – I had completely forgotten about that time I was desperately trying to jerk out a draft. That time I was sitting in my art studio working on large scale cyanotypes. It’s like I constantly forget what I’ve done and where I’ve been.
Footprints in the sand.
“Stories are unstable, and memory is unstable, and identity is unstable. All of these things that I've tried to make permanent in writing, they're actually unstable. So even though it's tempting to go, Oh, that was fake, it's more like, No, it was just temporary.” I listen to Tavi Gevinson’s words on the Longform podcast. It’s a strange thing to be a writer. To rely so much on words manifesting on the page. The way one creates a narrative, connecting dots, building a parallel life.
To figure out your footsteps in the sand. Again and again.
Part two | Excerpts from the Muse Letters 2022-2023
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I knew this would happen, it happens every time after I take a long break: I am reluctant to dip my toe into the water again.
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“A woman happy in love, she burns the soufflé. A woman unhappy in love she forgets to turn on the oven.“
I wondered what happened to women who lost their job and were trying to put their life back together?
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Tiny improvements, tiny changes.
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Of course there is a sunset and a sunrise every day but some sunrises are better than others and will I ever make it in time for one of the great ones?
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Simplicity is frowned upon as it searches for the most direct and obvious way to do something. It’s not necessarily elegant. It can be. Much like Haiku’s in poetry when “one is in the right, generous frame of mind, [they are] very beautiful.”
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Somehow it happened but I’ve fallen out of time. I’m post-time, post-culture. Or better I am part of nostalgia-culture now, of pick your own, find your niche and stay in it or worse the pending doom of younger people making you feel weird about everything you ever liked.
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It’s cheesy. It’s embarrassing. It’s weird.
It’s a lot like love itself.
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Rejection is not valuable feedback, it is not an instruction to get better.
It is merely a fact that this door is closed for you. A closed door has no feelings, it doesn’t care about you, it’s just there, it exists. Turn around and try another one. Don’t even think about it. Try another one. And another one. And trust that you get better on the way, that you get better at finding your opportunities, the things that are truly made for you. The things that fit.
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Imagine you are a shark. A female shark to be precise. You live in an aquarium in Seoul. The aquarium is all you’ve ever known. You’re eight years old which means that you are somewhat in your late twenties, early thirties. You have seen some shit. You know who you are. You marked your territory and let people know. You’re a shark and not just any shark but a sand tiger sharkwhich says it all: You slay.
So one day when you are just minding your own business, swimming around in your space, this 5-year-old shark, so like this shark that recently graduated from high school or whatever, he bumps into you: the audacity! He bumps into you, on your territory and you don’t like that. – So you eat him.
It takes you 21 hours to devour his body, head first. The people outside of the aquarium are watching you, pulling their cameras out. But you’re focused. This is an act of strength and total commitment. Though you appreciate the attention. The audience obviously loves you and that boy shark had it coming.
You know that eventually you are gonna throw most of him up again. But it was worth it. You smile for the cameras, swim another round enjoying your undisturbed space. That will show them. That will show everyone.
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Yes, I want escapism, thank you.
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I went into myself and I found something that I wanted to share with the world.
And so I did.
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I would stare at the seedlings I had sown a couple of weeks ago on the windowsill next to me and think: How great it must be to have a plan. To just know when to sprout and break through the soil and grow, grow, grow till you finish the purpose that is ingrained in you like there is no other way, you will become this flower no matter what.
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When I was little I used to have a lion. For most of the time, that lion was called Simba. (I was a very creative child.) But for a short period of time, that lion was called Tobias. Because I was in love with the Tobias in my class and I was eleven and that’s what you did when you were eleven and in love, for the first time, you named your stuffed animal after them and of course you told all your girlfriends about it on the school hiking trip. Because you were happy and why, why wouldn’t you let them know?
I think somewhere around that time I discovered the “right to remain silent”. That it was an option, too. Maybe a better one. Maybe a better option than having your heart broken by three little girls who go sneaking off to your crush telling him all about your most private possessions/obsessions.
After that, the lion was called lion.
He lives in the attic now. At my parents home. In a blue plastic bag. Suffocating.
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It’s Spring without you. It’s the green leaves emerging and the air tasting like fresh cut cucumbers: moist, cold, pure. I want to put them in a gin and tonic to drown.
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Take your time. She says.
Take your time. She repeats. And I wish I could take your time. I wish I could take it and make it last forever. If I could I would take all the time in the world and lay it out in front of you.
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If you have not watched Almost Famous, I don’t even know how to tell you, how to begin to explain the cosmos that this movie is for me. How many decisions I have based in my life on a curly blond woman, wearing a shearling coat and cool round blue glasses shouting: “It’s all happening!” in the background.
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– We keep folders of you in our heads.
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For a long time, I had thought, this is what leaving does. Move your feet, lose your seat. There’s no towel you can throw on a person to reserve them for a later date.
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This summer is not behaving at all.
It’s cold and wet and I wear turtlenecks and get anxious about the climate. I’m heartbroken and the rain fits. At least that. At least something does. Madonna is singing repeatedly about the power of goodbye.
The spell has been broken, I loved you so.
Nobody is asking me what I’m going to do this summer, they all sigh and hug and offer spare rooms. No more rapid changes I ought to stay still.
But the Uber driver thinks I’m beautiful. And Ryanair is not refunding anything.
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Most days I wake up at 5 AM now. There’s no point, no reason why I should start the morning so early but my body seems to think otherwise so I let it be. I lie and I dream of a future that feels just within my reach.
I’ve always done that. Live more in the future than the present, in the better world, looking for the better me.
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People wonder after a break-up, after a loss: Where does the love go?
Is it blown away like dandelion puffs? To be sown in better places?
Or can I take that love – all of it – and let the seeds fall onto me?
This time.
A wildflower meadow waiting to bloom.
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Tell yourself that this is it. You in a morning gown, a cool drink, legs up, and nothing else.
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The certainty of being young and enough mistakes lying ahead. The innocence of recklessness. Because there’s still so much time to get it right.
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There is something about a stranger reading you. The things they notice that you cannot see
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Unfortunately, there is no tide chart for a broken heart. No estimation, but some clues, hopes, wishes.
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Oh what is this? The consequences of my own actions?
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I feel like the more I am on Instagram the more I fall into the trap of motivational quote cards. Of just random “nice thoughts” juxtaposed in a coloured square that have the same effect as this gum I used to love as a teenager called “center shock”: essentially a gum that for five seconds completely explodes in your mouth with a wave of sweet and sour and then immediately transitions into tasting like a dirty three week old sock.
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Nothing in your life will change if you keep looping on low self-worth.
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We grow roots in darkness. Reaching deep into ourselves, grounding our feeble existence.
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“Fuck this then” might have a bit of an attitude problem but one that I am subscribing to this year.
(excerpts from the Muse Letter No. 81 - 114, part three will come out next week)
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I wrote a book (well two to be exact…)
"Things I Have Loved" the second book of the poetic memoir trilogy
If "Things I Have Noticed" was about growing up and finding yourself "Things I Have Loved" is about the things that were gained/missed/lost along the way.
Last year on Valentine’s Day my book came out. I could have chosen any day to publish Things I Have Loved but in reality only this day made sense to me.
Not because the book is about a breakup and all the ways I didn’t love myself but because to me it is a manifest to self-love, to defiance and a roadmap towards radical self-worth. “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”, wrote Joan Didion in her landmark Vogue essay from 1961. And writing this book felt exactly like that, like giving myself back to me.