Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now
Read a first excerpt from my NEW book | The Muse Letter No. 157
Today is a really big day for me: the launch of my Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing and editing of my third and final book of the poetic memoir trilogy I started four years ago.
I am: nervous/excited/overwhelmed/terrified/ecstatic. Picture me refreshing a website every 5 minutes for the next 24 hours.
If you’ve been loving the Muse Letter so far, I am sure you will love this book even more. And just to say, if you’re making a pledge today you will be receiving a special surprise with your reward.
And now without further ado, as promised in last weeks Muse Letter, read a first exclusive excerpt from Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now below:
A book about change. Why we don’t want to and how life will make us.
//
The girlies at the airport are wearing large bows at the back of their heads and chunky gold earrings. It’s early August and I’m escaping the Fringe festival masses that are flooding the streets of Edinburgh. The girlies wear their hair slicked back, their outfits are in muted brown and beige colours, everything is chic without chi-chi. Ever since Succession’s final episode came out I hear the word ‘quiet luxury’ thrown around a lot. Or ‘stealth wealth’. Or ‘old money aesthetic’. The girlies certainly got the brief and already started their reformer pilates classes and barre sculpt sessions.
There’s a guy on TikTok in a pink bathrobe who likes to dissect rich people’s habits; like creating, assembling and separating masses of ice cubes in their respective ice cube freezers; his punchline is always the same: “You don’t do this because you’re poor.”
//
For weeks I have been looking at my hairline. The algorithm is equally concerned and sends me ads on hair regrowth every time I open an app. Which may have to do with the fact that I’ve been googling “How to know when hair is falling out women?”, and “Is it normal to see scalp when light shines through?”. I watch other people’s hairline, too. And I worry for them. Though it is increasingly difficult to get long looks, as people tend to get really nervous when your eyes keep wandering up past their eyebrows. They don’t like it. They probably think you are concerned about their hairline, which – truthfully – I am.
For the first few days of staring into the mirror after swimming practice I can still calm myself. I have not noticed any particular hair loss, no clumps falling out, not even more hair strands on my pillow. Hair doesn’t simply disappear, I tell myself. There is no actual evidence. Except. Except. Except the fact that it did not look like this before, right? I look into the mirror, the light shining from above, making my scalp uncomfortably visible.
//
Since I was a child, I had this fear that one day I would lose my mind. That it was a fickle thing, easily to be drained out to the aether, just sieving through. I remember that distinct new feeling. I was sitting on the counter top and my mother was chopping tomatoes and I explained to her that: yesterday I was part of the universe, held in its net, but today I am drifting further and further away from myself.
//
I look at a photo of my mum and me on a bus in Thailand. Two awkwardly raised fingers are under my chin, signifying the peace sign. There’s nearly no photo where I don’t raise my fingers to some kind of gesture at that time. Like 2009 duckface it is an uncomfortable reminder of how idiotic humankind looks photographed. Victorians looking stern on chairs like they’re trying to haunt you from the page, huddled up group photos, selfies warping features into giant foreheads, it’s so hard to get a dignified picture of oneself.
I zoom in on the photo and see for the first time how young she looked; at 45 she went backpacking with me. People kept saying how we looked like sisters and it really annoyed me at that time. I was nineteen. Four weeks across Thailand just after graduation, our big trip together. I remember her saying then how she now was outliving her mother, venturing into uncharted territory. At forty-three her mother had died of breast cancer, just one day after my mother’s sixteenth birthday, tying those dates in an unbreakable bond. For years her mother was looking down on us from the top of the fridge, where my mum had placed her.
Now she’s sitting on the shelf in my former bedroom alongside other photographs of my sibling’s weddings and other dead relatives. Her cheeks are plump and rosy, her hair fashionably short: a most elegant woman. There is not one photo of her in the family album where she doesn’t look like she could be the spokesperson of some 1950s Persil washing soap ad.
When my grandmother was young she had to wear her hair in long braids as per her mother’s request. So when she finally left home and cut it off, she kept the braid in a box and later after she died, this box was kept in my mother’s wardrobe alongside her pastell-pink nightgown. I loved to play with my mother’s possessions, sneaking into her bedroom, opening the cabinet doors to her wardrobe, large enough to sit under the dresses, making it an excellent hiding place.
All of that is gone now as my mother likes to get rid of things. If my mother could, my father once joked, she would vacuum herself up after she dies.
//
I’m sitting on the floor of another airport listening to another self-help book. “We all have to occasionally shield ourselves from insights about ourselves.”, it tells me. Our psyche looking out for us, drip-feeding us reality, if it has to.
I rarely spoke about my mother in therapy. Which I never really thought about until much later; it just didn‘t occur to me. I remember one of my professors at uni loudly proclaiming how every writer – female ones especially – writes about their mother when they first start out and I remember distinctly thinking: really?
The interesting part of a blindspot is that you are not even aware of its existence. Some things are too painful to acknowledge. Unlike the lacuna I wrote about in Things I Have Loved, it is not something you know is missing. The lacuna is a gap where something used to be: you know its shape, so you feel its absence. The blind spot on the other hand.
– Is simply not there.
I don’t want to write about my mother.
//
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”, the poet and nobel prize winner Czeslaw Milosz once said and I wonder if that is true.
//
When I come home to visit my family my mother likes to take me shopping. Little things like socks, tights and underwear, occasionally bath salts and nice moisturizer. She’ll tell me about her friend Marie who always went on little shopping sprees with her mother and how envious she felt because she didn’t have a mother to buy her things anymore. If we walk past the Lotto shop we’ll buy scratch cards and occasionally we’ll win a euro or two which we always re-invest and then lose. I don’t need her to buy any of it but I never decline.
//
My dreams often have a ceiling, even the sky feels like a stuffy room.
//
I don’t want to write about my mother, so I call her instead.
We talk about quotidian things for half an hour. How her feet are still cold from being outside all day, waiting for a trout to bite. My parents started fishing together a while ago. When I was little we would holiday in Denmark in the autumn because holiday homes were a lot cheaper off-season and my dad would catch us flounders that sizzled in the pan making it look like they were still alive.
Anyway, it always takes me a while to get to the important bit but eventually I just say: Are you okay if I write about you?
//
[Excerpt from Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now / launching TODAY on Kickstarter 01.09.2024, support the Kickstarter here ]
More info on the book and how a Kickstarter works below.
The Final Book of the Poetic Memoir Trilogy
A homage to change, why we don‘t want to and how life will make you.
About the book
Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now
When I started writing about my own life, searching for myself ("Things I Have Noticed," 2020) and for my self-worth ("Things I Have Loved," 2023), this book dedicated to self-narration ("Things I Have Changed") had actually already begun long before. It is a collage of all the blind spots and omissions, the things I couldn't or wouldn't see over the years. It is about the things I don't want to write about: my mother, money, control, obsessive thoughts, fear. – But must.
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.
What is the Kickstarter for?
£5000 is the minimum budget that will ensure a first round of printing high-qualitiy softcover books, hiring a professional editor to finalise the book and creating a marketing campaign to get the word out.
There’s a line I often think of by the German poet Hilde Domin that translated goes something like this:
I put my foot in the air. And it carried me.
(Ich setzte den Fuss in die Luft. Und sie trug.)
Four years ago I started writing a book that literally changed my life: Things I Have Noticed – Essays on leaving/searching/finding. It started with an idea to create a zine, that quickly turned into a full collection and Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to publish it. Since then I sold thousand of copies, found homes in indie bookshops, was invited to readings, wrote and published the second book Things I Have Loved – A collection (sort of) – but most of all I understood that you don’t need a publisher or an agent to reach people with your writing.
That it’s a special honour to create a book from start to finish, to design the cover, to illustrate it, to be in charge of how it is presented and find its own niche. To create something that feels like a Gesamtkunstwerk – an object that is conceptually, visually, inherently in the way that it is made: art in itself.
That it’s not just about the process of writing a book but also the way it comes into the world: supported by people who believe in my vision, who trust that I can do it all on my own.
Now, the circle is coming to a close.
What is a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign?
I believe a Kickstarter is a way to proof an idea. It’s a way for people to support independent artists. To create work that is different, new and exciting.
But mostly it is 6 weeks of me, pressing the refresh button every ten minutes and hoping that I make the targeted budget, because if not: no money will be transferred. Kickstarter has an all-or-nothing approach, you only get the money if you reach your goal. If you do not reach the goal within the set time frame, all backers get their money back and the project will not happen.
So, I love your writing and I want to support you, what can I do?
Make a pledge as soon as possible. The more people pledge in the beginning the higher the chances are that we will actually reach the target.
Tell your friends about the Kickstarter and/or make a post on social media and show other people that you've made a pledge to encourage them.
The Promise
"Things I Have Changed" will be the third and final book of the poetic memoir trilogy I started in 2020. The collection is nearly finished but will need to go through a round of editing. Just like the first two books it will be illustrated with my own visual artwork. The artwork for the book is currently in the idea stage.
As a backer you will witness the creative process up close and I will give frequent updates on how it's going.
Approx. publishing date: Spring 2025
Approx. pages: 200
Paperback: softcover
SHIPPING Please note: We will be shipping all rewards national and internationally, with duty and tax prepaid. So you don't have to worry about customs at all.