A few months ago I wrote Aspirational Asparagus and Forgotten Skills. I felt like I’d hit some sort of a groove, and I was leaning in. I think other’s felt like I’d hit some sort of personal low, and was leaning a little too close to the abyss. Perhaps the groove just looked like oversharing to the outside, but to me it felt like honesty: of process, of intent, of message.
I got some of the most enthusiastic responses I’ve ever gotten to my writing, albeit mostly from those who were concerned about me and my well-being. Let me just preface this particular piece really quick with something that I didn’t know I needed to say, but I realize now, I do need to say: Moving to a new country is difficult. Learning a second language as an adult is difficult. Adjusting to a new culture is difficult. Applying for visas and finding housing and making new friends and furnishing an apartment and looking for work and getting a job, it’s all difficult. I’m not afraid to admit it.
I didn’t have the sense that leaving out that difficulty would have done me or my writing any good. “Follow the tension,” is a piece of advice from a former professor that still guides me, regardless of the form my writing takes. These tensions and pains and discomforts, they all come up in my writing. They come up in my life and in yours, I’m sure.
The strange nature of this Substack means that my essays arrive directly to your inbox, which I realize now, may make it feel like I am reaching out to you saying, “Help! It’s hard out here.” And, in a way, I suppose what I write can be read that way. But as I write it, I feel more like I’m saying, “Look! This is what it is like to feel and here’s a story about that.”
It’s a difficult line to toe, being straightforward and unflinching in the face of my own, messy, human experience, co-opting it for use in my creative endeavors and just living my life as it comes to me. Sometimes I tip over one edge or another and fall a bit flat or a bit uneven. No one receiving this can see the friends who have edited and inspired it, or the many meals I’ve eaten in community. None of you are looped in on the long phone calls with my family that punctuate endless days of German grammar. Because I’m being selective.
Telling a story is choosing which things to bring in, which to leave out, amongst many other hard-won skills. Above all else, telling a story is a creative act. Even with a foot in reality, you are receiving something heavily played with and performed.
I appreciate the messages and notes of strength and love. Everyone can always use more. But in service of unblocking the words that keep catching up in worries that if I say what I mean, or what I think, or how I felt for a moment there, I will find myself explaining myself to unfamiliar faces.
Today, I am here asking you to read as I write – as it comes. Words are permanent in a way that my feelings, which drive the pieces, are not and that can be confusing.
On entirely different note, the new title of my Substack represents a shift in my interests and focus. You may read about food here, and you may read about something else.
I’m just letting the writing do it’s own thing for awhile and I hope you’ll still be here to see where it goes.
Coming to you from a place of less tension and a lot more lightness,
Clea
Thanks Clea for keeping on writing and pushing through to the next level - I feel like this is a little like the old letter writing, capturing the feeling of a moment, a specific context. I wonder if one day, German will ooze into this and a German sentence will appear.....
Write! Write! Write!