i’ve just turned 29, hi!
i am forever grateful to have found kinship and homes—enduring and insistent—in those i love and who manage to love me more.
i am resilient to a fault.
it is within me, knowing.
i’ve spent my whole life hoping to be someone who does only One thing, it’s only now that i am beginning to undo the warp. because what the hell, there is no fun in trying to be someone i am not.
i have an easy sense of wonder, and it feels like the easiest thing to love.
i choose love. though it makes me hard on people, soft on the world, hard on myself, easy on you.
i keep a working document for my writing—here’s a peek:
i like looking back (one year) and feel like i was such a different person.
“it’s always fun when people are themselves”
stories are all we’ve got.
I love not knowing something and saying, “I don’t know”. Tell me more.
i like clear communication, and understanding what the other person wants. i don’t like it to be confusing. but in writing, i think i like it when people don’t exactly know what i’m trying to get at. do i like it, or do i not? do i want it, or do i not? i am not telling you what i like or what i want, i am telling you what i see and what i feel.
i am not to be known in an instance.
i never believed in the things i wanted to do, and then year after year i see people succeed at them.
do winter trees wither in summer?
showered my skin so red, like i’d just drank two glasses of wine.
I almost spent 520 euros on shoes that didn’t fit.1
“he’s nosy” “he’s curious”
I wish I could pretend I never had to leave.
i want to be friends with the girl reading solo
when does staying become living?
i will find colours for the rest of my days. i found this one in a draft on here.
it’s Thursday, 10 Oct, 01:01, and my friend D just messaged me “you are so seen”.
i see that the lessons, they stay, sometimes they return, until you learn them.
if you are playing games you’ve already lost, so i’d rather not even if they protect me. each time we don't say what we want to say, we're dying.2 when i love you, you know. i will say it in all the ways i can, until it is impossible, and still i try.
in or out. all or nothing.
i’ve recently taken on an additional role supporting my lead editor at my job, which involves crafting social media posts. “you’re overthinking it a bit”, he tells me. i know it myself, so many times i overwork what i am trying to say. not that writing doesn’t need work; sometimes you write just to delete it all, to get to the heart of what you want to say. yet, so often, you just want to sound this, or hide that.
i’d just summoned some moments of courage to send a message when i unexpectedly received an exciting email from someone i’d never heard from before. makes me think if we keep taking time to take courage, we can make meaning and love go around. then, we’ll be okay.
i continue to feel so open to possibilities, to all the living and learning ahead of me. it is a beautiful feeling.
if i believed in talismans, i’d carry one and it will say: when you do something from the heart, there is no losing or failing, the doing becomes loving, a release, enough.
i used to think you needed to know now but then one day Haley Nahman wrote the answer may not yet exist3 and it changed my life.
i tend to write endings first, and sometimes that’s enough for me to see it through.
it’s in the home-cooked meals that takes them two hours. it’s in the letting you stay. it’s in the timely messages, the reminders, unknowingly saving you. answering the call. feeling close even when they are far away. it’s in the late night chats even when they are exhausted from the day. it’s in changing the sheets before you return home and making sure you never run out of petrol. it’s in understanding what you think and want despite what you say, even when you try to say what you think you want.
it is always the small things.
i sometimes scroll through my phone’s photo album quickly, whatever i land on to tell me something, like drawing a tarot card.
i have been living out of a suitcase three-quarters of the year, for the third year now. something i wrote the first year, This is the year I was least tethered to a place, anywhere in fact, and also the year I felt most grounded in myself.4 yet, how deep a desire to root, how it just hasn’t been the time; most of all, how lucky i am to be loved and held across time and space.
it is not lost on me the immense blessing and privilege to return home to a love that has given me the world and allowed me to find my own way, a room that stands still, to be able to come back to a life as i know it. i understand that one day this home will no longer be awaiting.
i read this last night before bed—on birthdays, on my birthday—i feel equal parts called out, seen, spoken to:
in moments of clarity, i finally feel liberated, but even then it still takes reminding myself. you are worth it. you have everything you need. choose the people who choose you. and as Lara Pawson put it, Once the decision seems inevitable the courage needed was less than I thought.5
intuition has never failed you.
i wrote these 29 lines beginning with i, like lighting candles on a cake; happy birthday. for years i have had this vision of a cake with only small candles. that’s what i want, i think, telling no one. what a sight. the older i get, the greater a hazard, greater the spectacle.
i clasp my hands and close my eyes, wishing for the same thing every year: for the people i love to be happy, healthy, and safe.
hi! i’m taking the occasion to ask you to please share Objectively with one or two others who you think would enjoy it! it will make my week, honestly.
more coming very soon; the conversation series is returning! and i plan to simply share what’s on my mind more—musings on why we are the way we are, finding fulfilment, design and objects, observations at the café/in the tube, maybe even Love, cuties, etc.—and let the newsletter find its beat. paying heed to Alexander Chee,
Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.6
lastly, a reminder that i really appreciate you being here, and love hearing your thoughts — just hit reply :-)
lol imagine
as Amy Key quoted Yoko Ono in Arrangements in Blue