Well, friends, let's not bury the lede. I dropped out of wine school in January, recently interviewed for but did not get a job back in Amsterdam, and am considering a move to Nice once our lease is up here in Paris. So, you know, just another day in the life.
Should I back up a bit?
Right. So wine school, what's the deal with that? I won't go into an elaborate explanation. The long and short of it is that I made a rather expensive error in judgement about where I thought I should direct my post-bagel business energies. Wine has long been a passion of mine, and as with bread, the more I studied it, the more I wanted to learn. That hasn't changed. But what I couldn't see was the end to which I was ostensibly working. What, exactly, was I doing this for? If you'd have asked me at the time, I would've said that it felt like a sound and promising career path, which could have been true. Just not for me, at least not for now. And if I'm being very frank, I felt a little wary of the relationship I was creating with drinking by making it my job. In any case, knowledge is never wasted on me, and it moves in mysterious ways, so it's plausible that this path will pop up again somewhere down the road. Meanwhile, I am very happy to be the friend that chooses the wine when we get to go out to dinner again.
And then what's this about getting a job back in Amsterdam? A job? Amsterdam? I'm as exhausted by all this flip-flopping as you are. But what can I say? I haven't had a paycheck, much less an income stream in years. Once in a while, when I'm feeling a bit down and out and muddy-brained, I'll impulsively apply for jobs on LinkedIn. I was toeing the finish line with an agency in New York last summer in fact, but in the end they didn't make me an offer, because, I suspect, they could tell my heart wasn't really in it. Although it may have also had something to do with my extended diatribe about how slide decks were where good ideas go to die. Who knows! I think this latest opportunity suffered a similar fate: a rapport dampened by a mutual concern that I might not be fulfilled in this role, even though I kept my opinions on slide decks to myself this time. Anyway, I'm not keen to close any doors of future potential, but I also can't deny feeling a form of relief.
Sometimes I think it's a failure of imagination that I turn back towards the prospect of full-time employment when my ventures don't quite pan out. Maybe it is, sort of. But I worry it's actually something worse: a failure of confidence in my ability to make a living doing what I really want to do, which is to write. The truth is that I've never properly given it a go, skirting around the endless loop of pitching and rejection by way of insulating myself in the safety of self-publishing.
As a journalism student, I wrote a bit for the campus newspaper, but definitely not as much as someone who was there with the specific intent to make it her job. I'd take on occasional music writing gigs just for the price of admission to a show I would've gone to anyway. Then I got a job in design, and then a different job, and then another different job. Sometimes I wrote a blog, but a lot of the time I didn't. I have told this story over and over again, and yet the ending remains a cliffhanger, a lifelong will they/won't they drama between me and my writing career.
It wasn’t really until around four years ago, when I started this newsletter, that I began to take it seriously again, which is to say that I began to regard writing, or ‘being a writer’ as central to my identity. It still makes me wince to even say it; it’s much more comfortable to say that I write, in the way that a certain type of chef might prefer to say that they were just a cook. It lowers the stakes.
At the time, I was working in London and living away from my partner, approaching forty and in need of an outlet for all the spare thoughts rattling around in my head. Initially, my intention was to send out cheerfully inquisitive dispatches to a humble number of friends about what I was cooking or reading at the moment, essentially a penpal who always appreciates, but never expects a reply. But as you, gentle reader, are well-aware, there's always been a certain restless undercurrent to these letters, compelling me to mess around with format and themes and that time I was really into GIFs. My unsettled relationship with being a writer has even given my newsletter an identity crisis.
The question of identity has been on my mind a lot lately, and it's taken me to some surprising places in terms of looking for answers, which–consider yourself warned–you will soon witness in forthcoming missives. In trying to figure out who I am, or who I want to be as a writer, I'd been re-reading some of my past letters as well as some journal entries, looking for a kind of through-line in the narrative. It turns out that identity is precisely what I've been chipping away at the whole time, although less a crisis (whew!) and more along the lines of what sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as an identity project.
According to Giddens, the themes that seem to persist at asserting themselves in my writing–practice, consistency, empathy–are the product of an ongoing and reflexive construction of the self, or an ideal self, anyway. It's like I've been writing my own set of detailed instructions for how I should be, yet not always following them. So there are times when I deconstruct and then reconstruct, and then, inevitably, there are times that I self-destruct.
No one's really had a great year to be sure, but I've definitely been wading through some deep, sticky existential goo. Maybe you have too? We should talk. Writing has, as always, provided a lifeline. Some of that work has made it to the surface in my sputtering attempts to send out this letter with a modicum of consistency, but I hold back a lot, feeling like I should exhibit some restraint, worried that I'm wearing out my welcome in your inbox with all this apparent navel-gazing.
Last night, as I was laboring over how to wrap up this particular letter, my serendipity magnet pulled me towards a podcast I'd had on my to-listen list for awhile. The Long Conversation is a weekly work-shoppy gathering of writers discussing craft and process. In the episode I chose, the moderator, writer Rachel Jepsen interviews Dr. Robert Yagelski, author of Writing As a Way of Being and Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self. Dr. Yagelski, who is also the director of the Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry at SUNY Albany, makes a case for writing as a way of making meaning of the experience of ourselves, the idea that the act itself of writing has meditative, therapeutic potential in our quest for self-knowledge. Writing, it seems, is my identity project. It is my way of being.
Which is why I'm going to stop beating myself up for thinking this is an exercise in self-indulgence, and instead start reframing it as what I believe is my true objective: to be an empathy generator. To write with all of my self reflecting all of your self, with my heart open to yours.
This is, of course, serious business. Later this month, I join an 8-week writers fellowship to help me be a better identity project manager, figuring out its scope, its milestones, its deliverables, and crucially, how to get paid for it. So it'll be hardhat required for awhile here at the identity construction site.
Attention: Woman at Work.
What’s On Deck
Next time you see me, there’ll be some changes that I’m actually quite excited about because I think they’ll help bring this letter (and hence, myself) into better focus and also give me a structure that’ll make it easier to create regularly scheduled programming.
The playlists, however, aren’t going anywhere. Does anyone ever listen to them? Eh, it doesn’t matter. The joy of making them is worth the effort.
But this one is particularly good, just sayin’.