The quiet act of putting something into words
On what happens in the space between feeling something and finding the language for it. Something happens before the words come. There is a period, sometimes very short and sometimes much longer, where the thing exists but has not yet been said. Where it is present, fully and unmistakably, but has not yet taken a […]
What we carry and what we let go
On the weight we choose to keep, and the quiet work of putting something down. You are carrying something right now. Not metaphorically, or not only metaphorically. There is actual weight. The particular accumulation of things unresolved, things unsaid, things that happened and were never quite processed, things you are still waiting to find out. […]
A letter to the version of you that didn’t know yet
On the strange mercy of not knowing what is coming, and what you might say across that distance. There was a version of you that did not know yet. Not about everything. Just about the particular thing that changed things. The thing that, once it happened, divided your life quietly into before and after. The […]
Giving yourself more time
At some point, without quite deciding to, most of us set a deadline for ourselves. Not a formal one. Not written down anywhere. Just a quiet internal agreement about when things should be sorted. When we should have arrived at the version of ourselves we are working toward. When the uncertainty should have resolved into […]
How to say the thing you never say out loud
On the words that wait, and what happens when you finally find them. There is something you have not said. You know what it is. It came to you just now, or it was already there, sitting quietly in the place where the unsaid things live. It has been there for a while. Not festering, […]
The things that stay when everything changes
On what holds when the ground shifts, and why some words outlast the moments that made them. There are periods in a life when everything moves at once. You know the kind. Not just one thing changing, but several, arriving together or in quick succession, until the landscape of your daily life looks almost unrecognisable […]
Writing to someone you used to be
On the strange tenderness of looking back, and what you might say if you could. There is a version of you that no longer exists. Not in a morbid sense. Just in the ordinary way that people change. The you from ten years ago, or five, or even two, had a different sense of what […]
What it means to leave something behind
On the quiet wish to be remembered, and what we actually want to pass on. Most of us will not build something that lasts a hundred years. Not a building. Not a business. Not a body of work that gets studied or archived or referred to by people who never met us. That is not […]
The words you keep meaning to write
On the letters that live in your head, unfinished, unsent, and still waiting. There is someone you have been meaning to write to. You know who it is. The name came to you just now, before you had finished reading that sentence. It has been there for a while, sitting quietly at the back of […]
Slowing down in a world that doesn’t
Why writing by hand, or just writing, might be the most radical thing you do today. Something arrived in your notifications while you were reading that first line. You may not have checked it yet. You will, probably, before you finish this. Not because you want to. Just because that is what we do now. […]