New year, same me
On rejecting the tiresome mandate of reinventing ourselves in favour of doing more of what brings us joy.
“Roughly, what do you say you have in here, about one thousand?” my sister asks as she inspects my room.
“Yes, I think it must be something like that, maybe more”
“Plus the ones back home” she adds without looking at me, focused on the task at hand.
“Plus the ones back home, yes. How many do you reckon there are? Home, I mean”
“No idea, but I’d say about 400. Maybe 500 all together. It’s difficult to tell because they’re all in boxes”
We look at each other for a moment, both pausing in our chat to do a quick mental calculation, each of us trying to retrieve from memory the number of clear plastic boxes under our beds, piled up on top of one another and also scattered in other rooms back home.
Neither of us know for sure how many books we really own (she in Paris, me in London, together back home in Spain) as we’ve never had -and we aren’t sure we ever will- enough space anywhere we’ve ever lived to create a proper library and display them in shelves, instead of having to store them in boxes, each of them containing an envelope with either hers or my handwriting detailing the contents to avoid frustrating searches when we need a specific title.
I can tell she’s determined to establish how many books I have here in London after having conducted a careful examination of my bookshelves and bumped into bags full of books every time she attempts to get in and out of the bed. “If you keep buying books at this rate you can probably open your own bookshop” she tells me matter of factly as she continues her inspection, and I bet I can hear the wheels of her brain spinning at full speed as she inspects the contents of shelves, piles, boxes and bags, muttering numbers to herself in a half-whisper.
The truth is that I love books, probably more so than I love reading, and I do love reading. I can’t tell where this comes from as to the best of my knowledge no one in my immediate family shares this passion of mine, which I admit verges on obsession as on average I buy a couple of books a week, whether I read them or not. I think it is a way to compensate for the lack of bookshops in the place I grew up and although there was the school and the town library, the only other option was a newsagent. I would have to wait until I went to university in a different city to enter a bookshop for the first time, which turned out to be a rather disappointing experience as it mostly sold textbooks.
It wouldn’t be until much later, when I first lived in the US, that I would experienced what I have called the Barnes & Noble syndrome -the book lover’s equivalent to the Stendhal’s syndrome- when I was so overjoyed by the sight of endless bookshelves that I almost peed on my pants with excitement and for five minutes straight I was unable to articulate full sentences, and could only emit little screams with half-words, which prompted the friend who had drove me to the bookshop to ask multiple times if I was ok as she was sure I was having a stroke. I don’t think she had ever seen anything quite like it. Neither did I.
I’m lucky that I like accumulating books instead of trash. Otherwise I would have a serious problem and my obsession, as well as the stench, would have attracted the attention of social services long ago. I guess that as long as my sister only trips over Penguin Classics editions and not piles of random shit I’ve picked up on the street all is good and I am allowed to indulge into my literary addiction for a little longer.
Because here’s the thing: if you are obsessed with something that society deems acceptable, even respectable, you have a passion, not a problem.
If you love painting and drawing, writing, composing music, photography or any other activity of a creative nature you are thought of as talented and driven and worth of admiration, perhaps you may even find yourself at the receiving end of undisclosed desires of sexual nature. On the other hand, if you’re into video games, sci-fiction conventions and cosplay, or Lego you’ve probably been told to grow up and behave like an adult. If instead you’re deep down into crochet, gardening, DIY and knitting before your 40s you probably should consider looking into a good pension plan sooner rather than later. And if I were you I would seriously look into having a will drafted.
As luck would have it my book obsession falls into the set of socially respectable, and potentially attractive passions one can have in life so I entertain it generously and often. Any excuse is valid to get a new book.
For instance, since my sister was visiting I thought what better way to start the year than go to the bookshop and get her a book, while getting other two for myself. In my defence they were poetry books (Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the excellent Simon Armitage versions), which don’t count as we don’t read enough poetry nowadays and I’m trying to do my best keeping it alive on behalf of 7 billion people. And the day she left I was sad, so while I walked her to the bus stop I thought I may as well go to the bookshop seeing it was already on my way. I got a couple more books but it was a therapeutic buy.
And yesterday it was the day when in Spain people are enjoying the presents the Three Wise Men brought on the 5th January at night, so what do you want me to do? Renounce my country ancestral traditions and have no present at all just because I live in the perfidious Albion, where Christmas celebrations are a joke, last one day and no one remembers what happened anyway because they were drunk the whole time? Please, have a heart and some common sense. I already had to eat panettone yesterday instead of Roscón de Reyes and missed the cabalgata one more year. Of course I had to buy a book to survive the despair of living in this country at such a critical time of the year for me. Three of them, to be precise, but it was a Roald Dahl set, all three books as new, and they were £5.99 in total at the charity shop. You can hardly call that spending. If anything, rescuing.
The problem is that when one buys so many books, and at the rate I do, at some point one needs to face reality, grab the bull by the horns and come to terms with the underlying issue: my reading pace is not on par with my book buying habit. I guess this is what people mean by being an adult and assume your own responsibilities. I have to read more. Actually, let me rephrase that: I just have to go back to reading, which is something I loved as a child and a teenager.
So much so that when the conversations of the past days with my sister touched on our memories growing up, I told her that the only clear memories I have involve me being glued to a book, while she could remember events and conversations I was completely oblivious to despite having experienced them. For instance, I can tell you with no shadow of doubt that Vladivostok is the last stop of the Transiberian because I read it in Doctor Zhivago 24 years ago, but if you asked me about that time my father fell from the roof and my mother thought he had died, I would tell you you’re making it up despite I was the one who told my sister when she got home from school and found me home alone as my parents were at the hospital.
It always fascinates me what each of us has retained from our years growing up and what that says about ourselves.
For me it’s definitely the love for reading and books, perhaps because I was happy between their pages. Books are the reason I love writing and they are responsible for how my life has turned out. Thinking of me reading is thinking of me being happy, feeling full of hope for the future, for the adventures that awaited even if I didn’t know back then and nothing in my immediate environment suggested I would ever lead the life I’ve ended up having.
As a child, and later as a teenager, a book was not only a way to pass the time and lose track of time, it was a key to a new world that had nothing in common with the one I lived in and where the characters I read about seemed all to live in distant lands where wonderful things happened to them unlike the uneventful life people led around me and to which no doubt my circumstances would guide me to. I remember wanting to be like these fascinating people I read about and become the protagonist of my own story, not a secondary character in a plotless book.
At the end of 2022, days before flying back home for Christmas, I was in Paris attending my sister’s PhD dissertation at La Sorbonne, an event that lasted for over four hours (without the reception afterwards) and which required me to retrieve all the conjugations I knew from the darkest corners of my brain in order to follow the conversation about her research into Pierre Bayle, a French philosopher from the XVII century. My sister’s dissertation focused on Bayle’s idea of the passions at a period of great political and religious unrest in Europe and how he contemplated them as driving forces behind the feelings of religious zeal of his time.
During those four hours and a half in which my sister and the academic committee discussed every aspect of her research many thoughts crossed my mind. But there is one I remember very clearly: I was proud of how my sister had pursued her childhood dream.
While some bits and bobs may have got lost in translation (there’s only so much one can retain about religion wars in XVII century France), that much I understood clearly while I looked at her speaking in that wooden room with high-ceiling bookshelves in the heart of La Sorbonne, a setting that neither of us could have imagined ourselves in all those years ago, when she looked up from the book she was reading in bed about the Queens of Spain and told me she loved History and that her dream was to become a university professor. Although the circumstances didn’t make that a plausible option at the time, she never thought that was a reason to reconsider her career plans. She focused on chasing her dream and what she loved, despite the many difficulties and hurdles she encountered along the way.
And here she was, one step closer to achieving the future she had imagined for herself as a child. That realisation, seeing what being loyal to what you have always loved and where it can get you, felt like an electric shock for I was well aware that I, on the other hand, had chosen pragmatism and I was at a point in my life where being practical didn’t cut it anymore.
Like art, life needs to be beautiful to look at, not something that makes sense, and for that we need to give free rein to pursuing what makes it exciting and unpredictable: our passions.
I had become someone who was drifting further and further apart from the adult me that I had imagined I would be as a child - someone who would spend every waking hour reading, writing, talking about books because she loved those things to the point of losing track of time, or forgetting to eat or sleep, when immersed in a good story. “Se te van a hacer los sesos agua con tanto libra, niña” (your brain is going to melt from reading so much, girl) was my mum’s way of starting a conversation with me growing up as she always caught me reading.
I naively thought that adults were lucky because no one told them what to do and so they could spend all the time reading. What was the point of growing up otherwise? The words capitalism, rent, bills, inflation, pension, and burnout were not part of my vocabulary yet and in hindsight I wished they had remained so. Life was far better when I didn’t have to worry about the practicalities of living it.
In one of the many lengthy conversations I had with my sister over Christmas at home, where we had time to talk about her upcoming relocation from Paris to a new city in France as as a result of a post-doctoral contract to join an international research project, she told me that she always felt I had chosen pragmatism over passion perhaps because I am the older, and she wondered what my life would have turned out to be had I followed my heart or had someone else as an example to follow.
“Well, that’s what I decided to do in 2023 after attending your PhD dissertation” I said to her. “I realised I had given up something I always enjoyed just because I thought it was impractical. I could never see myself making a living out of books, or writing, but I’m happier now, and I feel happier, after I’ve given myself permission to finally dedicate time and energy to things I’ve always loved because I enjoy them.”
And said things have always been the same since: reading, books, writing and learning languages. Last year I enrolled in French classes again, I completed two writing courses, one in London and one in Oxford, I bought an insane amount of books (but that has always been the case since I got a proper job), and I tried my best to read some of them. 31 to be specific. Getting there with the ratio. And last but not least I started sharing what I write via this newsletter, letting go of any expectation or outcome as my yoga teachers have showed me.
Here’s the thing: in the past I welcomed the idea of setting intentions for a new year and believed in the “new year, new me” motto as a good way to kickstart things, although how different can a person be from 31st December to 1st January? Well, it depends on how many units of alcohol they’ve had as first-hand experience has taught me. Leaving intoxication aside, most of us move in a continuum, without big oscillations between one day from the next, unless something clicks and we start feeling unease with the version of ourselves we have become. Like I did that day at La Sorbonne.
Because we always become something different to what we originally were, and that’s not always a bad thing as we can’t be the same person we were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Life happens to us and as a result we change. We become a new version of ourselves, maybe not at the tick of the clock on midnight, but we evolve and with any luck that’s usually for the better as we turn wiser, calmer, more grounded.
The issue comes when we associate constantly evolving into new and improved versions of ourselves with maturity and in its name we let go of things that make us happy because we consider them inappropriate for our age. Perhaps what we should do with the arrival of a new year, instead of trying to shed our old skin in favour of yet another shiny self, is to remember when we’ve been the happiest and try to stick to that version of ourselves, regardless of what society thinks is suitable at whatever stage of life we are at. As long as you’re into legal stuff and everyone consents, all is fair game. But I must insist: if the new you that has emerged in 2024 has started to show interest in some dubious hobbies, do consider having a chat with a lawyer. Someone needs to inherit the crochet hooks and yarn when you unexpectedly pass away from the adrenaline rush of getting that pattern right.
And now allow me to open a parenthesis to mention that since joining Substack I’ve come across innumerable publications, posts and comments to said content voicing a similar message, or two actually.
On the one hand -and something I completely agree with- that it is never too late to resume a creative passion and how this platform has allowed many to do so by giving them the tools to share their writing and discover engaging content they couldn’t find elsewhere. On the other hand, and perhaps because many people have seen the potential of monetising their newfound passions here -the medium is the message as McLuhan said- I’ve come across an equal number of content on how to make your content profitable and turn followers into paid subscribers. And please don’t get me wrong: It is only fair to be paid for what one creates, especially if one is a full-time writer (seeing we’re on a writing platform) and has been so for all their life. And it is equally fair to want an audience and to want them to enjoy what you create to the point they want to pay for it.
My concern, for lack of a better word, is that we’re living in a world where everything has to be capitalised in order to exist, to have a reason to be created, and sometimes that is the very thing that crushes the seed of creativity right at its root, preventing any of its fruits to fully form. I believe it is necessary to state the importance of engaging in any creative hobby or activity for the sake of it, especially if we have denied ourselves the possibility to do so for whatever reason. Otherwise we will become frustrated with a thing that should be a source of joy but also of play, and we will be doing ourselves a disservice as we don’t get many opportunities to be playful as adults and engage in things for the sheer pleasure they bring to us.
Past a certain age we all approach most of our activities with a practical mindset as time and energy become scarce commodities. And while that ensures that we remember we are adults with a job to do, bills to pay, kids to pick up, vegetables in the fridge to eat and rubbish to put out, it is also a bit of a shame that we can’t say ‘I’m going out to play with Bill’ in the middle of the day when we’re tired of it all. Not because we really can’t, but more realistically because Bill probably has his own set of terrible job, outrageous bills, annoying kids, rotting vegetables and smelly rubbish to deal with and can’t really play with you right now, dear.
To close this parenthesis, at the end of last year I was moderating a panel on creativity and artificial intelligence where the intention was to help demystify some ideas around AI and illustrate how it can also be a tool to enhance creativity. I shared the example of someone I know whose father has always enjoyed writing as a hobby but found plotting difficult and confusing, so he wasn’t writing as much lately. However, thanks to ChatGPT this person was now, at 75, more enthusiastic than he had ever been about creating stories as he could play with different ideas that ChatGPT turned into potential plots, that he in turn could develop further. He was in awe of such a thing could be done, almost as if by magic, that now he’s trying new ideas every day just for fun. Technology had given him the opportunity to be playful again doing something he enjoyed.
In the same way that it’s never too late to pursue a passion, we’re never too old to approach what we love with the same genuine excitement we had as children. Bottom line: Don’t let your practical adult self get in the way of your enthusiast younger self.
I always wrote as a child, as a teenager and later as a young adult - diaries, letters, short stories, poems, I even won a couple of writing competitions too… yes, I was that child. I wrote with no expectation or agenda, although getting books as a prize in the case of the competitions was a clear incentive. The more, the better especially as we didn’t have bookshops were I grew up. Other than that, a child doesn’t know about being successful or making money to pay the bills, they only know they love to repeat what brings them joy and for me the trifecta of bliss was made of writing, reading, and being surrounded by books.
I studied English so I could spend time doing what I already loved and getting a degree for it. There was no question about it. And then one day I decided that books, and reading and writing couldn’t get me a job abroad, which was my ultimate goal, or a job at all for all I knew, and so I focused on other things. The practical, sensible things that lead to jobs that pay the rent. While I kept reading and have never stopped loving books, I removed writing for my life and with that I also removed a big source of joy. This is something I was only able to admit it to myself last year, when the gentle rhythm of French phonemes uttered by my sister and her academic committee as they discussed passions must have activated a switch inside me that had been off for decades, and which sent a short but clear message once it went back on: Do more of what you love.
Those were the words I lived by in 2023 and along with reducing significantly my screen time (as per the dreaded notifications my phone sends me every Monday) they have brought back so much joy into my life, proving a very important point: the things that usually make us happy have always been there all along, we only need to look back in time, and within ourselves, and think of what we enjoyed doing for hours on end just for the sake of it, when being practical or sensible wasn’t even an option because we didn’t know what that meant anyway.
In 2023 I became a past me, or rather I went back to who I had forgotten I was: a child that loved books and stories, and could feel them very intensely, forgetting about the world around her which only existed in the measure it was contained in the pages she held between her tiny hands. I gave myself permission to do more of what I love regardless of the outcome.
All of a sudden I was 7 again and was crying my eyes out because, in the end, the nightingale died for nothing but by the time I arrived to read about its tragic ending and the tears were forming in my eyes, I was already transformed by the power of words. And from that day I wanted nothing but to experience that feeling again, that mysterious magic contained in a few pages, in appearance innocuous but capable of devastating force. And I wanted to learn how to create that emotion. At such a young age I already had given myself permission to love what I loved, but somehow I forgot it as I grew up.
Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin for me - a connection with parts of me that I am unable to access otherwise and incapable of expressing in conversation. I had subconsciously silenced myself by removing writing from my life for so many years and it was time I recovered my creative voice.
In 2024 the intention is to stay the same and so far I’m glad to report that a week into the new year I’ve already bought an insane amount of books, finished one, and started three, including War and Peace. I’ve signed up for a new writing course in the summer at Oxford and can’t wait to be back in the city of dreaming spires (and Blackwell’s, let’s not forget about Blackwell’s) and I’m considering a new French course to join in February.
Perhaps this one needs a bit of thinking because going to French classes requires me to take annual leave and I need to use it wisely. As my sister rightly put it when I told her I was trying to figure out when I could visit her: “Don’t you think it’s a bit ridiculous to use your holiday on this French course when you could come visit me in France instead and speak French with local people?” And that in a nutshell is why she has a PhD and I don’t.
Most importantly in 2024 I want to keep indulging that child and make sure she knows she has always permission to get lost into the pages she reads and the words that she writes, and that she has everything in her to create the life she dreamed about all those years ago. Because, after all, that same child has eventually become the protagonist of her own story, living her own adventures in a land called abroad, just as she thought she would one day.
Why should I change her? If anything, she needs to keep following her passions.
Abroad is an independent publication about identity and belonging, living in between cultures and languages, the love of books, music, films, creativity, life in London, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.