There are a million reasons not to.

 

For about a year I figured the best way to write more would be to read a lot about how to write more. After skimming past the silly, pestering step “in order to write more, you must WRITE MORE,” I always got stuck on the intimidating powerhouse “get up early + meditate = become a genius.”

I am an afternoon person. It is the least glamorous of the time-of-day aviary creatures, but there you go. Not an early bird, not a night owl. I love bedtime and going to sleep and I hate getting up in the morning.

I need a solid hour of stumbling around the apartment with a bad attitude in the morning before I can identify myself in time and space; the ability to externalize takes an additional hour. I’ve tried meditating, but even on my most well-rested days, I get so relaxed I usually end up taking a nap sitting on the floor.

 

 

What’s an afternoon girl to do, then? Write in the afternoons, I suppose. Winter in Holland looks like 7:30a.m. all day anyway, so does it even really matter?

Now that it is the afternoon, what do I write about?

I used to have so much to say that I carried around notebooks plural to collect all the thoughts. I would repeat a line to myself over and over while I was driving so I wouldn’t lose it by the time I pulled over and wrote it down.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with the dream of being a real writer. I think it would actually be easier to write if I didn’t have that secret wish. As it is, every nascent flash of an idea gets scrutinized for quality and potential until it implodes like a black hole, sucking away a little bit of my confidence with it.

A few months ago I heard some shatteringly good advice from RuPaul. Although I get serious bouts of anxiety and self-doubt on a regular basis, when I was soaking up life tips from drag gurus my confidence was at record, not-since-puberty lows. I was reeling from culture shock and expat fatigue, and I felt cripplingly isolated. The negative voice in my head had never been louder or more precise. RuPaul’s advice? That voice (Ru calls it the “Saboteur”) doesn’t go away and trying to silence it is a pointless waste of energy. (A more worthwhile endeavor, RuPaul insists, is to spend more time building up a positive voice. Don’t waste your time pushing away the Saboteur, spend your time nurturing positivity to counteract it.)

I’m not sure it’s realistic to think I’ll ever attain RuPaul or Yeezy levels of confidence, or that I’ll ever think my voice is necessary. But I have loosened my requirements a bit for what is “worth saying” by settling into a more neutral position of caring less.

It takes a lot of energy to sustain the self-doubt machine. If I can’t banish it entirely, at least I can try not to feed it as much. I don’t think my ideas are brilliant or that my voice is unique, but I’m working on convincing myself that that doesn’t really matter.

What matters is I love to write, so I’m going to do that. I’m going to try to relax the filter and worry less about what I write and more that I write.

I was pestering Trenton for a long time to make a podcast with me about the expat experience, or more broadly, our life right now as we travel, meet new people, and exist as unmarried child-free adults. I jotted down a few notes about potential topics and outside the context of creating written content I realized, to my surprise, I actually do have something to say. I do have stories to tell.

So, here we go.

Starting at the beginning. Slowing down and writing it out.

The first time the possibility of moving to Amsterdam entered my head, it seemed like a far flung fantasy, too absurd to even properly consider because I was positive it would never happen. And yet, hopeless optimist that I am, I couldn’t help myself. Pretty much as soon as I found out Trenton’s company had an office in Amsterdam, I started to daydream. I would drop little hints, asking if the possibility ever occurred, would he consider moving to another city? What about another country, how crazy would that be??