April 17, 2025

the day's progress

_{freshly squeezed is a long-form newsletter on our thoughts, and how we can better support ourselves when left alone with them}

I wrote this a few weeks ago and while I considered scrapping it and starting over because I feel differently now to how I did then and I think it could use more editing (always more editing) and the word count is a little less than what I normally do but because those are all just rules-of-my-own-making, I’ve decided to try sharing it instead of deleting everything just because I’ve told myself I should only share something if it’s guaranteed to be nothing short of excellent.

So here I go, breaking all of my own writerly rules with the hope of finding more joy in my writing endeavors.

It’s wonderful to have you here.

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Earlier this morning, I unloaded a few wall vases, dishes, and tiles from the kiln, still warm from their night in the oven. Some of these pieces I really like, while others are more experimental, a way for my hands to once more find their rhythm with the cold, wet clay.

I haven't felt afraid of my creativity since late last year, and long before I knew what to call this particular type of fear, I felt strongly that there was something unnamed taking root—a kind of noiseless humming that could rearrange the thoughts in my mind without my go ahead.

And like an ocean at the height of a storm, I was drawn to this unnamed thing at its most unruly, so addicted to the way it would pull me up into its beautiful chaos, that I didn’t mind being spat out some time later, disoriented and unable to find my way back to the familiar parts of myself.

So when my therapist recently asked me what it feels like to no longer fear my creative mind, I tell her it’s like putting my face toward the cool morning sun. I tell her it’s almost as if that one time four years ago when I, with all the dramatics I could muster, told my best friend that I didn’t think I would ever create again, didn’t actually happen.

While it now feels as if I've only ever known how to be myself, I suspect this feeling to be a byproduct of this particular moment. Of the way the sun is slowly making its way across the room as I sit here holding my coffee, everything I've ever known and not known and learned and un-learned settled somewhere in the back of my mind. And because of all that, because of everything and nothing at all, I can now, for the most part, exist without fearing my mind.

At the time of writing this, I have designed just over twelve dishes, eight tiles, and seven bowls. There’s this one dish with a fox sleeping in wildflowers and another with a mouse on a mushroom inside of a strawberry patch. I held up the one with the mouse and the strawberries and asked my husband if there was too much going on, and he reassured me that there was, in fact, just the right amount going on.

I have a tendency to worry about what might happen if I were to allow myself to feel all of something. All of the joy or excitement or anger or chaos or passion or uncertainty.

But I like to think that when I am entirely consumed by the act of making something, I forget to tell myself that I am feeling too much of anything, and soon, the strawberries and the mushroom and the mouse and the fox are everything I’ve told myself I shouldn’t feel but am going to dare to feel anyway.

The book I'm reading right now is about a young girl who carries the weight of a death in a form of an imaginary deer, who repeatedly asks her to relive her grief in often cruel and unkind ways. And as I bring my empty cup of coffee to the kitchen and wash my face and get ready for the day, I continue to think about the stories she tells herself and the varying emotions that are tied to them and how when we try to ignore the stories we tell ourselves, they only want to hold on more tightly.

At the end of the day, when the dishes are done and the pottery is made and the tea is brewing and the drawer full of supplements and medicine slides open and I take the pink pill and the white pill and half of the yellow pill, I spread my body out over the living room floor and maybe my neck is hurting and maybe my brain is buzzing and maybe I spiral about what it means to be a good friend or the current state of the world or maybe it’s something else entirely or maybe it’s nothing at all. Either way, I try my best not to feel everything every thought tells me to feel. I try my best to just be on the living room floor.

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A brief note before I go.

It’s a week or so after I initially wrote this and we are now well on our way to being fully packed up and ready to leave the town we’ve called home for the past 11+ years.

And while I’ll write more about this particular topic later (or maybe I won’t, who knows), I did want to tell you about this one tree branch that I’m completely obsessed with: for the past couple of years, this branch has been hanging over from the neighbors yard just outside my current studio/office window, and to my absolute delight, had decided to bloom during this last week of us being here.

Talk soon,
Chloe

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