Hello —

I’m so happy to be here writing this to you, and to be writing more in general. For now, my goal is to write one essay or piece of short fiction monthly. For me, the trick is in the not being too precious with everything that I write. To write and edit and send and make mistakes and take what I’ve learned and do it all over again.

And for those of you that are paid subscribers to this newsletter, I included a little FAQ at the end of this email on how to access your account, and where to go if you have more questions.

One last little thing: Freshly Squeezed (what you’re reading now) is home to all of my personal essays and fictional stories. If you’d like to stay updated on my other creative projects, please subscribe to my monthly digest here.

This month’s essay is brought to you by the floor of my studio, which is where I did most of my writing from.

I hope you enjoy!
Chloe

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Outside the snow is falling and inside I'm on the floor typing next to Ochi the cat while she cleans herself on the pink chair with the sheepskin rug. My stomach hurts but this peppermint tea is helping and I'm wondering if it would be too cold to go on a walk later and if the thoughts that are beneath these thoughts will eventually make their way to the surface, disruptive and loud and insistent on taking up more space than I have to give them.

I stare at the wall thinking of every time I've started and stopped something and how my head feels swollen and that after years of trying, I think I’ve finally figured out how I’d like to relate to my health—how to better work and manage and tend to and rest and create and keep going alongside the on-going’s of my physical body.

There's popcorn in the kitchen that I may consider eating as a snack after our walk and anytime I think about everything I’d like to do all at once, I worry I’ll begin to expand and expand until I'm nothing but bone dust and organ soup and I’m certain that the only thing that is keeping me solid is knowing that I'm writing, writing in my home with Ochi the cat whom is now fast asleep and the snow outside that continues to fall and fall and the air that fills the gaps between each inhale and exhale.

My feet are now numb with sleep but I don’t want to move to wake them, I don't want to stop writing because I worry that if I step away I’ll lose what I was going to say but maybe that's the whole point, that what I write now isn’t suppose to be the same as what I write later and that not being in complete control of where this is going can be kind of scary but also kind of wonderful.

And maybe it's in the figuring out that I grow stagnant, unable to move forward with whatever I'm making or writing or wanting to make or write. To keep zooming in closer and closer to the inner-most-workings of my mind, only to realize that in the process of zooming in, I've lost touch with how I feel right now, and that maybe the me right now doesn’t want to be kind to the part of me that needs more kindness. To the part of me that is insecure and angry and impatient and always looking for a reason to change her mind. To start again and again.

It's still snowing at 10:00am the following morning and the idea of having breakfast has only just crossed my mind because I’ve been too busy thinking about how silent the snow is. About how it’s only when the giant gusts of wind push it through the branches of the trees and against the side of your house that you, sitting on the other side of the wall drinking your now-cold coffee, notice it’s even there.

Last night after finishing Mina's Matchbox, a book by Yoko Ogawa, I stayed there on the floor to continue my thinking. Thinking about Mina and Pochiko the tiny hippo and Tomoko, Mina’s cousin, and the big, big house they called home until my own world dimmed and the pillows of snow glowed through the window and all of my thoughts turned into elaborate and entirely nonsensical dreams—herds of hippos and abandoned zoo’s and piles of books hidden inside tiny matchboxes.

Thanks to Yoko’s book, this morning I woke up feeling inspired and decided to prepare myself for a writing session by boiling the kettle and brewing some black tea and looking out the window before beginning to type and delete and type and delete, telling myself that at least I sat down and at least I’m trying and at least I made this tea in my favorite mug.

To uncover more clues on how I can learn to be kinder to the part of me that I don't want to be kind to, I have found it helpful to observe how I create, because it seems to me that the way in which we relate to and organize and implement our creative projects, experiments, tasks, and ideas into our daily lives, says a lot about how we choose to relate to ourselves when by ourselves.

For instance, just because I like to create complex organizational systems, does not mean that I must also use these complex organizational systems that I create. And just because I feel inspired to write a story about a herd of hippos on their way to an abandoned library or design an owl with a crown on a candlestick holder, does not mean I am required to use or even like the end result.

It just means that by not holding on so tightly or being overly precious with the ideas I have or things I make, I can give myself more room to experiment and have fun with different mediums and methods that maybe, just maybe, help to better support the part of me I don’t want to be kind to.

Two hours later I'm holding my phone and listening to my grandpa recite Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a poem by Walt Whitman. This recording was taken on March 25, 2018, five days before my grandpa died. It was during this time that I became somewhat obsessed with poetry, and my grandpa, having always been unwaveringly enthusiastic about whatever his grandchildren were up to (baseball, fishing, photography, and so on) suggested we read a few poems together, and because this particular familial situation had most of us family all living in one relatively small space, everyone soon joined in, contentedly discussing poetry for hours on end.

The recording ends and the day carries on and I continue to imagine how excited he'd be to hear that it's now 2025 and I'm still writing and learning about writing and figuring out how I want to write, exclaiming, “no way, pottery! Yes, do more studio tours! That’s so wonderful,” after hearing about my latest creative endeavor.

I now know that the only way that I'm going to get better at anything, whether that thing is writing, drawing, cooking, painting, pottery, public speaking, being kinder to myself, etc., is by practicing and keeping at it, not fixating on the what if’s or the opinion of that one person I used to be close friends with but haven’t talked to in years. Just making things to see how it feels making things.

For me, when it comes to writing, it’s no longer about how much or how often I write, but about making some of what I do write available to be read and enjoyed by those who’d like to read and enjoy it; without ever hitting send or publish or making my art available for those around me to enjoy, I worry that my relationship to the things I create will grow stagnant and one-sided.

To dilute my own expectations and disperse my creative ambitions, while continuing to engage with the world at large, my hope is that I will no longer be relying on any one person or thing to produce all of my happiness and instead, writing to write—to find joy in the time spent with my own imagination while continuing to seek out other artists and their art and other authors and their writing, finding inspiration and motivation in imaginations entirely unlike my own.

Another day has gone by and now we sit with our preferred writing devices spread out across the coffee shop’s countertop, scooting our chairs back and folding ourselves into a conversation that did not end until hours later when we packed up our things and cleared away our empty mugs and slid back into our icy cars because it was too cold to stand outside and we both had places to be.

While we call this our weekly co-writing session, it’s really just an excuse to ask how that trip last weekend went or if you got the results back from your blood test or oh yeah, I loved what you wrote about that one thing in your last newsletter. We’ll cross and uncross our legs a thousand times and refill our mugs with more drip coffee and talk about everything but the things we came here to talk about.

The writing does come. Maybe not in the coffee shop where the winter sun warms the backs our hands wrapped around mugs, both agreeing that the only way we'll know what works and what doesn't is by trying something on and seeing how it feels alongside who we are right now.

And maybe not when you do sit down to write and you don't like how the words sound when you say them out loud to the empty room and so you shut your computer and pick up your cat and go to the window to watch the birds fluff their feathers on snowy branches for what feels like hours when you have an idea and decide to try again.

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