Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

- The Waves, Virginia Woolf

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It’s been four years since I’ve written a newsletter. Over a decade ago I had a tinyletter, and then I had a substack, and then when I found out how evil substack was, I stopped publishing my writing online entirely. My life had become increasingly smaller from the strictures of illness and isolation and I was weary of sharing. I wanted to elide a public self and instead see what shape absence allowed, whether it was large enough I could slip through and become someone else.

I’ve been online for most of my life—I have beloved friends whom I’ve known since I was thirteen that I met on blogger, and my partner and I crossed paths on flickr in our early teens through mutual friends before we ever met in real life. I was able to escape the isolation and confinement of a homeschooled adolescence through the internet, and thanks to the photography business I began in high school, was able to physically escape said isolation by flying to visit friends I’d previously only known through their respective blogs. Sharing my life became intertwined with living it; two threads bound together so tight I hadn’t realized there was ever a boundary between them.

The last decade of my life has been spent first unraveling then shaking off the detritus from the first decade online—detritus composed of years spent accumulating information about who I was to other people, what my writing and photos and art meant to them, what my life looked like outside myself. Understandably, through this winnowing process, I’ve grown more private.

More pertinently perhaps has been the ways chronic illness further disrupted any explicative desire. As I watched the foundations of my life collapse, the constants I had counted on to know myself—my writing, my closest friendships, my hobbies—disintegrated. Suddenly, I was not writing because I could not, and when I could, the words that came out were rudimentary and formless, wreathed in the fugue state typical of brain fog. I wrote almost exclusively in homonyms and homophones, albeit accidentally. I lost the vocabulary of my life as the grammar and syntax I had to understand it seemed perpetually out of reach. If the right word is merely a matter of extension to find purchase, my arm was always just shy of the next branch.

When I looked back at my writing before (if there is a clear delineation before/after illness, my life is made up of years straddling the line), it seemed as if a stranger was speaking to me across the divide. What I could answer in response felt inadequate, drained of an essential quality or energy. It was not ease I missed, but the tussle of thought, when I could move from root to branch to crown and consider them in entirety.

I feel cautiously optimistic in claiming a fuller capacity in my current state as a sick person but claim it nonetheless. Thanks to a combination of factors—moving from NYC to Minneapolis in 2024; finding supportive doctors who’ve run tests, sent out referrals, prescribed medication, and generally allied with me in my search for care; taking aforementioned medication and improving my energy; leaving my abysmal and horrifically extractive contract position in the winter of 2023 and transitioning to freelancing full-time with a smaller client base (a transition I have been able to make thanks to my partner having both a full-time and decent-paying position); drastically scaling back my energy expenditures and commitments outside of work between April 2025 and April 2026 (again, thanks to my partner); having a myomectomy this April to remove a GRAPEFRUIT sized fibroid (goodbye to that bitch); becoming fully estranged from my family of origin; being loved well by friends IRL and online (clx3 forever); sleeping in for once in my life; and crying almost every single day—I have reached a point with a little more stability, if not stasis.

I have energy more than half the days to do what makes me feel myself, to complete my tasks, to participate in my life and the lives of my partner and friends. If I’m careful and it’s not too humid, I’m able to take a walk once or twice a week, I can wash dishes most days at least once and potentially make lunch or dinner for my partner and myself, I have enough capacity to paint and read, and perhaps most importantly: I’m writing again! If my writing voice feels different to me still, it’s a difference of years and changes in temperament, taste, and attention. Also, did I mention, I finally turned thirty? Thank fuck. 𓅯｡𖦹°

In April, I spent a third of the month writing poems with my friend Charlotte (before my surgery derailed my optimistic attempts at daily lucidity and strength), and I’m currently drafting a sort of gothic fantasy novel about doomed twins. I’ve also been micro-blogging on special.fish. And now, I’m writing here too.

As many of us are, I’ve been trying to move away from social media as much as realism allows and this newsletter is part of that attempt. While I’ll be sharing art updates here as well, I’m also hoping to use this space like I used to use my beloved blog fifteen years ago, before I considered anyone was watching—as a room in my life with which to point at the various light throughout the day and say look.

What I’m…

Reading: I finished The Wheel of Time in May after spending six months tearing through all nearly 12,000 pages (and often staying up until 3 or 4am to do so), and while I’m now itching to begin A Song of Ice and Fire, I’ve decided to catch up on other book on my to read (or reread) list until later this year. June’s reading log:

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell ⊹ Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara ⊹ Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke ⊹ How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu ⊹ Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell ⊹ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ⊹ Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simic ⊹ Persuasion by Jane Austen ⊹ Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso ⊹ The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson ⊹ Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin ⊹ Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

Watching: Yi Yi, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Throne of Blood, Harold and Maude, Shrek and Shrek 2 (well rounded).

Eating: With some beautiful rhubarb from the farmers market, I made this rhubarb upside down cake for a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago—it was a bit too sweet for my taste but went over well with friends and my partner. Otherwise grain bowls with miscellaneous vegetables remain our staple meal, lately topped with homemade tzatziki, hummus, and/or spicy harissa. I’ve also enjoyed some beautiful plums.

Listening to: Playlists I made in 2017 while living in Seattle, Here Comes That Crow, all of The Last Dinner Party’s discography, One Without, the trees outside shaking out their leaves like musty dresses.

Painting: Almost entirely finger painting from life on my phone these days. I love the simplicity of this practice: phone plein airs remind me that nothing is lost nor required to be perfect. And perhaps just as importantly: there is no rush. I arrive at my life each day—here is the oak outside my window, the stranger on the bus, the near-empty toothpaste left on the bathroom counter, each in their particular light.

I’ve also been chipping away at two larger paintings I feel enthusiastic about—both that I began months to years ago and have returned to now with more space (and skill) to paint them as I initially envisioned. I feel like I’m in a transitional stage with my art and am making all effort to listen and attend to what comes through. A small piece…

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All for now—I have no certainty nor plan around the frequency of these newsletters but it feels good to write in this way again. I’m off to prep some rhubarb for dessert, thanks for reading. ♡

xo Han