We're Changing

Starbucks Friday's and my imagined life

I answered a call for submissions weeks ago, about change, within the final months of 2020. It was barely September by then, it was still hot, we were using AC units. Today while my roommate packed her AC unit away into our closet I found I’m still thinking extensively about change. Specifically, I am thinking about change in relation to myself, how my view of it has shifted. At some point in my life, I had attributed change to be a concrete form we take on instead of the sometimes conscious conversations we have with our past selves. Or even so, change I believed was something that happened to us more often than it was something we decided to do. The publication that I submitted to has decided to shut down, not before rejecting me one last time, I harbor no ill will. But I’m sad. I’ve been sad, stagnant, and lonely for these past 14 days going through a routine that was only about surviving, which was fine for a while, but I started to feel a little lost. In a way, it has felt like everything is changing but me. There are times when change happens to us, but for now, the story in my head that I would be discovered by this publication and my world would shift needs to be rewritten or even so, not written at all. I realized in my slump that part of mourning the loss of my imagined life is the decision to become it in another way. All of this to say I must change too. Chloé in Letters is a place of deep joy for me. It started as a mood board in 2017 that I neglected and since then has gone through an aesthetic change as well as a professional one. I asked myself at the end of 2019 to take my education seriously and apply the style I have cultivated in a real way. It also required that I accept that I’m an inconsistent writer. Now I am asking myself to show up as the writer I want to be, to survive a little better than before. With the pandemic, Chloé in Letters has taken to the wayside a bit. It wasn’t at first conscious on my part, but I felt, as I said, stuck with something that I loved but didn’t really capture what it was I wanted to do. I think I have been honest in admitting that poetry is just more marketable on Instagram and it is a second sort of love I have in terms of writing. I want to keep doing it though. I want Chloé in letters, for now, to be the thing that it has become because I love the section of the internet I’ve made. I feel less alone when I post a poem I am proud of. At the same time, I have realized that I actually do know quite a bit about writing, enough to be the person I have wanted to be for a while. People with less talent have done much more at this point. I have a deep love of poetry, but I also love reading, collages, drawing (badly), essays, advice columns, therapy, opinions, and talking. Like Whitman I too contain multitudes. When I thought about this I was looking at my friend’s Instagrams trying to figure out if I could incorporate all these things while keeping it as it was, but it is not at present possible. So then we come back to change, change like Chloé in Letters has always changed, and I have decided what it is that must be done. In my research on freelancing, I have found that the writer's version of making a podcast has become making a newsletter. I have decided to do that. I have also decided to realistically set some soft goals, as my therapist put it this week, about how I want to do this so that I can do it as the inconsistent writer than I am and so that you can enjoy it with consistency. I am trying, as you can see, to become unstuck. I have been wanting desperately to do my writing now now now and I have decided without a degree now can really be right this very minute. So, this is my plan:

On the first Friday of every month, I’ll send you my little love letter. My mom, sister, and I have a tradition called “Starbucks Fridays” that started with us getting drinks on our way to school that has surpassed our teenage years and is still celebrated when we are home. Really though we did it to spend time together. It was an excuse to get an extra ten minutes in the morning singing to the radio. Now it’s my turn to have an excuse to be with you. 

Most newsletters I won’t bore you with a column this long.

I have been doing a lot of scheduling ahead knowing how my creative brain functions sporadically and school drains a lot of that extra creative flow. Sometimes, though, I start projects too fast and want to put out something so badly that I forget who I am as a person. So I am taking a lot of time to prepare this and other newsletters of the future.

No two newsletters will be the same but every single one will have a theme. This one’s theme is, get this, change. 

Newsletters usually come out weekly, but I won’t be so foolish, more often than not I only have one thing to say for an entire month so this will be a monthly little smooch to your inbox.

The whole thing won’t be writing. I simply wish to share the things which influenced what I said that month. I want to include some of the process with which I made the thing you sit down to read, scans (because I always appreciate handwritten notes) maybe a drawing of some cats, or just some things I happened to love. Who knows! 

The most important part of this plan is it is subject to change. Like Chloé in Letters, I am not sure how this will evolve or even devolve, but it is something at the present I want to do, and if you’re willing I’d like for you to witness it. 

Along with this I also want to reserve my right to do my best, but sometimes I warn that my best is not very good. Some months I might have a theme with no column at all, just a quick note, jot, passing opinion about the theme I have decided to send you. This too will be full of love, it might just look a little different than the goal I am setting here and it might not always be profound. That is okay with me and I hope that is also okay with you.

Below this you’ll find your goodie bag, the things that I decided should be included this time around, what got me here, in your inbox. This is how I have decided to show up as the person I have wanted to be. 

Love always,

Chloé

Currently, I am slowly working through the book “Maybe You Should Talk To Someone” by Lori Gottlieb which captures therapy from the therapist’s point of view. Interestingly enough a major theme in this book is change and that is perhaps why I have been thinking about it so much in relation to my life, but its humor and insight have offered me major steps in my own therapy journey which have been hard but revealing. The book is phenomenal and I always have a lot of love to give, but this is 20/10. Here is the part of the newsletter where I show you what I read this month or what captured me, a snag of a quote that has been rattling around in my brain like elevator music, there’s only one this time around.

"But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want to change but nonetheless stay exactly the same." - Lori Gottlieb Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

There’s the very real saying in writing, you have to kill your darlings, but mostly the darlings are the things that started the poem in the first place which is why it’s so hard to do it. I gather my darlings via texts I send myself that I leave unopened until I am ready to make them into a poem. Many of them are cut out in the end because they were the jumping point, the vague idea I was trying to convey, not the nitty-gritty details. Here are a few jots though that didn’t go anywhere (yet). By the way. they aren’t always that good.

"I experience love ineffably and I am a writer. It is a curse I hope to spend my whole life trying to break." October 19th, 2020 1:34 AM

“Somehow it seems more often than not I’m remembering everything because I’m afraid that if I don’t it wouldn’t have happened.” October 28th, 2020 12:58 PM

“I also understand I cannot rid him from me, but I can forgive myself for the place he will have in my heart, and the fact that by living there I will consequently think of and remember him.” November 2nd, 2020 1:13 AM

Here is a little look at how this month came together! 

This is a reverse Q&A, where I ask you questions I asked myself and you can think about them maybe even tell me their answers later, or you can think “that’s a weird question” and forget about it forever until one day at lunch you might know the answer. 

How do we mourn losses for things we never had? 

What is one small change I can do for myself to feel a little better right now?

What has been my relationship with change?

Here’s some stuff to take you home, keepsakes for the rest of the month.

I made this about a week before I announced the newsletter and was beyond excited I thought I was gonna burst. Share it with the world if you’d like I know I wanted to.

These are some images I saw, liked, thought about, and made an impact if ever so slight, to the thing you just read!  See the details up close and personal here

Congratulations! You made it to the end and I hope you enjoyed 97% of it, found some love, some comfort, and a relaxed state where you were totally yourself. That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Feel free to save or share your favorite parts and tag me @chloeinletters (do I sound like an influencer? Has my ego gone to my head? All this change?)

My Instagram is @chloeinletters where the DMs are few and far between but checked, cared, and loved for. 

My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go. 

My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me 

My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here! 

Here’s to another month, change, and Starbucks Fridays.

Love always 

Chloé