I Found Myself, and Now You Can Find Me, Too
If you haven’t missed reading my long rambling mess and you’d just like me to get to the point: Howdy, neighbors. I miss you. I love you. I hope you’re doing well.
I may write about other stuff there, maybe even perfume occasionally, but know that it will likely be mostly short stories for now.
I’ve imported pieces from a half-dozen of my writing projects from across the Internet over the years, including this blog, and other blogs I’ve run, and poetry, so you can poke around the archives and read some of the other kinds of stuff I’ve been making in the time before, during, and after this blog.
If you’re one of the lovely folks who has come around over the years to comment that you love my writing and would read anything I wrote: here you go, a place to follow my writing.
I love you loads and bunches, bunches and loads. (Just a very laundry-tinged vocabulary of love, my vocabulary of love for you. Feel yourself awash in it.)
Alright, now into the full ramble.
The Full Ramble
I began writing perfume reviews in 2020 or 2021 on a fragrance review website which shall not be named here. I enjoyed the process of writing these reviews very much. I loved sampling perfumes and I adored writing about them. My reviews accrued many balloons, symbolizing likes, and that felt good too.
Those anonymous balloons buoyed me up. Somebody likes you. Somebody thinks you’re funny.
I decided to start my own perfume blog for a few good reasons:
- I love having a space that’s all about my stuff, getting to decorate it any way I want. I wanted somewhere I could dump thousands of words, collages, custom typography, whatever weird digital furniture I wanted in peace. That aesthetic satisfaction and challenge was a major draw of building a blog. I had some experience blogging and spinning up websites, and I knew I enjoyed the process.
- I’d heard blogs could make money.
- I’d realized the people who ran the fragrance review website which shall not be named here were certifiably insane, and I increasingly did not want to use their forums or give them any attention, ad money, traffic, or content.
All my life, writing is the one thing I’ve needed like air. My days feel empty, wasteful, hollow without it. It doesn’t matter how much productive-looking, money-making, life-organizing activity I get done in a day: if none of it is writing I feel like a wastrel, an unfortunate oxygen and nutrient sink whose existence brings forth nothing of value, only business and smattered moments of pleasure. The days and years I have not written feel entirely wasted to me. Not writing simply is not an option.
I know this reads a little like a mental illness. I’ve tried to shake it all kinds of ways and have come to the conclusion that this is just how I’m built — and that furthermore this is a gift, that so many people feel haunted and hollow for want of something like this.
However.
All my life I have been practicing a second art. One I like to call getting in my own way.
How to Get In Your Own Way Without Really Trying
Chief among my methods: standing in the way of my own writing by obsessively falling for all-consuming schemes that will surely someday allow me to be writing.
Such schemes have included, among other bright ideas:
- Desperately writing, editing, and trying to publish a novel at age 11 — one I did not particularly want to write, nor feel ready for, but felt I had to get out now now now, while I was impressive by sheer virtue of being 11, and might thus hope to capitalize and begin a real authorial career for myself;
- Hard-headedly pursuing any number of various “day jobs” that I’ve convinced myself are the ticket to a life where I feel okay (stable, nourished, not drained) and can write, but choosing paths that are incredibly difficult to succeed in and which themselves require full focus, leaving nothing for writing (entrepreneurship, working in big tech, publishing)
- Going all-in on a Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) path with a burning intensity that left me always working and never writing (“I just need to retire and then I can write”);
- A slightly tempered version of the above, albeit still moderately patently ridiculous: “I just need to save enough money to someday buy a home in cash, and then my expenses will be less and I can semi-retire to write” (I still kind of believe this one)
- Trying to make a living as a freelancing copeditor/copywriter/translator/musical saw player (yes, this was real);
- Throwing myself into a miserable academic research career (“Well, it’s a kind of writing”) and waking up way too late to realize I’d been chasing approval for the wrong thing, I hated everything about what I was studying, felt morally uncomfortable with the implications and results of work in my field, and did not want a PhD;
- Trying to Build a Successful Blog That Makes Money.
Task Failed Successfully
As you can likely guess by the fact my blog is not covered in hideous ads, I disclose no brand partnerships, and my few affiliate links are all buried after some 5,000 words of literary drivel regarding a smell (and that to date I do not have an affiliate relationship with Amazon, the serious affiliate money-maker — though I am considering changing this policy; if people are going to be shopping at Amazon anyway, I want a cut) I have not particularly succeeded in Scheme #7.
Not for lack of good hard work on the blog, mind. And not entirely for lack of readership either. It just turns out that — surprise, surprise — I think ads are really hideous and obnoxious and don’t want them on my website, and I generally didn’t want to put shilling ahead of writing the exact sort of material I wanted to write (and also that I felt weird about in any way promoting Amazon).
My rather sensitive hair-trigger sense of personal ethics, it turns out, does not lend itself well to moneymaking schemes.
I didn’t care. I was having fun anyway.
Until I wasn’t, because I was pushing myself too hard. I had a day job (see schemes #2, #3, and #4) that drained me dry, freelance entanglements from hell (see scheme #5), and I was still making the blog a to-do, a task, a thing to get done, as if it made me money, even though it didn’t, as if it were something I did because it made me money, even though it wasn’t.
It felt unfun. I needed a reset. So I left.
That Was Two Years Ago
What have I done since?
Moved cities. Moved apartments a few times. Switched jobs a couple times. Shaken up some intimate relationships. Gone on some adventures. Moved out entirely on my own — look ma, no roommates! — for the first time. Worked at a movie theater, a handful of restaurants and event spaces, a summer camp in the boonies, another university.
I’ve learned some things, and I’ve wasted some time. But I’ve also done some things (chiefly, moving out to live on my own — Virginia Woolf was right about these things — and also several years of quiet intensive journaling) that have brought me back to my writing center. I’m ready to play again. I’m ready to try.
Telling Stories Again
So I’m back out here trying things that freak me out. Like writing fiction, which I’ve sort of tiptoed around ever since the Great Painful First Novel Disaster of 20XX.
At present I am mostly writing teeny tiny doses of it. I’m talking hundred-word stories. (I’m working on a few in the low-thousand-word ranges, but I’m not ready to show these to anybody just yet; will publish these soon.)
Why am I writing such tiny short stories?
A. I’m exhausted and drained at my present day job
B. I am naturally extremely verbose and this restraint holds important lessons for me
C. I’m coming from writing a lot of poetry, and enjoy applying constraints that really make me weigh the value of every word
D. Writing prose fiction freaks me out, and I’m starting small so I don’t run away back to my hole
E. All of the above
I’ll let you decide.
Why Write Fiction if Blogging is So Easy?
Fiction calls me back. That great scary neglected frontier.
David Foster Wallace put it in a letter to Don DeLillo this way in 2001:
I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do.
This is precisely how I feel on the matter.
I enjoy writing nonfiction. It flows out of me easily. Too easily.
I can word-vomit some thousands of words of nonfiction at a go. One time I did a whole ten thousand word post in one day, and it wasn’t even about perfume. Ten-thousand-word days weren’t out of the ordinary for me in the days around Christmas, temporarily freed of work and much responsibility.
(I also have a tendency to get sucked into discourse, to feel that I have to be writing essays and thinkpieces and reacting to current events. And that stuff just makes me angry and stressed. It’s not fun for me. I’m learning I couldn’t stomach actual journalism, nor full-time Op-Ed and Personal-Essay-ing — another early aborted scheme.)
I want to play with different kinds of challenges, the ones I find writing fiction. Even though currently doing more than a few hundred words of that at a jump makes me feel entirely spent.
Those delicious challenges are currently freaking me out. It’s delectable. I feel like a world of craft is opening up before me. I feel keenly, intensely how wobbly and dumb I am, how much I do not know.
This is exactly what I’m looking for.
And Then There is Poetry
Which actually is not mutually exclusive with fiction, and I’ve always rather disliked the default-MFA-track split of poetry/fiction/nonfiction, but I digress. In poetry I have mostly played technical games. I have played at poetry like it’s a big Sudoku puzzle, striving to attach sentiment tab A to formal prosody frame B. I have translated poetry from Ukrainian to English, from memes to Shakespearean sonnets, with pleasure and gusto. But I felt I was playing surface-level games. I still work these out as a sort of brain teaser but haven’t published any in years. I might put some of the latest crop out sometime, as people do seem to enjoy them. But I wanted to go deeper, beyond technical pyrotechnics and the pursuit of rhythmic perfection, of optimizing successfully for prosody and meaning.
I’m Trying to Change Things
I’m writing. I still have a full-time job. I’m still utterly exhausted too much of the time. But I’m no longer hinging all my hopes now on this youthful fantasy that I just need to get the right setup and then someday I can write entirely in peace.
All my life my writing, the one thing I want to do like breathing, has been supplanted by these desperate schemes to support my writing. It’s an intergenerational trauma thing, I think. Obsessive, all-consuming fantasies of survival. “But I want…” “Yeahyeahyeah let’s get this sorted first.”
Like you can ever get survival entirely sorted. Get life entirely sorted.
Like you can ever fully get all your affairs in order, ducks all in a row, and then neatly set out to do the thing you feel you’ve been built to do.
So here we are.
I have a day job — not a scheme, without desperate hopes attached — that leaves me feeling too drained, and takes up too much of my time, to give myself as completely to my writing as I’d like. But I’m giving something of myself to my writing daily — something tiny, a hundred words a day maybe, maybe less — and that feels delicious.
For Love and Profit
I think when your creative life is the reason you’re still kicking it’s often wise to do a different thing for money. Free your creativity from that pressure, that stifling horror of having to follow somebody’s whims so that you, its host, can eat.
It’s good to have another thing. But it’s also tricky not to give the other thing too much of you.
Especially when there’s never just one other thing but dozens of fractional draws on your attention going at all times.
Where do I mostly write now? Trains, mornings, commuting. Notes taken when walking, going places. Maybe a little time in the evenings, though it’s tough to carve out the focus.
Still I’ll admit I have schemes. I’d like to think they’re more reasonable, moderate schemes.
Schemes like buying an inexpensive condo and then having lower, stabilized living expenses and being able to live on my writing one day (plus maybe a couple shifts of service work a week).
Schemes like getting into a funded graduate program in creative writing.
I’m trying to temper myself. Let the part of me that needs to worry and gnaw a scheme have something, something perhaps a touch closer to achievable, and letting that part of me sit in its corner and not get in the way of my writing.
In service of that little schemer in the corner, I do have a paid option enabled for my newsletter, if you’d like to toss $5 my way each month to support my work.
“And then we can buy a house and write in it forever and no one can ever, ever hurt us, right?” the little schemer says.
Sure, honey, sure.
I know she’s just a kid. I know she’s just trying to come up with a plan to make everything okay.
Will You Keep Publishing Here?
Maybe, sporadically, occasionally. If I have things to say about perfume I’ll drop them here.
I have just found some half-dozen collages I made for reviews I’d planned to finish and post. Maybe I’ll post those, perhaps accompanied by my notes, real bare-bones, simple reviews.
I really loved making those collages. I had so much fun. And I think the handful I never posted are some of my prettiest ones.
But if you’re just interested in connecting with me, personally, outside of this blog, this brand: I’d encourage you to subscribe to the email newsletter.
Why Do You Keep Referring to It as The Newsletter?
Because it’s just little emails from me. I don’t have a name for it at present that isn’t dumb. The title (to the extent such a thing matters for an email publication, and liable to change) is currently Push/Pop, a dumb programming pun about the fact this is my (Sub)stack.
Aha! You’re Becoming One of Those Substack People!
I have real mixed feelings about Substack as a platform. It’s trying to be a social media. Like, I’m not going to tell you all to get the app, to follow me there, to read Notes (Substack Tweets) all day.
But the tech stack was there, and it handled a lot of things easily that I’d been wanting for a place like this (content importing, paywalling, emails handling) which were difficult to build myself. I sat around for two or three years kicking rocks, everyone telling me to set up a Substack, and I saying noooo, I can build something better, but I never did, and right now I don’t want to.
So yes. Currently, Substack is the tech provider behind the thing. If you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it. Don’t let anyone bully you into downloading an app you don’t want to download. You can just share your email with me, and someday maybe I’ll take my list of emails and shuffle off this mortal Slack in favor of something else.
(Something real cutting edge-maybe. Like ListServ.)
(This is a joke.)
Here’s one of the coolest things about it: I write my emails, I send them out to you all, and then you can privately, individually respond if you feel so inclined. We can have a genuine conversation, an exchange. It closes some of the distance I feel administering a blog, this thing floating in the Internet ether, this intimacy of emails.
This Is All Because of You, So I Hope You’re Happy With Yourself
My heart feels all huge and full returning here. Positively distended.
I don’t want to start doing a dumb Oscars speech. Especially because I don’t want this to feel like goodbye. I want you all to subscribe to my emails and keep in touch forever. Email me about your favorite smells. Respond to tell me about things you liked or hated. Just tell me about your day.
But I will say that I’m only here because of you. I’m only giving writing on the Internet another shake because I keep sporadically checking this website every couple of months and seeing another comment that says “Please come back.”
I don’t want that to feel like I’m admitting to doing this entirely for the attention.
Rather, I just… felt so alone so much of the time, doing this, in this medium.
I felt like I was floating so far out, on such a long tether. And I was trying to adhere to this pseudo-professional publishing schedule, write to SEO demands, rather than just existing and connecting like a human.
I was trying to do this deeply-personal-writing thing in a medium that’s fundamentally rather commercial, pulling readers in who are looking to buy something, looking for opinions to skim that will confirm which thing they should buy.
Looking back, this was a bit of a strange choice, but what can I say, I loved perfume and I was starry-eyed about the prospect of someday making money and getting to write all day.
Floating out there, it always felt like a complete and utter miracle to be found. And it was a dozen miracles on top of that that brought each of you to actually reading my words and commenting something kind, some bit of human connection.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you — for reading and being here as a person, just as you are, even in such utterly strange places, such places built around trying to research and buy and sell, skim and scheme and skimp.
What a testament — and I’m aware this is utterly inadequate sentimental drivel — what a testament it is to our humanity that despite it all, despite this horrifically dysfunctional, janky-ass blog I slapped together by hand, which goes down every few months until I notice and have to hand-edit in a single line of PHP reading $this->widgets[ $widget ] = new $widget( $widget, $widget ); —
Despite all that, we are still here. You and I. Thank you.
Please Connect With Me Via Email So I Don’t Lose You Forever
I miss you.
Much love XOXO,
Sophie
P.S.: Surprise! My name is actually Ellen! It’s lovely to meet you.
