Still Writing

Sezane dress
Zara sandals (similar)
Sezane bag
Celine sunglasses
Agape Studio necklace (c/o) (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Agape Studio earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Petit Palais – Paris, France

Paris, June 2, 2023

Dear friends,

What a journey this has been. I don’t mean our trip to Paris, although it sadly comes to an end today – I mean writing to all of you.

It’s been over a decade now. What started, in theory, as a small step towards a bigger goal (which wasn’t actually mine) became, admittedly to my surprise, the biggest and longest writing project I’ve worked on. And I’ve written three books. I’m no stranger to interminable writing projects. I’m sure I’ve said this often enough that it’s becoming repetitive, but I never dreamed I would still be here after all this time. And yet sometimes, we never dream of something simply because our imagination is limited by our experiences. We can’t imagine everything.

Which is why, if you’re lucky (and I am) your life can turn out to be better – more exciting, with more unexpected adventures and plot twists – than you dreamed possible.

I’m thinking about writing today. Not just because this is my last in another long series of letters from Paris but because, after years of prioritising absolutely everything else above the thing that is supposed to be my passion, my purpose, I’m finally back. There are poems on my Instagram account, for heaven’s sake – this is serious. I’m a writer. I’m filling notebooks and publishing my work almost daily.

But then I pause and think, haven’t I always been doing that for years, just in a different way? I’ve been writing to you all since 2010. My early blog posts were little more than paragraphs, but I still wrote them. This is really a perspective issue. I was writing all along, but I didn’t think of what I did here as writing. It was quick, it was fun, like sending emails to friends. But there’s nothing wrong with that. The work wasn’t less legitimate because it was casual and enjoyable. We all need fun. And we need, desperately, not to take everything seriously. But I was close to, if not actually, dismissive of all the effort I put into the former Coco & Vera. That I wrote it didn’t mean I was writing, it was just my silly little fashion blog.

It wasn’t just anything, in reality.

In the years after I finished university, when the love I’d felt for writing had dissipated completely and my belief in my ability to write much more emails was at a precipitous low, Coco & Vera was all I did write. When I consider that in my last days of high school, I confessed to my diary that I had no idea if I wanted to pursue the career I’d be studying for in my first year of university, that I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life except write books, the fact that I’d all but given up on doing that four years later feels shocking.

What it means is that this space, these words, the ones I laughed off as frivolous, were hugely significant. They kept me writing. They anchored me to written work even when I allowed myself to forget what it meant to me. And without them, which is to say without a space that gave me the impetus to continue to write consistently, week after week, year after year, I wonder if I’d still be writing at all.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
– Joan Didion

What a waste it would have been, to give up. Not just of all the time spent honing my skills but of potential. (Writing is a lifelong pursuit. I can, and will, I hope, still keep improving.) It would have been easy, certainly. And less painful, I have no doubt about that. To write for an audience is to make yourself vulnerable over and over again – and not just to criticism, either. Every sentence, every opinion we impose on others comes with an inherent risk of rejection, because to write is also to claim that your ideas are important and valuable. There’s never a guarantee that anyone else will agree. What if no one likes my writing? is a question that plagues everyone who writes. But there’s an even bigger one; what if no one even reads my writing?

Without an audience, there is no criticism. And it’s worse go unnoticed than to be disliked. Art is subjective, after all. It’s almost never universally appealing. But for your work to warrant no reaction at all… not even a shrug… rejection in the form of indifference is the worst kind because it’s the most likely.

It would have been a waste to give up but I know why so many people do. You need immense emotional wherewithal to face the constant prospect of indifference and negativity, but keep going. It takes something beyond determination, something more than courage – obstinacy, maybe, or, more simply, a desire to prove that the near impossible is still, on rare occasions, possible. (There’s no word for that, but there should be.) Just wanting to tell stories as a way of living isn’t enough. My teenaged self didn’t know that, which is probably why she thought a life spent in the pursuit of writing books and little else seemed achievable. It wasn’t. Not for her, anyway – not for anyone who wanted as many shoes as she still does.

And in retrospect, I’m not convinced she would have loved the reality of a life spent on nothing but novels. She would have missed out on a lot of adventures she might have had instead.

But the fact is, if I weren’t still writing to all of you, it’s very possible that when I discovered that writing books was not how I’d spend my life, I would have given up on writing entirely. I had a reason to keep at it, even if I thought of my pursuit as frivolous, so I did. That reason was you. And having it lead me here, which is the end of another trip to Paris, but also the early stages of a renewed focus on the words that go along with all these pictures. So thank you, my friends, for all the different ways that you remind me that whatever form it may take, writing will always be what I do – and there will always be people who care enough to read.

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