july, against all odds

Welcome back to Field Notes on Becoming. At the end of each month, I'm stepping back from my weekly reflections to look for the patterns that have emerged. I share my prompts to reflect and prepare for the month ahead.

It’s July and I have hope in who I am becoming.

-- Charlotte Eriksson

I went into July feeling a little overwhelmed by things. I had three months to finish my PhD, I hadn’t secured a job, and various goings-on in my personal life were gnawing away at me. All of those things are still true. But July was, against all of the odds, a lovely, gentle, happy month.

Before I dive into the rest of it, I will share some very happy news: I got engaged! I want to give some more details later in this post, but I’ll say for now that I’m still basking in sheer joy after my partner proposed to me last week on a rainy Scottish beach.

I have felt a bit like I’m floating since then. Of course, I still need to finish my thesis and apply for jobs and pay my bills and deal with normal life. But I am, at heart, a true romantic, and I am full of a joy that makes all of those things feel lighter.

Anyway—more on that later. For the first 28 days of July, I was not thinking about weddings, so here is a little reflection on the rest of the month.

Aside from spending the last few days of the month solely thinking about how happy I am to be engaged (!!!), a few things really shaped my thinking in July.

Film: The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Like everyone and their mother, I went to see Nolan’s The Odyssey. And I really, really loved it. I count myself quite lucky that I managed to see this before I really saw much of the online discourse (of which there has been… a lot), and also managed to see it in Oslo’s Colosseum cinema, which is spectacular. The thousand-seat cinema screen was full, and I felt completely swept up in it all. I truly love seeing films as part of a huge audience. I feel such a sense of togetherness in the shared act of watching an epic story unfold in the darkness of a cinema, no phones in sight.

I find it quite surprising that a lot of the critique of this film centres around its purported lack of emotional depth, because I was weeping by the end. I had a similar reaction to rewatching Interstellar earlier this year: Nolan’s films have me leaving the cinema thinking about how badly humans are messing up the world, but hopeful that there is a chance to strive for goodness. They make me want to be a part of that effort; to not leave the fate of our planet to the absolute worst of us. Odysseus realising what he had done in Troy and beyond made me think about the climate crisis, about war, about the AI arms race that seems to be at serious risk of spiralling out of control. I thought it was so powerful that I went to see it for a second time the following weekend, and would see it again.

Book: Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

On a lighter note, I have been slow reading Taiwan Travelogue and very much enjoying it. (I say slow reading as though this is a contrast with my other reads, when really I’ve been slow reading everything lately. My head feels very full, and I’m worried that if I read too fast, I won’t take anything in.) This book feels exquisitely layered: it plays with ideas of the nature of translation, colonialism and class dynamics, and appetite. A lot of this exploration happens through descriptions of food, which I’m finding equally clever and hunger-inducing. I have about a third of it still to go, and am really enjoying working my way steadily through it to allow myself to unpack the hidden layers.

Item: Louise Carmen Roadbook (leather journal)

One material item from the month has brought me a lot of joy: my Louise Carmen leather journal. This was my first leather journal in what has become quite a sizeable collection, and it remains one of my absolute favourites. I bought it in January 2025, and I love that it has aged so beautifully (it looks substantially more patina-d and a little scratched up compared to the photo above, which is from last summer). On meh days, when I feel like my thoughts are a mess, and I am not holding it all together very well, I can rely on my journals for some moments of calm and clarity. While one obviously doesn’t need an exceptionally fancy journal to find this, I think the beauty of this lovely object can genuinely help me to get out of my own head. Returning to it feels like a ritual; a reminder that it is still worth taking time for beautiful frivolities on good and bad days alike.