A Belated Introduction

It’s been a while. Throughout most of May, I kept thinking I'd finish the essay I was writing the next day, and then the next one after that. Outside, brilliantly green spring rolled into London, sun-starved Londoners spilled onto pavements and everyone seemed to have collectively agreed that life was full of promise again. I, on the other hand, had developed a full-time interest in feeling sorry for myself.

The culprit was the hefty dose of hormones I was taking at the time. I struggled to focus, and the whole month now seems like a blur, with essays started and never finished, books left half-read, and even the things that would normally excite me feeling like a grind. It was one of those months that could have lasted thirty-one days but just as easily half a year.

At the end of May, I found myself at lunch at Bouchon Racine, London’s notoriously difficult-to-book French bistro, with my boyfriend Kam and a work colleague of his I’d just met. The usual what-do-you-do question came up. As I began explaining that I’d trained as an attorney-at-law but no longer practised, Kam cut into my answer, saying: “and she’s also a writer”.

I turned to him, looking for some sign that he was only saying it to make me happy, but there was none. They had already moved on to discussing why the duck confit was the best any of us could remember eating. I nodded along, but my mind kept wandering back to what he had said.

I noticed that what I remember most from the things I read are the personal stories people generously share with others. They often draw me into places filled with different voices and possibilities I didn’t know existed. Long after I’ve finished reading them, they become another room I walk to when I think.

I also like knowing the people behind the ideas. When I enjoy someone’s writing, I inevitably become curious about the life that produced it. I want to know where their thinking comes from. I’ve spent many happy hours reading interviews, biographies and letters by writers whose work I admire.

Since so many new readers have joined over the past month, it feels like a good moment to tell you a story about how I ended up here, too.

I’m Dee. I live in London with my boyfriend Kam and our dog Bianca, and I’m rolling into my mid-thirties at terrifying speed. This place is my attempt to honour the curiosity of a kid who always wanted to write but somehow ended up somewhere else.

I’m also rather funny. So my boyfriend says.

I wrote a lot in my teenage years, keeping an extensive diary in which sprawling descriptions of school romances mixed with terrible poetry of my own making and screenshots of chats with friends on Gadu-Gadu (Polish equivalent of MSN messenger), which we all used in the early 2000s. Looking at this period, it’s remarkable how little of life I seemed willing to let pass unnoticed.

After high school, I somehow lost that spark to narrate my life on the page, and the oversized teenage diary remains my first and only magnum opus. I remember the years recorded in that diary vividly, unlike most of my childhood, which is patchy at best.

My memory lapses and the feeling that life disappears if I don’t write it down weren’t accidental. I was ten years old when my best friend Justina died in a car accident, and it changed me overnight from a curious and playful child into an anxious one. My mom says she couldn’t comfort me for the following year, but I don’t remember any of that. Instead, I remember imagining shouting “fuck!” in church and dashing out (funny now, terrifying then), or doing something else that horrified me and felt completely at odds with who I was.

There was always something tugging at the back of my mind, questioning whether I had checked the hobs before leaving the house or whether I had forgotten something important. I remember at some point wondering if it’s possible for a twenty something to develop a dementia because the brain fog was so heavy.

Uninterrupted attention and the feeling of being present felt like luxuries and, as I gradually got better, I realised that being able to place my mind where I wanted it to be was one of the great privileges of life. I got back to recording bits of what I liked, what happened and what I noticed, knowing that writing directs my attention away from whatever is consuming it and back into the vast, beautiful, interesting world.

It helps me notice more, understand more, and imagine more for myself. It perhaps helps me become a slightly better friend to myself and to other people. It took me a while to figure out what I want to do with my life, so it’s especially pleasant to finally become serious about something. I’m going to write as if it’s my job, and maybe one day it’ll become one.

I went through many phases over the past six months, but the core of this place is an ongoing research project about design, art, creativity and culture.

I tend to pursue certain topics when I want more of something in my life. One of the ongoing ones is decorative arts and interior design. We’re planning to buy a house soon and, before I decide what I want it to look like, I need to put things into context: understand styles, the designers who shaped them, the decisions behind the rooms they created, and what I might borrow for my own idea of home. I want to see the whole menu of ways of thinking about a space before choosing my own. More than anything, I want to feel inspired.

If you new here, these will give you feel how I think about places:

Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico home was her largest work of art

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Jan 15

Last November, as the days closed in and my hunger for all-consuming stories returned, I pressed play on a new series. What started as a casual watch quickly turned into a binge; by January, we were deep into season four of Better Call Saul.

So far, I've mostly written about places from the perspective of a visitor. This particular project requires me to become more interested in how they are put together. I'm hoping that learning to see these things more clearly will make my own thinking about spaces more fluent and perhaps become useful to someone else along the way.

Many of the essays I write begin with a question: is there a better way of looking at this? I keep searching for ways of organising thinking that make me a more generous presence in my life. Artists especially make for a goldmine of various mental models, so I often end up writing about them.

For example, I noticed that whatever the subject—a hotel, a chair, a painter or a house—I kept being drawn to the same qualities, such as beauty, spirit and craftsmanship. But I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to do with that information. Was it simply a collection of preferences, or did it mean something more?

I kept circling around the question until I eventually wrote about a Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired idea: that paying attention to what I found beautiful could help determine what I pursued. What had seemed like random bits acquired a structure.

How to see according to Georgia O'Keeffe

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Apr 23

In September 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe, then 29 years old, taught art at West Texas State Normal College in the small town of Canyon, just south of Amarillo. Years later, reflecting on that period, she said:

I also tried to reframe the need for specialisation that modern life seems to have instilled in me, and at which I continue to fail on a daily basis.

Jean Cocteau and the freedom of not specialising

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May 1

Cocteau’s output is staggering in quantity and diversity, encompassing novels, plays, poems, films, essays, autobiographical writings, journalism, painting, and a voluminous correspondence. Much of this oeuvre is minor and some is frankly bad, but enough of it is outstanding, either intrinsically or …

In one way or another, all of these essays are attempts to direct my attention a bit better. My writing will evolve ten times over and the topics will fluctuate, but I suspect this will remain a constant in everything I put out into the world.

To everyone who has been reading along—thank you! I’ve enjoyed our exchanges and more than once I’ve shown your messages and comments to my boyfriend, beaming like a full moon and feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.

Dee xx