Letters & Postcards from Portugal
An attempt to revive the joyful and nonetheless necessary act of writing letters
I am not sure when exactly the idea of reenacting hand written letters flourished in my head.
It might have come to go with my leaving London, and with it, leaving behind a good bunch of solid and soulful female friendships, some of which had only started to grow roots not long before my departure.
Maybe it’s the wild strawberries I picked from the mountains in Portugal, with such a hungry nostalgia. A reminder of a ritual I used to partake in during my teens years (when rituals were organically part of our lives, not just something we relentlessly talked about) with my back then pen pal (she’s still a friend today). A deep longing for simpler, freer and also more tasteful times, in all senses of the word.
Or perhaps the moment I opened the Pandora box in my grandparents’ house in Romania - full of old letters and personal dramas that I devoured during the night between the years (between two portals, maybe?) - and something in me shifted.
Maybe it’s my increasing rebelliousness against an increasingly desensitising digital world that cultivates anything but connection.
Or the coincidence of stumbling upon and indulging in the reading of “The Correspondent”, in parallel with the craving for a kind of connection I used to know.
Maybe it’s all together, or just an old, more complex longing, one I can’t fully articulate but that is growing bigger and louder as society itself is growing bigger and louder in its attempt to anaesthetise our innate ability to use our hands for more than just typing on a phone or a computer. And with it, the human touch.
Clearly, I’ve been flirting with this idea for a while. It took some incessant rainy days in the mountains (that were supposed to be used for hiking were it sunny, but ho hey!), filling my pockets with as many wild strawberries as I could collect, and a part cave part fairytale home, that actually prompted me to sit down and write my first letter.
While I won’t even try to be that eager adolescent whose sole responsibility was to fall in love and send letters to her best friend, or pretend I can conjure up the same amount of mental and physical space from the good old days, keeping this endeavour as a soul enriching - limbs unwinding - neurons stretching ritualistic practice, feels as good as it gets. Now praise the Lord the CTT post office in Portugal doesn’t live up to its famously bad reputation and my letters do reach their intended destination!
Meanwhile, another idea stemmed from this idea because Yodel-Ay-Hee-Hoo! this is how my brain works. As much as I praise and crave for old-school ways of being and living, I also find satisfaction from writing in this digital home. While I won’t be able to send a physical letter to all of you, dear readers (or should I?!), and since I’ve just started my life in a new environment, I thought I could expand my letter crafting to Substack as well, reporting from my current home by the Ocean. Like a collective letter. Filled with some practicalities but mostly with the juiciness, the anxieties, the discomfort, the excitement of starting a new life in a new country - all this while navigating the complexities of being a neurodivergent woman in an intense, often debilitating, likely premature perimenopause stage - and the aferent grief that comes along with this mix of ingredients. While I also listen to a poignant need to strip myself off of labels, identities and diagnoses, and allow myself to just be this mixed salad of all colours, flavours and textures. A beautifully articulated piece of writing “On Labels, Neurodivergence, and the Desire to Be Seen Beyond Categories” by The Cognitive Ecologist here.
🍒 These being said, I would still love to send physical letters to my Substack friends, so I am offering a little extra for paid subscribers. Most of you I don’t even know personally, so even more exciting!
This is how we’ll do it: You send me a note (a comment to this article, a private message, an email, whatever suits you best) where you express your desire (and curiosity) to receive a letter from me. You can tell me a little bit about yourself, or what brings you joy at the moment, or sorrow, what keeps you awake at night, what scares you the most. Or maybe you want to share your favourite book. Or a recent glimmer moment. Or you can just ask me a question. Anything you feel like sharing. And I will address that thought or question in a personal letter. Oh, yes, and you will also receive a postcard from Portugal - a sweet memory I captured on my camera. Don’t forget to share your home address as well!
And by the way, if, hopefully, I’ve sparked an impulse to reenact this little ritual of hand written letters in your own life, I’d love to hear how the process unfolded for you - the the childlike joy, the messiness, the resistance, and everything in between. Have fun!
The pendulation between the new and the familiar has been a lot on my mind lately.
So much has happened since we’ve landed, three months ago, in a place we were mostly joking we would move in, a few years back. Everything feels new and raw. In my external environment but also the internal one. A lot of it feels familiar and yet even the familiar feels new. Utterly uncomfortable at times. Even when one expects one would experience a place differently as a local, as opposed to a mere passerby, there’s still a lot of unexpected getting in the way of a full breath. Even more so when one hasn’t had the space to undress from an old identity.
Humans still tend to romanticise (people and places and people in places) a lot. Especially when the grass feels greener on the other side.
I find it hard to metabolise it all. This shift feels like a much bigger beast than when I moved to London some eleven years ago, with only three suitcases and with my complex inner world only just beginning to open up. When the whole world was less saturated, less on fire of all sorts. Less depleted of inner and outer resources.
As I am meandering through all the nuances of becoming a local, many of my perceptions of Portugal, as seen through the lens of a tourist (even if an intentional one), are changing in the process. One thing, though, retained its familiarity, even as we keep on discovering so many more layers of its wild beauty - and that’s NATURE.
I need this intimacy in order to ground myself in moments when the dopamine and overstimulation from too much novelty needs pondering down. When the crave for rituals and the soothing comfort of familiarity overrides the crave for the excitement of the new and intellectual stimulation. An overturn that might be more a consequence of the current external noise - so much information, all the time, and everything coming at us so fast, through a screen - than one of age. In a loud and saturated world, I lean on staying quieter(online) and doing the actual work (offline) of exploring possibilities in this new home. I also often fail at it, as we often fail at doing the necessary things for ourselves and others, when the issue is systemic yet the pressure is on the individual..
As usual, I strive to create energetic and visual sanctuaries out of all the homes I live in. Once I manage to do that, my system also begins to settle. Waking up and setting down with the Ocean in sight, feels like a necessary privilege. Scanning and gazing at the infinitude of the blue horizon, rather than narrowing my sight, and with it all my other senses, into a screen (that we are being fed as expansive but is in fact isolating), brings me peace. I look at the horizon and let my thoughts shrink to fit the moment. The Ocean has a way of putting everything back in place.
Now, let’s see how I navigate the paradox of being someone terrified of water/swimming and quickly scattered by high winds, who just moved to a place that embodies these exact two aspects. More on it, and other insights, in the next (news)letter. 🖋️🏄🏻♀️