No Brunch: Black Forest Cake

And The Existential Angst of Creating

“Creating something requires an exaggerated sense of self importance” said a friend while I was guiding him around a design exhibition during London Design Week years ago. Meandering through the Truman Brewery he was baffled by the “amount of stuff nobody really needs”. We may not need all the end results on a vast scale, but the process of creation and what drives it, I think we do need. It is our saving grace.

Create and destroy.

Anything that tickles the senses, surprises or instills wonder, provokes awe or just a smile, is worth it to me. I see our urge to create not as some mere self gratifying act. Well, not in all cases. But take music for example. If I experience what the right song at the right time can do, it is freaking magic. It helps unblocked tears be set free, it makes bodies move in ways we didn’t even know we had in us. It makes us feel understood, less lonely. Tom Hank’s character in Philadelphia listening to Maria Callas, the soundtrack of Out of Africa. Like scents, music melts with out memories, to help us remember, years later. We humans have such an ugly tendency to pillage and plunder, we are such a destructive, brute force. Let us at least also create something.

(That something often needs to be destroyed, like a piece of cloth for a dress or a chunk of marble for a statue is another philosophical exploration of transformative destruction).

Jackson Pollock “Alchemy” - Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Art (as does design) has many roles to play in society and not all those have a deeper meaning beyond their monetary value or artfart status. But the space itself and the idea that people continue to be drawn to a sometimes painful process, to communicate the conscious and intentional combined with the subliminal, a process that also profoundly changes the creator themselves, to me is a gift. How different the world, my life would be without it. The Pollock in Venice that told me that the universe holds it all, including me, pulled me out of the pit of darkness of depression. My “special ladies” are the portraits of women waiting for me at the National Portrait Gallery, ever since my journalism teacher Martin Raymond from LCF took me there the day I past my interview and test in 1995. It is like visiting old friends.

EXPRESSION OF SOVEREIGNTY

I now write as a way back to myself. Claim back the parts accidentally lost, carelessly squandered, or meticulously cut off to make others more comfortable. Although I appreciate response, I really feel the comments and direct messages, I don’t write for you. I don’t write for myself. I write for the writing itself, even if it is about you or me.

I worked for a long time in a position to facilitate and manage the creation by others. As a project manager for trend fora and photography producer for a department store I helped execute the concepts and creations others came up with. It was only mildly satisfying, as I have never wanted anything but be a writer. It is a desire, and skill, I have continued to marginalise for decades.

I should have stopped overthinking and just done it, starting 2011. Time was running out so what the fuck was I waiting for. I went up and down like an emotional jojo, had months where I could not get out of bed. I travelled as soon as I became more mobile. I held loved ones tight. And then once everything started to feel a little less urgent, the pursuit of writing faded into the background again.

When I finally wrote something of a memoir, “All Day A Good Day” in 2014, I wrote down a memory. It happened in my first year in Amsterdam, just after I came back from London in 1998. I had been working in a shop and was out with a colleague. We were hanging at a bar, when someone walked in. He put down a violin case and sat with us. The conversation was not long, but I have never forgotten. He asked a few simple questions: Who are you, what are you doing here, why. When I did not answer he told me.

He told me about my time in London, knew my favourite places, knew my heart, read my mind. “You should write. So, why don’t you?” I felt shy, maybe even ashamed. Who was I to think I had anything to write about? “Because I don’t think I have anything to say that anybody needs to hear.”

“Hold out your hands” he ordered. I did, with balled fists. “No, open up, palms ups” he ordered again. I obeyed. he held his hands above mine and within seconds my hands and then my entire body were on fire.

He grabbed my hands, held them tight and pulled me towards him, and said: “I have given you all my courage. Now write.”

When I told my aunt about this, she said: “I think you may have met your guardian angel.”

A very human angel. It took me a long time to remember. One evening I had seen him play the violin at the Max Euweplein. Weeks later another memory flashed by: I had often seen him play. In London. At Camden Market. Years ago. What are the odds of crossing paths again. To have that conversation. That moment.

I still did not listen. My insecurities kept getting the better of me, steering my into any other direction (including cake making), literally anything other than to pen and paper.

I consider it the ultimate act of self sabotage that in spite of working as a freelance writer (PR, SEO, bit of journalism, lot of exhibition catalogues and a book on bricks) for almost twenty years, I did not start writing my own shit consistently until a year ago. I was a regularly published journalist at 18, yet my writing never really took me anywhere. Because I kept dropping the ball. The universe does not respond well to someone who begs for something and then opts out seconds before it is about to drop.

I have three university degrees, a relatively high IQ, I have been told countless times that I write very well and have a “special way with words” (and not just by my mother). My life by now reads like a “truth is stranger than fiction // Oprah Winfrey personal expose // Reese Witherspoon book club”. Yet when friends or even the lady from the welfare desk tell me to write about it, I suddenly feel like I have literally nothing to say? Or that if I do, I need to justify it? Back it up by education, intellect or life experiences. Why do I feel I somehow have to earn the right to write? It’s nuts.

Considering that more than half of the notes on Substack I see are about wonderful writers questioning themselves, and whether they even belong on the platform, I am hardly the only one struggling with this.

(here, a song that may help)

BEING REDUNDANT

When sometime last year, a fairly new acquaintance saw all my rolls of handwoven hemp and linen, she was curious what they were for. “To make bags” I replied. Around 2017 I had attempted to set up a small sustainable fashion label, AER LIBER, rooted in Transylvania. It failed. The fairly new acquaintance huffed and puffed ever so slightly and then said “Well the whole world is making bags.” I didn’t have the heart to inform them that the whole world is also making soap, in case they believed they were a rare exception in their chosen field.

I know many great creators who have bouts of debilitating fear exactly because of this idea of being superfluous, redundant in their creations: What if what I make doesn’t matter? The answer may depend on why you create. I believe you can always make it matter. For the process, the result, the response or for the hell of it. With seven billion of us roaming the globe, and all of us holding the potential to create something, it is a little overwhelming. The same way I am excited when I make a new friend -instead of approaching them with “oh god no, not another human being I already know plenty of those- I will always be curious to see what else is made, cooked, composed, sculpted, created and concocted.

Not immune to it myself though. I was working on my memoir (if there ever was a form of creation that requires an exaggerated sense of self importance it would be dedicating an entire book to literally yourself and your own story) yesterday. Doing a little research I came across a novel with a story eerily similar to mine. I felt my heart sank, it was as if my saliva had turned into tar, sweaty palms and even a little dizzy. I had automatically drawn the conclusion: too late. It is already written. By someone else.

BUT. WE ALL HAVE UNIQUE VOICES & STORIES: That’s something no one else can tell in quite the same way as you…

We have used every note a million times, yet new songs are created. We may have by now discovered all edibles on the planet, yet chefs and home cooks manage to conjure up new dishes. Fashion if a bit of a snore bore to me these last years, but also there, the space to create, like Pollock’s universe, keeps on expanding. There is room for creation. We won’t all be able to cut through the noise to the extent that our work always gains the audience it deserves, but we have to keep at it.

WHAT TO WRITE

I have over 100 topics waiting to be tackled on my Trello board. The wide range tells me something about the interest I still take in the world, as not everything I want to write about is a navel gazing exercise. I do zoom in on myself a lot, that is true. Going through the drama and trauma of last year with a possible cancer recurrence as the sour cherry on top keeps throwing me into wobbles that make the Kingda Da look like an amateur ride. It comes with avalanche dosage of self reflection that pushes its way out in the shape of words.

NO BRUNCH BUT CAKE

I am not sure why I chose dating shows as a hot topic this week. Maybe because there has been no getting away from them. Two days after publishing it, a Dutch TV-presenter popped up with an open call for a new TV show. He is looking for former reality TV dating show contestants who have had bad experiences and want to share them. I was surprised he hasn’t been inundated yet, but then who knows how ironclad the contracts were…

It is the only piece I finished this week. “Bimbo vs Tradwife” and “Act of Empathy” are back on the Trello board.

Until next time!

LOVE XXL

PS I DID NOT THINK I WOULD HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WRITE TODAY. THE PLAN WAS TO BAKE A TEST CAKE FOR MUM’S BDAY. BUT SHE STUCK THE BUTTER BACK IN THE FRDGE LAST NIGHT. IT NEEDS TO BE SOFT. SO I WRITE WHILE I WAIT. HERE IS THE RECIPE: BLACK FOREST CAKE

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