Confessions from my Red Notebook

exposing myself feels terrifying.

“In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

—Stanley Kunitz, “The layers”

I was in the middle of writing a conference paper that refuses to move forward. My academic sentences felt airtight, almost sealed. So I opened another document to write this, whatever this is, because that’s the only way I know how to breathe, through words that come from within, unedited by permission or proof.

It has been months since I last sent a letter. God I love letters. Life has been full and busy and I find myself holding onto the things I love with every ounce of my being, trying not to let them slip away. And please don’t be fooled by what I share on Instagram. I have received a message that stayed with me in an uncomfortable way. Someone told me how much they wished for my slow life, how beautiful and calm it seemed. What I share is not my life as it is, it is curated. I treat my Instagram like a mini museum of my own. I choose what to display, what to frame, what to preserve. But behind it all, life moves quickly, messily, imperfectly. And I’m just here, doing my best to keep the small things close.

Speaking of statements that stay with me, the other day one of my students asked me if I’m enjoying teaching.
I said yes.

It surprised me. The answer came without hesitation, without a pause, without rehearsal, without the careful thinking I insist on in class. Just yes, already spoken. Already out of my mouth. Then I paused. Not because I doubted it but because I realized my body had answered before my mind caught up. Not practicing what I preach. I tell my students to think before speaking, and here I was, already…spoken.

So I decided to answer properly. Slowly. From where I am now. From the hotel lobby I am staying in on a cold rainy December night. Hotel lobbies have always made me feel strange and familiar at the same time. No one really belongs here. People are either arriving or leaving, waiting to step into something new or trying to hold onto something that’s ending. You’re not meant to stay, and yet everything feels like the backstage of a movie scene. Everyone has rehearsed their role, waiting to step into the light. I think that’s why I feel at home in places like this. I don’t have to be anything here because I, too, am blurred by the departures and arrivals and for a moment, that is enough.

This month, I went back to my journal and read the year from the beginning, January onward, month by month, letting each version of myself speak in her own tense. I rarely do this. I don’t like to read my own words. They carry feelings that have settled on the page on the moment they were written but haven’t settled in me. But something told me to look, to return, to remember because forgetting myself had become too easy.

January feels distant. I recognize the handwriting more than the voice. Notes everywhere with open margins and a name of a student that I don’t recall the face. I am usually good at remembering faces. They stay with me longer than names. Longer than dates. But this one slipped through. Is my memory failing me? I am good at remembering faces which is how I know this forgetting matters.

I was preparing lectures a week ahead, like I always do. I still do this. I leave space in between pages, not everything needs to be filled. Sometimes I step outside the curriculum. Sometimes philosophy slips in. I don’t want my students to collect information; I like to ask questions instead of offering answers. I like watching them sit with uncertainty, even briefly.

I like to ask questions because they resist closure. Because they stay. Outside the classroom, I am less disciplined. When a question turns inward, my first instinct is to move, to tidy a shelf, to scroll, to answer an email that doesn’t matter. Distraction is easier than stillness. Stillness asks something of me. But in those classrooms, in those conversations, I am safe. That version of me, the one standing there, asking, listening, watching something spark, that is the version I trust. That is the one I like.

February and March were heavy. The pages are full of a feeling that doesn’t yet know how to arrange itself. Reading them now, I want to be gentle with the person who wrote them. I am always gentle with others. I forget that this is something I’m allowed to extend inward. Clarice Lispector writes:“I am searching, I am searching.”
That line could have been my handwriting then. That’s how those months read. Searching without knowing what for.

But some evenings, I don’t move, I let the questions sit beside me, unanswered, like a coat I haven’t hung up yet. It’s uncomfortable. It makes the room feel larger, colder. It reminds me that not everything yields to effort.

By April and May, something in me was shifting, the way seasons do, though I didn’t yet have the language for it. I was giving everything: care, effort, attention but nothing felt complete. Achievements arrived like relief instead of joy. I would exhale and move on. These were the things I had once prayed for, and still, they asked something more from me. Growth, I was learning, carries its own kind of weight. Even becoming takes something from you first.

I think this is what I have been teaching all along, without naming it, that uncertainty isn’t a failure of understanding, but a condition of being alive. That sitting with a question, really sitting with it, is an act of attention, maybe even care.

June was strange. It felt as though I was carrying the change of seasons with me, winter loosening into spring, spring tipping into summer. It wasn’t like a metaphor, not really, but as a weight, a heavy physical weight. It was revealing nonetheless. I kept writing. I noticed patterns, how suffering repeats itself with different faces, how it insists on being witnessed before it loosens its hold. Writing didn’t fix anything, but it made the days lighter, breathable.

When I finish my lectures, there is a moment I never quite hold onto. The room empties slowly, chairs scraping, notebooks closing, voices returning to their everyday pitch. I gather my things carefully, as if I might disturb something fragile.

July and August were different. I was intensely alive. There was warmth everywhere in my body, in time, in the way days opened themselves. I felt full of love, reckless with it. Everything seemed sharpened by feeling. I moved through those months as if touched by something electric. I didn’t ask questions then. I lived inside the answer.

I know it wasn’t going to last. I think I always knew. There are moments that announce their own ending even as you’re living them. Those days have already become memory, the kind that haunts and returns without permission. I am still haunted by July and August while standing inside the cold patience of winter.

September arrived like reality clearing its throat. It started in the beautiful Rome where I walked through stone and light, through streets that kept offering themselves, through churches where silence knew how to hold color. I was open then, easily moved, easily lifted as if beauty had found me before I had time to brace myself. But September also thinned. It showed me how quickly fullness can empty, how joy can fold itself away without warning. I moved through half of the month colder, suspended between places, between selves, learning the strange stillness of not knowing where to live inside a body, inside a life.

There was chaos in the suspension, but also a silence I didn’t resist. I stood there long enough to notice the risk: that staying too long in between could turn me into someone unrecognizable. So I watched myself carefully, holding on to what still felt like mine.

October and November spoke in different language and there was a shift in my pace. There was a shift all along sometimes I observed it and other times I completely ignored it. These months arrived with a finality I could feel in my bones. I walked through days that felt unfinished. I stayed busy, filling hours, arranging tasks, letting motion stand in for certainty.

The days moved forward, but I carried memory alongside them, aware of how different I am in every month, how each version of me feels temporary and convinced of its own truth. Sometimes, though, I want an older version of myself to surface not out of longing, but out of need, someone who knew how to submerge and deal with life without asking questions, without feeling estranged from herself. Why do we reach for earlier versions of ourselves when we’re lost? When we are heartbroken? Maybe because we are our own refuge, our own safe space that we constantly look for in others.

Clarice Lispector writes about this continuous becoming, about never being the same person twice, and I return to her often because she understands how unsettling that can be. What unsettles me is not the change itself, but the fear that certain ways of feeling may not return, that what once felt vivid and immediate may exist only as memory now, and that I will go on carrying proof of who I once was while learning, quietly, how to live as someone else.

This has always been me. I live in between moments, and I let nostalgia haunt me willingly, not because I am trapped in the past, but because this is where I know how to feel most honestly. I am better, in some ways, when I live inside memory, even though it can be burdensome, even though it asks me to carry more than what is immediately present.

Reading back through my journals, month by month, gives the impression that this year was difficult, or at least gives it the allure of difficulty, but that is not the whole truth. It was a year dense with experience, rich with emotion, saturated with feeling. I have made mistakes, and I am no longer ashamed of them. I am learning to sit with the discomfort instead of rushing past it, because avoiding it has never taught me anything. Growth asks for presence, even when it’s awkward, even when it costs you certainty. I owe that honesty to myself, and I owe it to my students too. I don’t want to show them perfection. I want them to see that I am still learning, still failing, still becoming. That this, too, is part of the work. And in the midst of all this, I realize I was not wrong in how I answered the question: I do enjoy teaching. It is not incidental to who I am; it is woven into me, a way of being attentive, of staying with questions, of remaining open to others and to myself. It has shaped how I move through time and memory, and whatever else changes, this will remain, quietly, faithfully, part of me.

It was a strange year, but I met it with a tenderness I didn’t know I had learned. Not perfectly, not consistently, but often enough to surprise myself. I learned how to move more gently through uncertainty, how to stay present without demanding resolution, how to offer care to others, and eventually to myself. Looking back, I can see that even the hardest moments were held with a kind of grace, one that grew slowly and without announcement. For that, I am grateful.

I hope this letter meets you gently, and if nothing else, feels like a warm hug.

Happy new year

With love

“It’s that I shall pass because of the rhythm into its paroxysm—I shall pass to the other side of life. How can I tell you this? It’s terrible and threatens me. I feel that I can no longer stop and I am scared. I try to distract myself from the fear. But the real hammering stopped long ago: I’m being the incessant hammering in me. From which I must free myself.”

—Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva.