no one wants to be a beginner anymore

don't you dare lose that cute rough edge

I had lunch last week with two aunts I had never met before. One of them rides a Harley that she learned to drive at fifty-four. The other has the face of my grandma, the woman who raised me. The resemblance is wild and exact. (People had told me this before, but seeing it in real life was a whole other thing.)

Turns out my long-lost aunts live close to each other in this new city. I couldn’t have made this up. (We’ll get onto the cognitive dissonance of me not knowing they lived here another time.) I sat across from them at lunch and felt, for the first time in years, as though I belonged to people.

Sometimes I reel from the bleak recognition that parts of us are homesick, sometimes for our whole lives, without knowing what the homesickness is for. Do you know what I learned from lunch, from pretending to eat my salad?? That my emotions rule me more than I know (and I’m a bloody poet!!)

What I’ll tell you first is that I was done the next day. Exhausted. Couldn’t do much, which reminded me that I am, by all the measurable definitions, beginning. So much so that this week finds me sending texts to these new family members and obsessing over each word, the way you would when you are newly dating, or something, and want to come off a certain way.

I laugh a bit, catching myself in the midst of all this, because omg this strange impressionable young(ish) soul is me, and she’s learning to be inside a family that she’s still meeting.

In other but (maybe??) similar news, I have been wearing a kind of dress lately, a daytime dress, but not entirely, cut for someone paying attention to themselves, to the world. Not so done up, but rather, I don’t know, put together. The kind of thing you wear when you are hoping, in an itsy bitsy way, that you’ll make a new friend.

Yeah, being in a new city has shifted my needs. I make more eye contact than I’m used to, and sit where I might be approached. I notice my own noticing. What are we doing? is a question I ask myself a hundred times a day. What is life doing, what am I doing, what are we doing?

Why are we so afraid to be seen beginning?

The hustle/push toward entrepreneurship is at an all-time high. Though I love the agency that may arrive with this, self-branding feels less like an option and more like something you need to move forward, or risk AI taking over what you used to do for work. Because of all this, the beginning has all but disappeared. The pressure is there right away. The whole learning or apprentice phase, the unpromising and shaky middle where you are practising, has all been removed from public life, so it’s easy to assume it does not exist.

Can we afford not to be there yet?

Who will pay us if we’re not there yet?

God, it used to be possible to be young at something, to be in the process of honing, to be rough around the bloody edges. Even to be a person who was writing, not a writer, or to be deep in research, not any kind of expert. You were allowed to be unfinished, and everyone would still be kind to you. Now the algorithm, agency or brand wants you to be stuck fast in your lane, or arriving, sure with all your numbers/followers/proof of concept. Your voice is supposed to have arrived, and be super clear. Or you should come with 100k+ engaged readers or a TikTok count of 1 million, or something.

I think we’ve all internalised this to the point that even in private, it’s difficult to comfortably sit with the fact that you’re still working it out. There’s the underlying stress of things taking too long. Perhaps many of us are tired, sick, or both, from having to pretend to be further along than we are.

I thrive a bit on the unknown, but I wonder if I’ve been letting it into my everyday enough. Something about me loves the fact that some of the more self-assured of us might still be, on a Monday, in our late thirties or our forties or further along, sending a text we have rewritten four times,

or sitting across from an almost-stranger who has our grandmother’s face and feeling so much tenderness but not knowing the words, thinking, somehow you might fuck it up, or putting on a dress with a hint of evening in it and hoping, a little bit, to be spoken to.

There are still people doing the slow, magnificent thing in private, but you know it, and I know it, it’s often only a real possibility for people with support systems/money/time they are not trading for money. There appears to be less to play for the rest of us, less time to get it “wrong”.

I write embarrassing sentences all the time. It is part of being a writer. These days, so many essays I read around the place have been polished into confidence not really lived through. Well, you can feel when something has been written by someone willing to look silly, someone putting themselves on the line. It all has a different texture, some daring live edge. Is that why people can knock a novel out of the park on their first attempt, only to struggle with a book or so later? Does the daring get smoothed away?

What I know is this: I want more of that in my own work and the things I read. I’d rather be a beginner more often. Yeah, I would rather sit across from two women I have never met and feel, in real time, the part of me that has been homesick come around and haunt me into a different way of holding myself, a different way of being for that entire week. Or God, wear something lovely, have made the effort, go to the place, and not be sure if anyone is going to speak to me. Not-knowing is the point!!! It’s what makes things bloody interesting.

I know, I know. Times are tough, and sometimes we don’t have the heart for the not knowing. Here’s the work, the true work. Don’t you dare lose that cute rough edge. Stay close to the part of yourself that is still figuring it out. That part is golden. Speak from there.

yrs,

Yrsa

P.S.

I rewrote a text to my aunt four times on Mon morning before I sent it. What I almost sent and what I sent belong to two different Yrsas.

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