🖇️ A Route to Being Less Fearful and More Authentic
On vulnerability and turning my newsletter into a weekly publication.
When young, I mean younger, or more concretely until I was twenty-five, I told people: I’m still figuring out what I want from life, but I’m sure I want to be a mother.
I don’t know whether I changed my mind about having kids after my first book was published, or whether what I said about motherhood was never true. I do know that I was aware of what I wanted from life early on. I was just too scared to tell people outright, for this would open the path to possible failure: I wanted to be a writer.
Over two decades and five novels later, much has changed. I no longer hide what I want. But my ambition and anxiety still do this crazy dance together at times. I’d like to write wildly and take chances, but I worry about what others might think. Are they going to see me as ignorant, inappropriate, annoying, or arrogant?
I feel particularly vulnerable publishing this newsletter. For one, English is my second language, and although I’m fairly proficient in it, I still make mistakes. I have no editor proofreading my words before they go out into the world. Each time I hit “send,” I am nervous, like I’m getting a tattoo I might later regret.
The vulnerability goes deeper, though, than worrying about typos and grammatical errors. I also fret about content. What if I publish something that’s inadvertently offensive? That demonstrates a prejudice I didn’t know I had? That’s simply bad writing? Publishing anything can lead to shame.
A Substack writer whose name I’ve forgotten—sorry!—and who experienced the anxiety I describe above asked for advice on dealing with this fear, and I surprised myself by typing: “Writing is communication. We typically don’t read to judge others. We read to understand them, feel closer to people by getting an insight into their thoughts.”
I believe most of us are here to connect, not to judge. Sharing thoughts is the goal. But the question remains: How honest should we be?
For a long time I believed I could get away with showing only part of myself, a filtered self, a censured self. A self that played it safe to keep criticism and ridicule at bay. But even during that time I longed for more authenticity. I dreamed of revealing my thoughts with a flourish, like lifting my skirt.
As a naïve young author, I made the mistake of telling a journalist how it felt to see my debut novel in a bookstore. “It’s like I’m lying on the table, naked,” I said. To my mortification (yet in hindsight very predictably) he turned this into the headline. I’ve become more careful with what I tell the press now, but I spoke the truth that day: Writers feel naked when they write with any kind of honesty.
Still, there’s no other way. We must be willing to move beyond our fear and expose ourselves. Vulnerability isn’t comfortable, but it’s what makes us human and relatable. We’re all vulnerable in our own unique way, yet this vulnerability is universal and therefore connects us.
Vulnerability is also the place where creativity thrives, where we can uncover truths we intuit but haven’t yet been able to express. Where we can link ideas and might discover things we’ve kept from even ourselves.
Going forward, I’ll try to be a less fearful and more authentic author. I’m going to experiment more and branch out. I’m going to write wildly and lift my skirt, probably not all at once—I’m not that brave—but a little less daintily than this:
Will you join me?
Wander, Wonder, Write is Going Weekly!
As you might have guessed from the essay above, I’ve been wanting to publish more frequently for a while, but fear stopped me. I was afraid I would scare my subscribers away if I posted too often or wrote about subjects outside my travel niche.
But my newsletters began to feel bloated, and I was still holding back, not always sharing what felt urgent. So I’m going to take the leap now and publish weekly. I risk you won’t like everything I’ll send you, yet I’d rather take that risk than limit myself.
What You Can Expect
I’ll send you one post a week on Thursday (used to be Friday) in one of the following six categories.
# Travelogues and Travel Essays, deep dives into cultures, destinations, and themes related to my nomadic life. This is most of what you’ve been reading so far and will remain most of what I’ll send.
⌂ Life & Memoir, posts on subjects such as family, marriage, grief, trauma, caregiving, anxiety, mindfulness, and death. For example: How Do You Get to Be 107-Years-Old? and My Dysfunctional Family Screwed Up: Here’s How to Protect Yours.
🎶 Artists in the Wild, a series to avoid you getting sick of me and introduce you to some of the interesting creative people I meet on my journeys. The first in the series is about an ikebanist.
🔎 How to Whatever, short articles such as “How to Feel at Home in a Foreign Country” and “How to Recognize Epiphanies and Change Your Mind.” I majored in philosophy and veer toward moral and existential questions. I’ve been wanting to write articles such as these since Alain De Botton published The Consolations of Philosophy in 2001. What have I been waiting for?
🖇️ On Craft and the Writing Life, occasional pieces that may empower you on your journey toward publication or give you a peek into my creative highs & lows. This post is an example.
🗝️ La Chambre Claire, my wild cards, such as:
Roundups of reading recommendations
Ask-me-anything posts, in which I answer readers’ questions and share life & travel hacks—message me!
Lyric, braided, or hybrid essays that don’t fit anywhere else
Fiction: a flash, an excerpt, or a cut darling from a larger manuscript
Guest author essays on post-colonialism, responsible traveling, culture, language, mindfulness, and more—pitch me!
Crossposts from essays I’ve guest authored for other publications
Housekeeping posts.
You’re in Control!
Subscribers to Wander, Wonder, Write will receive posts in each category by email or in the app, depending on your settings. Most will be about wandering: Travelogues and Travel Essays. Pieces on what else makes me wonder and write will fill out the rest.
If hearing from me once a week is too much for you, or you don’t want to receive posts in a particular category, you can adjust your settings in your Substack account. No need to unsubscribe completely: You can select exactly what you want to read.
Paid Subscriptions
You can now become a paid subscriber to Wander, Wonder, Write. You can choose to contribute monthly ($5) or annually ($50) or become a founding member.
For the time being, there’s no difference between the free and the paid subscription, except for your generosity. All my content will remain accessible to everyone. In the near future, I’d like to explore the possibilities of offering additional posts exclusive to paid subscribers.
Please consider upgrading your subscription if you can afford to do so. The more income I’ll derive from this newsletter, the more time I’ll be able to dedicate to it. My plan is to do more in-depth reporting and research.
If you cannot contribute financially or prefer not to do so at this point, that’s totally fine, too: I’m happy to have you on board! You can support my writing by liking my posts, leaving comments, or sharing my writing with others.
Another way to contribute: Invite Daniel and me to housesit for you while you’re away, or offer us a brief writing residency. We don’t smoke and don’t party. We have an international liability insurance and will care for gardens and easy pets. Give us a try!
I’m grateful for your help in whatever form it comes.
Author News
Yesterday, SmallStack published my first guest essay: How Just One Exceptional Reader Changed My Life.
An excerpt:
Whenever I walked around, I imagined Robin with me, looking over my shoulder, pointing at what intrigued her. I became more observant and probing, photographing details with her in mind. I got better at talking to strangers. I could be hesitant to make inquiries for myself, but asking for the sake of my most invested reader was another story. I had a responsibility to fulfill, an extra soul to satisfy. My writing improved.
Thank you editors, Robin Taylor (he/him) and Robin Cangie (she/her), for accepting this essay, thank you Erin Mercer for your helpful edits, and thank you Robin Flicker, for having inspired this piece.
Please head over to SmallStack to read the rest of this essay!
Time to Say Goodbye
Daniel and I flew from Osaka to Paris yesterday. After we landed, traversed the Olympic city, and caught the train to Morlaix, we received the news of the 7.1 force earthquake in Kyushu, where we had just spent a month on the coast. A tsunami warning went out and we held our breath along with the rest of Japan. Now, as I’m wrapping up this post, I’m reading about the earthquake in Tokyo and about the increased risk of an even bigger quake to come. Let’s hope the seismic activity will soon calm down!
All my best,
Claire
P.S. Your thoughts on Wander, Wonder, Write are very welcome. What would you like to see more of? Less of? How can I make this newsletter more valuable to you? You can send me a private message, too, if leaving a public comment is not your thing.
“We typically don’t read to judge others. We read to understand them, feel closer to people by getting an insight into their thoughts.” What a wonderful way to describe why we read.
Thank you for leading by example.