Introducing...

On trying new things (and kicking off a new section)

The last time I wrote to you, 2025 was still ahead of us and 2024 not quite behind. It was a strange position and yet it was less strange than the one I find myself now, after a month that has been equally lazy and busy and calm and full of turmoil.

And it would have been a pleasure to say that I have been active in my writing, just behind the scenes. But that’s not quite true.

I’ve been struggling lately with words and finding refuge in crochet. There’s something soothing, almost lulling, about the movements growing progressively more mechanical, more intuitive, and your mind just drifting away, or being anchored by something else (I’ve finally found a way to incorporate audiobooks into my life, and it’s as an active soundtrack to my crochet hours). If I make a mistake, I can undo the stitches, count back to where it was still correct, rework those rows as if nothing had happened. Whereas with writing, well, you know how it goes: this is not the right word, not the right sentence, not the right tone, maybe I’ll go back and delete it, no, better to just leave it as is for now and go do something else, watch a video, crochet for a while, now it’s time to make lunch, now it’s time to do something else, and what was I writing about again? what did I mean to say with that half-written sentence? where was that paragraph supposed to go?

A few minutes before this photo was taken, this pile of yarn had been a sleeve in progress.

I haven’t been writing lately, which is not to say that I haven’t been thinking about writing, and about words, constantly. But there’s something in the process of sitting down and opening a blank document that has come back to haunt me, an old friend, a sensation that starts to build in my stomach and takes over my shoulders and arms: uncertainty leading to brain freeze leading to a full block.

I wish I could process the insecurities caused by years of a difficult relationship with writing in a productive way and at a steady pace. It hasn’t been the case, of course. As it turns out, the process of blunt trauma turning into sore wounds turning into dull bruises is not that linear. And when life feels a little more confusing than average, or when routine gets a little shaken, or something feels slightly off-kilter, it doesn’t matter how much I think about writing, I can’t get myself to do it properly, or even at all. It’s a feeling, a sensation, an irrational impulse to guard myself and my words because they are not in proper order, they will never be, how could they ever be.

Writing can be a soothing balm but, to me, it’s been feeling more like jolting even further out of place.

Maybe that’s okay for now.

You see, since my last dispatch, I have made two beanies, a scarf, a vest, and I’m well into creating an oversized sweater. In the meantime, I have listened to all of the 1980s albums by The Cure, I have rewatched Avatar: The Last Airbender, I have audio-read more than I ever had before. And I have some nice, comfortable if not perfect, handmade pieces to tell the story of this first month and a half of 2025.

Oh, and I’ve been having fun while at it, which is definitely more than okay.

Still, I miss this space. I miss this activity, this typing of ideas and working through them as they come.

As I used to when I was a teenager, I find refuge in other people’s words when I fail to find my own. Unlike my 15-year-old self, however, escaping into others’ words has been an active exercise, of trying to retune my brain and my guts, to warm them up, to see how to make it all click into place as the perfect Tetris match I see elsewhere. So, even though I don’t intend to become a book reviewer, the most writing I have done in the past few weeks has been a set of bullet-point book reviews I have been posting to Instagram. Sitting down and trying to distill what may or may not attract readers to a book in such a short format has been a little bit like a fun puzzle, one that I now want to bring to this space, as a way to embrace this practice and share with more people the worlds and minds I often visit but don’t often talk about here.

In a way, this is a very long-winded introduction to a new section to Juliana, cronista, entitled read/don’t read: (extremely) short book reviews. At first, I will be posting my January reviews in three batches over the next handful of days; after that, expect a dispatch every two weeks, with reviews of books I have finished during that period. And, if anything strikes my fancy in any particular way, who knows, maybe it will merit a longer post here like the ones I’ve written for some books in the past.

I hope you will consider read/don’t read as a patio for this house: a part of this virtual abode, one that you can spend your whole visit in or one that you can completely ignore if you want. But I do hope you will stop by, sit down for a cup of tea or two, and share your thoughts and perceptions of any titles you may see on my virtual shelves!