I planned on sending this email during last New Moon, to keep things poetic. But, of course, the astrology of this month wasn’t easy for anyone and I couldn’t manage to sit and write an email. And then I noticed the Full Moon had gone too and I hadn’t even written or dug out an old short story to send you. But it’s fine, I skipped a month, really. We’re nearly at the New Moon again. That’s aries season for you.
When I first got to Germany, I talked to a Brazilian friend living in Sweden about what it was like to live here. Everything was slower, she said, perhaps because of the seasons. In São Paulo, where I lived until last year, everything was “for yesterday”, people worked their 44-hour-day-job then their freelance job then their personal side projects (plural) and fit in dating and friends and family and standing in line to fancy new restaurants or pop exhibitions. All at once, at the same time. Even burnouts are supposed to last only a month. But here in the old world, we’re expected to wait for bureaucracy to last forever. We wait in line to register our addresses for months after moving. I’m still expecting to get my ID in the mail two months later. We’re supposed to have time to enjoy concerts and parks and weekends off. Processes last lifetimes. Nature will always reborn after the winter.
But it is springtime now and I got a new house and a new part-time job and I’m moving things for myself and everything’s blooming again. Writing this letter to you is a way to slow down my own heartbeat.
Anyway, last month I published my first article at Tor.com and am so proud of it. It’s about Disney’s Encanto and my grandmother. Or all of our grandmothers and the pressure we put on ourselves and each other, to be the perfect women. I didn’t want my family to read it, but they did. And some of them said nice things about it, so I am a little happy about that. What I left out (and what they probably would like) is this:
Being Isabela, the hidden part of me is being a messy queer. And I am so glad that Vovó Julia died years before she could know and hate this about me. I don’t think she could ever forgive me for being who I am. And I don’t think I could be as forgiving as Disney characters in accepting how limited she actually was. I would rather keep her as the warm memory she was. (Perhaps she would even surprise me.) It’s a difficult thing, accepting people as they are.
In my efforts to be a more professional writer, I have done two things:
organized my portfolio here (yes, it will be deborahhapp.com as soon as I sit down to buy the domain). I would love to hear your thoughts about it and it would help me very much if you shared it with people who might be interested in my work.
organized a reader research for you, my readers, to tell me more about yourselves and help me see what else (what else) I can do.
That’s it for this month. I’m off to box and suitcase up everything I own and move into my forever home and then sit in the German sun for a bit. See you next Full Moon!