doodlebug hath returned
Good writing is born from good living so here’s to a vast life.
I want to tell you about the essay that got me into college. It was a 500-word story about the cricket farm that my older brother, Caden, and I had on the porch of our parents’ house the summer after my sophomore year and that I was tasked with keeping safe from the birds so we could freeze the crickets and sell them to restaurants. The first college acceptance letter I got came with a note from the admissions officer that said, “I loved reading about you and your brother’s relationship and your cricket farm! How fun!” However, the handwriting seemed as though the compliment was said in a condescending manner, so I decided not to go there.
I want to tell you about the time that I posted a Tik Tok video of me covering my friend in shaving cream to emulate the Bella Hadid Coperni spray-on dress of 2022, and it went viral. When a Madrid-based fashion magazine reached out to ask if they could repost the video on their website and write about it in their magazine, I responded, “Sure, but only if you let me come intern for you,” and they said yes, so I spent my time studying abroad going to showrooms, assisting photographers on cover shoots, meeting the stars of “Valeria,” and attending fashion shows.
You also need to hear about the time my family drove 13 hours to South Carolina just so that we could smuggle turtles back into Missouri and how back in April I left a bag of assorted candy out on the counter at my grandma’s house, but when I woke up the next morning, it was significantly lighter when I picked it up, I looked inside to find a note that said, “I ate all your chocolate,” signed “G-Ma.” Or maybe the story of going dirt biking for my birthday and convincing the 23-year-old-boy who was supposed to be my instructor that I was good enough to ride on the motocross track.
It’s imperative that you know about all my travel stories. Like at 18 when I drove 20 hours to visit my friend in Gunnison, Colorado, and when I got back home I said to my parents, “I can’t believe you let me do that!” and they said, “Well, you didn’t really give us a choice.” Or how, on that same trip, my friend and I decided we didn’t want to pay for white water rafting, so we kneeled down on inflatable paddleboards and took them down the Colorado River. Or when I lived in New York City for a summer and my new friend and I ran two miles through the streets during a storm just to see Dominic Fike at a coffee shop and spent every weekend sitting in Washington Square Park and playing drinking games in our dorm.
If we’re talking about traveling, then you need to know about all the different places I have slept on road trips, whether that be on a hammock 12 feet off the ground with my friend Lennon in Colorado or in the trunk of my car in an auto body repair shop with Caden in Arizona or the empty five-star hotel in Albufeira, Portugal.
And if I’m telling the stories, I obviously need to show you all the photos in my Lightroom that correspond.
For so long now, I have been writing and deleting. Not posting anything, or posting things that I’m not fully proud of. Things that I don’t even edit because I don’t want to read over them again. I have been struggling to find what I actually want to write about among so many other writers. Occasionally, in the rare moments of clarity that come when I am biking down the massive hill in my neighborhood, walking my dog through the park, or taking a long, hot shower after a hard, cold day, I realize that I started this Substack to tell stories, and that is the only thing I have ever wanted to do.
From the time I was eight and wrote weekly newspapers to hand out to my immediate family, to hand writing a 20-page story in the fourth grade about a sassy band of flamingos breaking out of the zoo and having a rivalry with the elephants, to when I was a quarantined freshman in college subjected to the baby blue desk in my childhood bedroom writing a story from my dog’s point of view or the 14-page short story I wrote just as a bit to make fun of my geology professor. Storytelling has always been a constant thread, woven through every phase of my life.
I have been publishing on Substack for so long – over two years – and the platform has changed enormously since I first joined. What was once just a database to send out mass emails has since become a dynamic social media site of its own with collaborations between writers, notes, restacks, and recommendations. While I love to see the platform growing, it also has become saturated with writers, making me victim to the age-old problem: losing my own voice by consuming too much of others'.
I was snapped back into reality after reading “The machine in the garden” by Emily Sundberg, which sparked a conversation about who should be able to call themselves a “writer”. In my personal interpretation, the piece seemed to be a vehicle towards self reflection. A prompt for writers to read their work back in a different mindset and ask, “Is this something I’m truly proud of?” Nobody can answer that question except the writer. In my case, the answer was no.
Having published for so long, I also find that I read my old work I published in my sophomore year of college and it feels very empty and embarrassing and juvenile. This is a natural and good progression for artists. While it means that I am getting better at writing, more importantly, it has made me realize that some of those stories deserve to be told better. Instead of just deleting the old posts, I will be writing some of the pieces in new ways. It is fun to keep those posts around to see where I have come from and imagine where I might continue to go.
The main reason I started publishing was to tell stories like I always loved to do. But the other reason was to build a community online when I was spending a summer feeling lonely without a physical community. Those have been the two main goals from the beginning that I want to get back to — telling stories and building a community.
Good art – good writing – comes from a life well lived. The goal is not to sit at a desk and painfully and slowly write a novel in order to live, the goal is to live your life in order to have things to write about.
This is a place for telling stories, not analyzing them. This is a place for living to write, not writing to live.
Yours truly,
Calihan
Read my collaboration with Lila:
