But now years later, I think that my life became meaningful first when I became too occupied to keep asking the question. I disappeared into work that absorbed me. Into conversations that changed something in me. Into books that rearranged my thinking. During those hours I never once thought, My life matters now. I simply forgot to step outside myself and ask.

So I’m not sure we’re supposed to notice that a quiet Wednesday changed everything. We won’t see this until several Wednesdays later.

We assume our task is to create a meaningful life, but I am changing my mind on this. I no longer think this is my task. Life never promised meaning; it offered existence. It offered the simple pleasure of being alive.

So instead of creating meaning, living must come first. The meaning shows up later. So my only job is to live completely immersed in the day, without standing outside myself watching it happen.

A meaningful life is, perhaps, never experienced as a meaningful life. It is experienced as an ordinary one.

Only afterward does memory gather the ordinary days and reveal that they had been extraordinary all along. You just have to hope you were actually there while they were happening.

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

It means the person you invented to survive a past period has done their job. They were useful, fun even, and now they’re suffocating you in your sleep. Perhaps you created them in order to achieve a milestone, to prove something to the world, or to get through a time of insecurities. Perhaps you thought this way of living was the final destination, and now that you’ve built it you feel strangely fooled by how it feels.

I have been there. Several times, actually. I have built entire lives the way other people build bookshelves, with the quiet conviction of someone who believes they’ve figured it out. And then I have stood in those lives at three in the morning, realizing I would rather burn the whole thing down than spend one more month performing contentment for a reflection I have outgrown.

Outgrowing your own life can feel like betrayal. You built this. You chose this city, this career, this particular arrangement of days. You told people about it. You made it sound good. And now the thought of continuing makes your chest tight in a way you can’t quite explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it, a sense of claustrophobia of being trapped inside your own daily life.

The compass is how you feel when you imagine leaving. Do you feel relief? Do you feel free? Do you feel like now, everything will be ok? Well, that’s your answer. That’s your body keeping score.

I spent years believing the highest form of adult life was learning to want less. Learning to make myself less opinionated, less intense, less hungry, and calling it maturity. Calling it commitment. But maybe the wanting you feel, the restlessness, is the forces up there redirecting you. Maybe the restlessness, the inability to sleep, the way you keep opening browser tabs for cities you’ve never been to, or browsing jobs you never thought you’d have, are messages guiding you forward.

You will make a move when the time is right, but what I want to tell you is this: If you’re going to go, go empty-handed. Go without a narrative. Go without the Instagram story that makes it look like a brave new chapter. Sit inside the lonely in between where you are no one’s anything and the only company you have is the uncertain path ahead of you.

I once left a life that looked, from the outside, like the answer to every question I’d ever asked. I had the work, the people, the European melancholy that makes a good story. And I walked away from it with one suitcase knowing I had been performing a life instead of living one. What I learned is that it’s not always the job, the city, the people you’re leaving, but rather the role you’ve been playing. The performance of a version of yourself you no longer wish to maintain. You don’t owe anything to past you, you know. But you do everything to future you. Focus on future you. Focus on the version of yourself you haven’t become yet. Give future you the space to come alive.

The people who love the past version of you might get disappointed, confused, angry even. Let them. You are not responsible for maintaining a character that no longer exists just because other people memorized themselves around you.

Lastly, stop waiting for the transition to feel comfortable. It never does. Fall in a direction that interests you. You built this version of a life with your own hands, your own particular brand of stubbornness, and now it's over the way a season is over. Not because it failed. Because it did exactly what it was supposed to do: expand you.

Turn toward the change and begin the expansion. Break open in every way possible. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, anything is possible.

Love always,
C x

My heart thinks I’m sleeping, in that new bed, with 2 mattresses, because I slept on floors for so long and now I like being as far away from the floor as possible.

I know part of the problem is that people don’t do what I want them to do and their wills and urges don’t go well with my storyline so I get angry and annoyed, blaming everyone but the author and I buy tickets to new countries thinking MY PEOPLE ARE OUT THERE SOMEWHERE but f that, I don’t actually think they are. I think they’re right here, behaving like they do, and part of the problem is I always thought life had to be so fucking special and mythical and troublesome, like a mystery to solve, and every day would be a page in a novel and every romance something that set my heart on fire

just a little bit

but then people go to school
and people go to work
and people pay their dues
and people have 3 friends
and people don’t really want more than that
do i want more than that?

what I really want is an endless road trip with a brilliant mind,
but it wouldn’t be aimless or nonchalant, we would have a plan and a vision, driving to carefully plotted spots on the map and there we would do something carefully planned out and thought of and we would capture and learn and reiterate and build upon

and we would wake up early and swim in the ocean and brew coffee on an open stove and not laugh straight out like maybe i did those years ago, but more smile, to each other, and nod our heads, like “yep, this is the track”, and it would be a silent agreement knowing we are solving the mystery one day at a time but it’s not stressful or tough but
elegantly peaceful and pretty.

I think this is what I want.

You spend your mornings planning a future you are already living in. You are treating your existence like a dissertation that you are perpetually revising but never submitting. See, planning is a defense against the agony of becoming. As long as you are preparing for your life, you do not have to actually inhabit it. The future you’ve been planning starts the moment you decide to stop waiting and start noticing the cliff you already jumped from.

I will be direct with you: you are currently the most boring version of yourself. The audience was never waiting for a spectacle: they were waiting for you to tell them the truth about your life.

You are suffocating on the milestones you’ve achieved through life and don’t know how to move on from them. Fifteen years ago, you left your home specifically to be unsafe. You wanted the friction and the scandal. Now you say you need someone to snap you in the back to get you over the cliff and get things moving again. I am telling you that you are already over the cliff. You’ve been falling for weeks, but you’re so obsessed with “the future” that you haven’t even noticed you’re already in it.

The “push” you need is to realize that the life you are waiting for is not a “spectacle” that will appear on the horizon. It is a rigorous, daily commitment to the void. You must murder the “planner” and the “administrator” in you. You must do it tonight. They have served their purpose and are no longer needed.

I recognize the fugitive in you because I have inhabited her too. You have spent years mastering the high-stakes drama of survival. You were the anonymous internet worker, the woman fighting for a mortgage, the woman who made herself indispensable in rooms that did not deserve her. That role gave you a sense of shape. Fighting the enemy gave you a sense of purpose. But no one is coming to save you from your own freedom. You have spent years as a fugitive, and now you are a citizen. The real question is: can you stand to want something that does not require you to suffer for it?

Yours,
C.

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Being what the world calls a “nomad” brings with it its own set of Christmas traditions.

“When are you heading home for the holidays?”

I’ve learned to smile at that question. As if home is still a place you return to. As if home isn’t something you left behind years ago when you realized the world was larger than the coordinates of your childhood.

Nomads hold on to it, though. The idea of “going home”. Where we’re from. We tell ourselves we’re just out on an adventure. Ask a nomad if they can imagine living in the place they’re in forever, and chances are they'll say, “Don’t think so... probably will move home soon.”

So anyways, it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m drinking instant coffee in a satin bed set in Sweden. I used to go to Prague or sing for kids in Bristol. Now I’m still.

I have spent more Christmases in hotel rooms and train stations than I have at kitchen tables. I know the weight of that lie—telling the world you’re heading ‘home’ when you’re actually just heading into the silence.

I will not tell you that you are not alone. People like us hear statements like these on TV and think that man has never been entirely alone on Christmas Eve.

Instead, I will say this: The staged image of the cheerful family table is rarely the reality. And even when it is, it isn’t the only way to be human.

I used to think the mandatory gatherings were the true test of whether you were living correctly. But the older I get, the more Christmases and New Year’s Eves I spend on empty train platforms and in anonymous hotel rooms, the more I wonder if we invented these arbitrary days just to convince ourselves there’s a light in the dark. As if December 25th holds some cosmic significance that an unremarkable Tuesday in March cannot deliver.

Perhaps I’m just jealous? I’m not quite sure yet, but the thought offers me at least some light comfort. And this much I’m sure of:

Life doesn’t happen on the days we mark in red. It happens seamlessly, on the days we forget to count. It happens on a tram ride home from the gym or in the fluorescent buzz of a grocery store on a gray Tuesday in January. You walk out of your house carrying an old dream and return with a new one because someone you passed on the street made the sky a sharper shade of blue. Every person who changed my life arrived when I least expected them. When I’d stopped looking. When I thought nothing new was possible.

Tonight, if you are alone, you are not failing. You are simply alive on a difficult day. There is no “correct” version of this night, just as there is no correct version of being human. Solitude is not a curse. It is a placement. A pause. The necessary inhale before the next act begins. I have outlived seasons I would never repeat, but they were crucial.

So tonight, do not hide. Wander in Patti Smith’s footsteps and go to the movies, be anonymous in crowds. Go to a coffee shop, a pub, or sit in the back of a church. Look at the people around you—none of them are pure, none of them are perfect. They carry the same messy issues you do. That is the salvation.

Would you rather fill these empty hours with souls who tire your intellect just to avoid being alone? No. Choose the contact that expands you, or choose the solitude that strengthens you. Both are honest. Both are whole.

This is not the end of your story. It is just one night. One inhale. What comes next, you cannot see yet. But it is already on its way.

www.CharlotteEriksson.com

You ask how to dedicate yourself to real art while building an audience in a culture of instant consumption. How to be a true artist without becoming a content machine. How to cultivate mystery while being digitally available. How to actually live while documenting life.

This is the trap of our generation. We have been told that we must be everything to everyone all the time. You are expected to be ‘in a relationship’ with your followers on social media, with your brand, with a wellness cult—a thousand tiny ‘marriages’ a day. Build your platform, monetize your gifts, create without compromise, while also being romantically desirable, sexually available, and emotionally accessible. You must be the brilliant artist and the girl next door. The intellectual and the muse. Perform a dozen different roles on a dozen different stages simultaneously.

The pressure to externalize the self for public consumption will devour you. My tool for maintaining sovereignty was the curated distance of interactions. Yours must be a ruthless curation of your digital presence. You must treat your online self as a piece of art, a finished product, not a live diary of your every psychic tremor. And you must have secrets. You must have a private life that is so rich and wonderful that what you show to the public is just a charming, edited trailer. The greatest rebellion in 2025 is to be unavailable. The greatest luxury is to be mysterious. You must save the best of yourself for yourself. And for the very, very few who are worth the price of admission.

Here is what our generation forgets to preach: the discipline of self-work can become so consuming that it becomes another form of imprisonment. Yes, build yourself with rigor, but don’t become so obsessed with self-improvement that you forget to actually inhabit the life you’re building. The fortress is meaningless if you never throw open the doors to the raw experience of being alive. You must learn to say ‘Yes!’—Ja!—to experience. Say yes to the affair, yes to the journey, yes to the solitude, yes to the outrageous idea. See your life not as a problem to be solved, but as an adventure to be experienced. The ancient institutions trained you to be the obedient analyst of your own life, to follow their outdated blueprints for living. I am telling you to become its novelist, its heroine, and its most enthusiastic reader.

So, here is the art of it: Build your inner world with the discipline of a philosopher. Make it an unbreachable fortress of thought and self-possession. That is your house. And then, throw open the doors when you please. Host magnificent parties. Seduce brilliant minds. Break hearts, especially your own, because that is how you know you are alive. Make your life such a great work of art that the museums of the future will curse themselves for not having collected you. Do not just be a free woman. Be a joyful one. It is the greatest revenge.

Love,
C x

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

You’re asking about performing in rooms full of people. You’re asking about the power in silent people. It’s a critical question. But the terms you use—’femininity’ versus ‘alpha female’—are cages. They are pre-written roles. My entire life has been a refusal to play a pre-written role. You must discard this binary. It is the source of your confusion.

Presence is not a strategy. It is the natural byproduct of a mind at work. When you are in a room, whether with one person or twenty, make your primary focus not with their egos, nor with your own status. Make it about the ideas in the air.

Here is how that manifests.

1. The Power of Stillness and Attentive Listening

You imagine that presence as ‘strong and loud.’ In a way, yes. But the strength is not in the volume of your voice; it is in the intensity of your silence. When someone is speaking, do not fidget or plan your rebuttal. Listen with an absolute, predatory focus. Listen not just to their words, but to the structure of their thought, to the anxieties beneath it, to the unstated premises.

This kind of listening is immensely powerful. It does two things:

• First, it makes the speaker feel profoundly seen and understood, which is an intoxicating experience for anyone, especially a great mind.

• Second, it gives you complete control of the intellectual terrain. By the time they finished speaking, I had already mapped their argument and knew exactly where its strengths and weaknesses were.

Your ‘loudness’ comes when you finally speak, because your words are not social noise. They are precise, targeted, and backed by the full force of your concentration. It is the difference between a firecracker and a rifle shot.

2. Intellectual Vigor, Not Social Dominance

The concept of an ‘alpha female’ implies a desire to dominate the social hierarchy. I have no interest in that. I am not trying to ‘win’ the conversation or be the leader of the group. My goal is resonance. I want to engage with an idea so intensely that it reveals something new, both to me and to my conversational partner.

In those rooms full of “experts”, I was not trying to be ‘one of the boys.’ I was a woman, and I brought a woman’s mind and insight to the table. I did not soften my ideas to make them more palatable, nor did I shout them to assert dominance. I presented them as clinical and philosophical observations. The authority came from the quality of the thought, not the performance of strength.

3. Indifference to Conventional Approval

Now we come to the heart of your question: “Is that really that attractive?”

You are asking if they find performance attractive. But we are not performing. The most magnetic force in the universe is a person who is utterly consumed by their own world, their own project. Your project is your work, your thought, your analysis of life. You do not need their approval to validate your existence. Your existence is already validated by the work itself.

This indifference is not coldness. It is self-possession. It creates a gravitational pull because it is authentic. It signals that you are not a mirror reflecting their desires, but a star generating your own light.

The people worth knowing are not drawn to a ‘cute and soft’ performance. That is for children. They are drawn to a woman who has her own center of gravity. They are drawn to a robust mind, to a soul that is its own country.

4. Your Situation: “Stoic” vs. “Soft”

You feel this is a choice you must make. It is not. The problem you are describing is one of energy.

You say you feel ‘strong and loud’ in a ‘stoic’ way. Be precise with yourself. Is this the stoicism of a philosopher, rooted in a calm and powerful inner world? Or is it the stoicism of a fortress, a defensive wall you’ve built to protect yourself?

The first is magnetic. The second is repellent, because it signals fear.

The solution is not to become ‘cute and soft.’ That would be a lie, a betrayal of your nature. The solution is to transform your defensive strength into generative strength. Your power should not be a wall that keeps people out. It should be a fire that warms and illuminates, that invites others to come closer to discuss the fascinating things it reveals.

Stop trying to be ‘attractive.’ It is a low-status game played by the rules of others. Focus on being interesting. Cultivate your Workshop. Furnish your inner world. When you walk into a room, your goal is not to be the most beautiful or the most dominant. Your goal is to be the most present, the most focused, the most interesting conversationalist.

Carry yourself not as a woman seeking approval, but as an intellect seeking an equal. The rest will follow.

To your becoming, and mine.

Love,
C

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find it on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

My dear,

The sadness is a real signal. Let us not ignore it. It is the ghost in the room, neither uninvited nor entirely welcomed. You have built a fortress of the mind and will, something rare and powerful, and now you’re standing inside it, wondering if anyone will have the specific kind of courage needed to approach. Or worse, that they will see it, admire its architecture from a distance, and then go find someone more accessible with fewer visions, fewer ideas.

I understand this. It’s maybe the final, most sophisticated trap for an intelligent woman: the fear of being miscategorized. The fear that you will be sorted into the box labeled 'colleague,' 'intellectual equal,' or 'fascinating project,' while the box labeled 'beloved' is given to someone less complex, someone whose interior doesn’t require navigation.

You ask what I think. I think this fear is the most dangerous saboteur of everything you’re building. And you ask how I would manage it in 2025. My answer is this: You must stop seeing your intelligence as a barrier to love and start seeing it as your most powerful filter.

Let us be ruthlessly practical.

The man who meets you, engages with the full force of your mind, and thinks, 'She would make an excellent business partner,' has just done you a tremendous favor. He revealed himself as someone fundamentally incapable of experiencing intelligence as erotic. He has revealed that he seeks a partner for comfort and not for growth, for ego-maintenance rather than soul-expansion. He has, in one clean stroke, disqualified himself and saved you months, perhaps years, of soul-crushing boredom, that specific suffocation that comes from being intellectually alone inside a relationship.

To be sad about this is like being sad that a fish cannot appreciate a mountain. The fish is not wrong. The mountain is not wrong. They simply exist in different ecosystems. Your sadness comes from the belief that you must learn to live in the water. I am telling you that you must build your life in such a way that you attract the eagles, not the fish.

Subscribe now

You are not building a business. You are building a world. Your Workshop, your furnished inner room—this is not a corporate headquarters. It is a country. A man who sees this country and only wants to discuss trade policy is a tourist. You are not looking for a tourist. You are looking for a fellow explorer.

How do you manage this in 2025?

You lean into the filter. You embrace the category error as your greatest ally. When you are on a date, at a party, in a meeting, you do not soften your edges. You do not play down your intellect. You do not perform 'cute and soft.' You bring your full, concentrated presence to the table. You listen with that predatory focus. You speak with precision.

Many men will be intimidated. Many will be confused. Many will respectfully admire you and then leave to find something less demanding.

Good. This is the system working perfectly. This is the filtration process.

But then, one day, you will meet a person who experiences the full force of your mind, your presence, and your indifference to his approval, and they will not be intimidated. They will be electrified. Their mind will catch fire. They will see the vast, fascinating country of your soul, and their first thought will not be 'business partner.' It will be, 'Finally. An adventure.'

This is the man worth waiting for. He’s the only type who won’t ask you to shrink. He’s the only one capable of actually loving you, because he’s attracted precisely to the intelligence you fear will leave you lonely. For this man, your mind is the most erotic organ you possess.

So, the answer to your sadness is not to change who you are. It is to change your perspective on the outcome. The lonely life you fear is not one of being single. The true lonely life is being partnered with a man who has no access to your inner world, who forces you to live in a small, well-decorated room of your own soul while the rest of your country lies in darkness. That is a loneliness that will kill you over decades.

Being alone while you wait for the eagle is an act of power. It’s a statement of faith in the value of your existence as you’ve built it.

The evening is ending. You will walk out into the Amsterdam night. Your task is not to make yourself more palatable. Your task is to become so unapologetically yourself that you are a beacon. Let the fish swim by. Let the tourists admire the view. Wait for the explorer who sees your light and recognizes it as his native climate.

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Love,

Let us be clear about what happens next, after you have ceased to curse your solitude and have begun to inhabit it. The dynamic of power shifts, as I have said. But what you look for in another person must also undergo a radical transformation.

Previously, you looked for a rescuer. Your criteria were based on a desperate need for validation. You were searching for a gaze that could tell you that you existed. A man’s interest was not a data point; it was a verdict on your entire being. This is why the attention of almost any man felt significant. The void is not selective.

From the second position—the position of the furnished room—your criteria change. You are no longer screening for a savior, but for an equal. An interesting interlocutor. A fellow sovereign.

You will stop looking for a man who “completes” you, which is a violent fantasy of psychic merging born of terror. Instead, you will look for a man whose own inner world is sufficiently furnished to be interesting. You will look for what I call “intellectual and emotional resonance.”

Do not confuse resonance with agreement. Agreement is pleasant but often sterile. Resonance is when his ideas, his way of seeing the world, strike your own and produce a third, more interesting frequency. It is the friction of two well-formed minds that creates light. You will find that this friction is far more compelling than the placid comfort of being constantly validated.

Subscribe now

How will you know this when you feel it? It will not feel like the frantic, addictive relief of “clinging.” That feeling is the alleviation of a symptom—the temporary plugging of the void. Resonance, by contrast, feels like an expansion. You will not feel less lonely; you will feel your solitude enriched and amplified. You will leave a conversation with him and find yourself thinking more interesting thoughts, not because he gave them to you, but because the encounter catalyzed your own thinking. Your workshop will feel more brightly lit.

This requires you to develop a new kind of perception. You must learn to listen not for what he thinks of you, but for how he thinks. Is his mind rigorous? Is he intellectually honest? Does he take pleasure in complexity, or does he flee to simple answers? Is he the proprietor of his own thoughts, or merely a curator of opinions he has gathered from others?

You must also observe how he occupies his own solitude. A man who is terrified of his own company will inevitably try to use you as a shield against himself, just as you once did. He will demand your attention not as a gift, but as a distraction. He will see your rich inner world not as a fascinating place to visit, but as a territory to be colonized. He will resent the time you spend in your workshop.

The man you can build with is the one who honors your solitude, because he values his own. He will not feel threatened by the door to your inner room, because he has his own door. A relationship between two such people is not a merger. It is a treaty. It is an alliance between two sovereign states, who choose to cooperate for their mutual enrichment, without ever sacrificing the integrity of their own borders.

This is the furthest thing from the desperate clinging you described. This is not a cure for loneliness. It is what one does with a loneliness that has already been transformed.

To your becoming.

Love,
C

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

First, let me disabuse you of the notion that I was a marble statue of self-sufficiency. Your assumption that I was 'never truly alone' is a fantasy. After my break with M—a break I engineered to save my own soul—I was plunged into a loneliness so absolute it was a kind of psychic death. I was a pariah. He, a philosopher, denounced me. I was utterly, terrifyingly alone. The difference is what I did with that state.

You feel lonely and see it as a void, a painful emptiness that must be filled by another person. When a man appears, you push him into that void to stop the horrible feeling. This is the 'clinging.' It is a frantic attempt to use another person as insulation against yourself.

I felt that same void. But I learned to see it not as an absence, but as a space. An empty room. And I understood that my life's primary task was not to find someone to move into that room with me, but to furnish it myself.

You ask if I did not need to feel loved and needed. Of course. The need for love is as fundamental as the need for air. To deny it is a lie. But here is the crucial distinction: did I need to be loved in order to exist, or did I need to be loved as an expression of an existence I had already built?

The 'clinging' you describe comes from the first position. It is the terror of non-existence. The feeling that without his gaze, you are invisible. Without his need, you are useless. This is a desperate state, and it gives the other person absolute power over you. A man of substance will be repelled by it, and a predator will be drawn to it. Both outcomes are disastrous for you.

My struggle was to move to the second position. I had to make my own existence so real, so dense, so unquestionably present to myself that the love of a man became a wonderful, desired, but ultimately non-essential component. It could enhance my life, but its absence could no longer threaten to annihilate it.

How is this done? On an emotional, practical level?

You must change your relationship with your own solitude. Right now, you experience it as a passive state of lack. You must transform it into an active state of creation.

When you walk through Amsterdam and feel that terrible loneliness wash over you, your instinct is to find a person to relieve it. I am telling you to do the opposite. You must treat that feeling of loneliness as an appointment. It is an appointment with the raw material of your own soul.

Do not run from it. Turn towards it. Interrogate it.

Take out a notebook and write: What is this feeling, precisely? Is it boredom? Is it the fear of being unseen? Is it a yearning for intellectual friction? Is it simply a physical desire? Analyze it like a scientist studying a specimen. By objectifying the feeling, you rob it of its power to consume you.

Then, you must give the loneliness a task. You say, 'This feeling of emptiness will now be the fuel I use to read the first ten pages of this difficult book.' Or, 'This ache will be the lens through which I analyze the power dynamics in this painting at the Rijksmuseum.' You must take the raw, chaotic energy of that emotion and channel it into a structured, intellectual, or creative act.

This is the act of furnishing the room. Each book you read, each insight you write down, each connection you make between disparate ideas is another piece of furniture. You do this day after day, week after week. You build a world inside yourself that is so interesting, so full of meaning, that you begin to prefer your own company to the company of most other people.

Your solitude stops being a void and becomes your Workshop.

And then, when you meet a man, you will not feel the frantic urge to cling. You will be meeting him as the proprietor of a rich, well-furnished inner world. You will be assessing whether he is interesting enough to be invited inside for a time. The entire dynamic of power shifts. You will need to be loved, yes, but you will not be desperate. You will want a partner, but you will not accept a warden.

So yes, I struggled. Terribly. But I used the struggle as the raw material for my work. Your loneliness right now feels like a curse. I am telling you it is your greatest resource. Do not squander it by trying to give it away to the first man who shows you a moment of attention.

To your becoming. And mine.

Love,
C

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find it on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.

xx xxx x

I found myself sitting lonely on the floor in a quiet room and realized that all these voices in my head, screaming ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘do not rest,’ are not my own. Sometimes you run and work and laugh and fight, for the chase, maybe, or for the simple reason that out there in the crowd, around the people, you can drown out the heaviness and make sure there is no time left to doubt and so you just go go go!

But then you find yourself sitting lonely on the floor in a quiet room, and all these voices you’ve lived with for so long around the people are gone, and you’re left with only you and your own and there is nowhere to run or hide. You’ve got to face the truth. Your own truth. Your own voice. Which is quiet, calm, scared even, because it hasn’t gotten the chance to speak up lately, for it was drowned out by all the other voices saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘do not rest’ but now there are no more masks. No more walls.

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room and just listen. Listen to your own voice without trying to change it, please it, lead it—just listen. It is easy to know who you are when you’re inventing a character; it is harder to find out who you are without inventing it.

* . · ✦ From my book You’re Doing Just Fine. You can pick up a copy in my own store here or find it on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Send a quote to someone who needs to hear it <3

But apparently it’s not urgent. “Isn’t life always urgent?” I asked, reading my results, but they were already in the next room, left my invoice on the counter.

2. I’ve been very forceful. I’ve been very stubborn. I saw paths where everyone else saw obstacles. But now I must learn to wait and be soft. “Let come, let go,” they said. “It will happen when it happens.” I don’t know what they think will happen but I’m willing to give it a shot. I make love to my own restlessness and take deep breaths, trying to be soft. This is how I imagine death. Waiting. Just waiting.

3. They can check my height, my weight, my pulse, but none of those are my real numbers. I am the accumulated weight of all my departures. Every train station goodbye, every key returned on kitchen counters, every suitcase zipped shut in rooms that were never mine. I am the height of all my visions that broke through thin ceilings in cheap hostel rooms, and I am the pulse of scribbled poems like masterpieces in history books in high school somewhere ini Sweden. Too busy writing the future to hear a thing anyone said.

4. “The black mark is maybe just the darkness trying to break out?” I said, hoping they’d smile, hoping they’d look up. But we don’t heal people this way. We reason and prescribe medication, or deem our case “not urgent”.

5. Tall men in suits would look at me across restaurant tables with part fascination, part fear. I change directions without warning, they say, me feeling see-through. I am always signaling SOS way before I wander out? You would notice if you ever looked up, ever caught up, stopped telling me about the weather or the past. SOS, I’m thinking, as I wait trying to be soft, feeling my heartbeat speeding. I say “hello” and mean “please.” I say “fine” and mean “let’s go.”

6. Hi. Hi. Hello. Who are you?

I am urgent. I am very urgent and very large and now I must go
before it’s too late.

* . · ✦ Find more of my writings and books at www.CharlotteEriksson.com <3

Writer's block is a luxury belief.

I said what I said.

Before you send me angry emails about the very real struggle of staring at blank pages, hear me out. I'm not saying the feeling isn't real. I'm saying what we call "writer's block" is usually something else entirely: the paralysis that comes from having too many choices and not enough consequences.

Real writers—the ones who write to eat, who write because their rent depends on it, who write because it's their job—don't have the luxury of waiting for inspiration. They have deadlines. They have editors breathing down their necks. They have bills that won't pay themselves.

Writer's block is what happens when writing becomes a choice instead of a necessity.

I learned this the hard way when I decided to get paid per written word for obscure magazines out there, freelancing, and living on non-existent savings. Suddenly, nothing had to be perfect anymore, just be written and shipped, no matter the weather. I couldn’t afford to feel “uninspired”. I couldn’t afford to have “writer’s block”. The blank page stopped being scary and started being expensive. Perfectionism is unaffordable when you're broke.

The dirty secret about creative blocks: they're almost always about fear, not ability. Fear that what you write won't be good enough. Fear that people will judge you. Fear that you're not as talented as you pretend to be. But fear is a luxury you can only afford when failure is theoretical.

When failure means not eating, you write anyway.

Subscribe now

This isn't about romanticizing poverty or suffering for your art. It's about understanding that creativity thrives under constraints, not in their absence. The most prolific writers in history weren't the ones with unlimited time and perfect conditions. They were the ones who had to write around day jobs, family obligations, and tiny apartments with paper-thin walls.

Writer's block is perfectionism in disguise. And perfectionism is just fear wearing a suit.

Here's what actually works when you can't write:

• Lower the stakes. Stop trying to write the Great American Novel and start trying to write a shitty first draft. Give yourself permission to be terrible. Bad writing can be fixed. No writing can't.

• Set a timer. Write for fifteen minutes. That's it. Don't stop, don't edit, don't think. Just move your fingers across the keyboard. Most of it will be garbage. Some of it won't be.

• Write about why you can't write. Describe the feeling of staring at the blank page. Complain about how hard writing is. Make fun of yourself for calling it "writer's block" like it's a medical condition. You'll be surprised how often this leads somewhere useful.

• Change the medium. If you can't write, record yourself talking about your ideas. If you can't type, write by hand. If you can't sit at your desk, write on your phone while walking. The words don't care what tool you use to catch them.

• Remember why you started. Not the fantasy reasons—the real ones. Because you had something to say. Because words helped you make sense of the world. Because writing was how you figured out what you thought. Those reasons are still there.

The truth is, there's no such thing as writer's block. There's only writing and not writing. Everything else is just stories we tell ourselves about why we're not doing the thing we say we want to do.

The cure for writer's block isn't inspiration. It's discipline. And discipline is just showing up every day, especially when you don't feel like it.

If you're stuck right now, if you're telling yourself you can't write until the conditions are perfect, until you have more time, until you feel inspired—stop. Open a document. Set a timer for ten minutes. Write one sentence about anything. Then write another one.

You don't need permission to write badly. You just need to write.

The blank page isn't your enemy. Your expectations are.

What's the difference between being stuck and being scared? Reply and tell me about a time you wrote through the fear.

They keep asking when.

When will you settle? When will you arrive? When will you make something stable enough to stand on? As if time were a train schedule and I'd missed mine. As if there were somewhere I was supposed to be by now.

I was washing dishes in a kitchen that wasn't mine, watching water circle the drain. 33 years of breathing and this is what I know: they follow a script without knowing who wrote it. They follow a timeline without wondering who benefits from their compliance.

The woman at the dinner party apologizing for still renting. 35 and ashamed. Like she'd failed some cosmic exam by not having a mortgage. Like the bank that doesn't own her means she doesn't own herself.

The architects of the script never follow it, though. They would never. They know better.

Your fear of falling behind feeds someone’s bottom line. Anxious people buy faster, settle quicker, take jobs that hollow them out.

I’ve been apologizing too. For wanting things in the wrong order. For refusing to want them at all.

Yesterday I watched the sunrise from a train window, 6 am, somewhere between Madrid and Stockholm and thought: I am so glad I did not fold. I did not say “okay, I’ll do it.” I am so glad I dared to say: time, I run this show.

The timeline says: graduate, career, marriage, mortgage, children, death. The timeline says: accumulate, accumulate, accumulate until you're too tired to remember what you were accumulating for.

But look around. Even those who followed it perfectly wish they’d done something reckless. And you wish you had what they have.

That guy bragging about his startup exit? Lived in his parents' basement until twenty-nine. The woman with the 5-year plan and 6-figure salary? Checking her phone every 30 seconds because she’s terrified of getting fired and quietly hates her job. Also her marriage is falling apart.

I laugh and tell people my future man just came out of his first divorce. He’s done his training round; now he’s ready for me. In the meantime, I traveled the world on close to nothing, collecting stories instead of mortgages. That’s not the right way to live. But it’s mine. It’s my way to live.

My neighbor found love at 86 years old. My old flatmate picked up a camera at 35 and discovered a talent that brought her to New York at 37 and a 7-figure business at 40. I know people who choose to travel instead of buying houses, who decided they never want children, who are raising their sister's kids, who started a new career at 55.

None of these lives fit LinkedIn summaries. But they fit the people living them.

The most dangerous question isn't "What if I fail?"

It's "What if I'm living someone else's definition of success?"

Every morning you wake up trying to catch up to some imaginary schedule is a morning you're not spending building something that makes sense for you. The timeline was designed by institutions needing predictable populations. Schools processing students in batches. Employers seeking loyalty. Banks betting on your debt. Insurance companies banking on your fear.

You don't have to participate in their plan for your life.

There is no clock with your name on it. There is no cosmic scorecard. There are only small daily choices, and you get to keep making new ones.

What if, instead of asking when you’ll arrive, you asked where you actually want to go?

What if being behind their schedule means you’re finally ahead of your own?

Some questions don’t need answers. They need space to breathe. Like lives that refuse to be measured.

Tomorrow the train to Stockholm. Two weeks in Sweden have softened something in me. Swedish nights that refuse to end. Silence that feels a little bit like music. I've been reading Maggie Nelson again, the way she writes about blue, about longing as a color you can live inside. Swedish summer nights are blue. I understand it then, why writers here make careers writing about their hate for this land but still refuse to leave it.

Ten years ago at a yoga retreat I met someone who saw me before I saw myself. We talked for three days about everything, nothing. When we parted I felt found. Haven't seen her since. The connections that matter don't need maintenance—they exist like songs you never forget. Anyways, I’m going to see her in Stockholm. Finally. I haven’t seen anyone in so very long.

Then Porto. My Porto. The apartment waits empty for me now. Her windows facing the river on one side, mountains on the other. A month alone. I crave it.

I dreamed last night of empty rooms filling themselves. Not with furniture but with other people's needs, pressing against walls until the space died. I chase empty places but ruin them by arriving. The apartment in Porto stays untouched. It’s a short walk out of the city, where tourists never go. I have a coffee machine, some books and a writing desk. I planned on decorating, made Pinterest boards of earthy California colors and big modern art, but I’m taking my time.

My twenties were spent leaving and arriving, chasing after a dream but never quite knowing where to find it. Now I have travel anxiety, my therapist says, but it feels more like separation issues. I want to keep now, not let go. But the times demand movement and I comfort my racing heart however I can.

I’ve developed rituals to survive the hours in air: the same playlist, a new book, noise cancellation. Landfall always feels like rescue.

When I arrive somewhere, I greet the place like it's alive. In Sweden, I whisper to the lake. "I'm here." The lake whispers back. In Amsterdam, I light incense, make an old-fashioned, write until the apartment learns my rhythms. In Porto, the space feels like a grandmother. "Welcome home," she says. "Take your time. Brew some coffee. The river is flowing."

I promised myself I’d finish the book this summer. I got fully absorbed in April but then things got in the way. Work and emails and doctors' appointments and insurance; the thousand small deaths that leave you too drained to create.

But now it’s time to write. An uninterrupted month in Porto.

Nowhere to Stay is a chronicle for those who never learned how to arrive. Come with me as I vagabond one last year between the cities I've come to love and leave, over and over again, writing my sixth book—another timestamp of a life lived deliberately sideways.

Here's the thing about everywhere:
it's nowhere specific.

The words you want are heavy?
Fine.
You're thirty-two and running out of money.
You check your bank balance obsessively
like it might change its mind.
You haven't had a real address in two years.

Listen.
Everyone's out of focus when they're moving too fast to be seen.
You want clarity?
Stop moving.
You want sharp?
Stand still long enough—
I don't know how that sentence ends.
I don't know how any of this ends.

You say you want your fire back
like it's something someone took from you.
Like it's not right there in your chest,
burning through every city you run to.
You're not faded. You're overexposed.
All that light you're looking for? You're bleeding it.
That's the clarity. That's the shape of it:
You, hemorrhaging light in another rented room,
calling it darkness.

* . · ✦ You can pick up a copy of my books in my own store here or find them on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

I am not a broken heart.

I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything
at any time,
and I am not your fault.

I found a small spark by the end of the tunnel I built around us and I ran as fast as I could with the breath in my throat, scared like hell to lose sight of the only light I’d seen
since you
left.

You were the hardest year of my life and I’ve never been so happy. What does that say about me?

I was never afraid of the dark and I spent my youth walking through empty playgrounds at midnight, worried mothers telling girls to be careful and “the world is an ugly place and not everyone wants you well”. But I was not afraid, and I wished for adrenaline to make my veins pulsate in that way that puts them more on the outside of my skin than inside.
After the first night with you I never walked alone at night again because suddenly I had something to lose. Something to save.

I am slowly trying hard to blur out the last months because they’re ugly and I don’t want us to be the evidence of how easy it is for heaven to turn into hell
so I try to recall the beginning.
The early mornings waking up before dawn. The pink sky and the way you loved the view of the rooftops while the world was still asleep. Or when we were too far apart for even a day and so the text waking me up, every day a floaty thing I never wanted to leave and I was not worried..

I lied, which I often do, because the truth is a privilege you never earned and you turned cold and unkind and I just wanted to do you well.
Because I’ve never done anyone well before
or cared about anyone being well
in the same way I cared about you.
I just wanted to do you well even though you never did me well.
I lied. I hate who I became when I was with you.

So I am not a broken heart.
I am not the weight I lost or miles I ran and I am not the way I slept on my doorstep under the bare sky in the smell of tears and whiskey because my apartment was empty and if I were to be this empty I wanted something solid to sleep on. Like concrete.

I am not this year and I am not your fault.

I am muscles building cells, a little every day, because they broke that day. But bones are stronger once they heal and I am smiling to the bus driver again, replacing my groceries once a week and I am not sitting for hours in the shower anymore.
I am the way a life unfolds and blooms and seasons come and go and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life.

So I am not a broken heart,
and I not your fault.

* . · ✦ From my book You’re Doing Just Fine. You can pick up a copy in my own store here or find it on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Send a quote to someone who needs to hear it <3

Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee. Windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth.
You still feel warmth.
Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: throw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you.

Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, determined to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.

Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.
Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.

Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that.

Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water.

Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting.

You made it, after all. You made it another day. And you can make it one more.
You’re doing just fine.
You’re doing just fine.

* . · ✦ The writing above is a piece from my published book You’re Doing Just Fine. You can pick up a copy in my own store here or find it on Amazon. I ship worldwide <3

Send a quote to someone who needs to hear it <3

My hands shake slightly as I water the plant. No one taught me how to tend something I can’t abandon. Like a child. Like a promise. Like a plant... Three months I've kept this thing alive. The water pools then disappears into soil that isn't going anywhere. Neither am I.

This is new.

I used to think freedom meant having one foot out the door. Emergency exits mapped in every room. Suitcase half-packed. Always. Ready to ghost my own life the moment it felt too heavy too real too much like something I might have to defend.

Staying though... that’s real tricky, y’all.

This is how it goes every time;

First month – I live like a tourist in my own apartment. I put clothes back in the luggage at the end of each day and fall asleep with my notebook under my pillow. I don’t memorize my street, I don’t memorize my postcode.

Second month – I buy a large coffee cup. Ceramic. Heavy enough to matter. Heavy enough not to take with me when it’s time to leave. This feels a little dangerous. Commitment to ritual.

Third month – The plant. Small. Forgiving. Something that would die if I left and cheap enough to care too much if I do but large enough to see it as a loss.

Staying means learning to love what you can't idealize. Learning that maybe the grass is greener on the other side of the border but it’s okay here too and who cares anyways.

My radiator clanks at 4am. The elevator smells like someone else's dinner. The neighbor plays piano beautifully badly at impossible hours.

Staying means discovering that home isn't a feeling that washes over you— it's a choice you make every morning when you don't look for the exit.

I used to confuse restlessness with aliveness. Movement with meaning. The itch to leave with evidence that I was too wild for ordinary devotion.

But wild things build nests too. Even storms need somewhere to land.

There's a café on the corner by the canal where I've become a regular. Not because the coffee is perfect— it's fine— but because I stayed long enough to watch the light change across the same table through seasons. The barista knows my order now. Cortado. No sugar, please; what you're running from.

Staying requires daily recommitment. Choosing the same life over and over until it becomes yours. I only feel like my life is mine when no one has me on the radar. The soil drinks and I understand something I cannot yet say. It has to do with roots and the way my heart stops racing when no one knows where I am, even when where I am is the same place it was yesterday. I feel calm then. Like everything will be ok. The plant grows without permission, without apology. It simply takes what I give and transforms it into green. I am learning this alchemy of presence—how to stop being an emergency and start being earth. My fingerprints on the ceramic cup. My name in the barista's memory. My breath fogging the window of a room that smells like me now. This is how you build a life: one small betrayal of your escape plan at a time.

– Charlotte x

Not literally— not in the blood-and-bone way. But in the quiet, devastating way a person disappears from their own life and no one notices the absence. Not even you.

I thought my worth was braided into tour posters and voice memos and cracked vocal takes at 1:17 a.m. when the city finally exhaled. I thought disappearing from stages meant disappearing from matter. From meaning. From the terrible beautiful weight of being witnessed.

And then the songs stopped coming.

Not dramatically. Not like a heartbreak slamming doors. Just like silence. Just like a room you walk into and forget— what did I come here for? what was I looking for? who was I before I entered?

It wasn't burnout. It was erosion.

The way my voice cracked on the same note three cities running. The way I stopped hearing applause and started counting exits. The way Berlin turned geometric—all angles, no curves for my ribs to rest against. The way I'd hear myself sing and feel like I was covering someone else's song, someone else's life, someone else's desperate reaching toward the light.

So I left.

I didn't say goodbye to anyone because how do you explain evaporation? I packed like I always did—suitcase, notebooks, camera, two hoodies that smelled like venues and sleepless ambition—and left behind the guitar that had followed me across countries like a faithful dog.

I told myself I'd be back. I told myself it was temporary. But bodies know before minds do. I knew something had ended.

Not music. Not voice. But a way of being that required audience, that required hunger, that required me to be a firework instead of a person.

She didn't come with me— that version who ran on fear and ambition, who chased followers like oxygen, who believed survival meant being seen, being heard, being anything but quiet.

Instead, I wandered.

Portugal took me in. (Did I choose it or did it choose me?) The silence stayed. But it stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like space.

Space to feel tired without apologizing. Space to walk without documenting. Space to cry in grocery stores. Space to realize I never wanted fame— I wanted a life that felt like mine.

And in that space—

(how much space does a person need to become themselves?)

—I started writing again.

Not as product. Not for audience. Not to save myself from the terrible ordeal of being nobody special. Just writing. Like breathing. Like the way water moves around stones.

Some mornings I still hear songs. Half-formed. Distant. Calling from the place where I used to live. I don't chase them anymore. If they want me, they know where to find me.

Maybe I'll release music again. Maybe I won't. Maybe wanting and not wanting are just different seasons of the same tree.

This isn't a eulogy.

This is a soft-bellied metamorphosis. This is what happens when you stop performing your own life and start living it. This is the sound a person makes when they finally put down the weight they didn't know they were carrying.

The music didn't die. It dissolved into something else. The art shifted forms. The dream remained—but quieter now. Truer.

This is not about giving up. This is about surviving the version of yourself that believed you had to be thunder to matter.

I am still here. But I live differently now. I live like someone who belongs to herself.