Over time, I have written a great deal in the first person singular. For ten years, letters to my best friend Iulia and for many more years than that, self-confessional private notes jotted down in an attempt to hear my own thoughts more clearly often with a desire to move forward my inner process (and to save money on psychoanalysis.) There always seems to be a distance between my inner self and what emerges on the pages. My writing, even though it is first person and confessional, still doesn’t capture my being. Add to that a readership, and then I’m really put on the spot!
So much gets transformed in the simple process of seizing a thought, a trace of consciousness that we translate into language. I used to feel uneasy with parts of what has been written about me. Now I can’t blame the writers anymore and feel a sense of heightened responsibility about the process of transferring truth on to paper; it’s challenging because there is always the danger of the truth being diluted, mutated and misinterpreted. (My friend Guita, a Berkley graduate with degrees in law and philosophy just stopped by and after reading this first paragraph, exclaimed “Stefania, you’re tickling the realms of the post-modern and post-structuralism era!” OK, whatever that may be!)
Anyway, here I am sitting at my desk in the hills above the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California. On the board behind my computer are pictures of my husband, our sons and friends’ children. There are drawings by the children I sponsor through Save the Children in Bangladesh and Bolivia, a picture of an enigmatic orphaned girl from one of Romania’s placement centres and a poem written for me by my mother that ends “you’re gently weaving dreams that become reality”. I’m moved by the words “We Can Do It!
