Letter to my old friend Dan
Autor: Luciana Brandão | Publicado: 2016-04-03T12:53:00-03:00


Dan,



I know it
has been years since we talked for the last time. Truth is: I don't really know
why I am writing this letter addressed to
you right now. I think I have reached a moment in my life which confessing
to the psychiatric is just not useful anymore. Whereas with you, although we
have only shared a slight minimal fraction of our life-times, I feel there is
this huge potential for revelation, for reaching the core of things and uncover
the hidden truth that lies in the bottom of my soul and that for some mysterious
reason I can't seem to reach on my own. Those three weeks we spent together
were like a breath of revelation to me: I saw you not only as a mere teacher,
but most of all as a mentor. Someone I could look up to and guide myself; not a
figure I would try to mirror in a way that "your life is the life I want
to have, and the pathways you've chosen are the ones I will choose to
myself". But more as a amazing, real person, very tall indeed, and also
extremely wise, I knew I could ask questions and you would give me a honest, matterful answer. I trusted your opinion
and the weight of it, and I knew I could consider and reflect upon anything you
said. Yes, I might reject it, and yes, I might think over it and get to the
conclusion that I was going to do different, but still. Being 17 and having
someone I admire giving insightful inputs into my life was unique and so
important. 

So when I
confessed to you that I was in a crossroad, that I loved movies and cinema and
the arts but that after studying for a year under
full scholarship I wanted to give up and go on studying politics, I felt
the anvil over my shoulders melting into sweet lather and covering me in
smoothness.&nbsp; I was feeling utterly
uncomfortable with that entire dilemma.&nbsp;
I felt I was doing things backwards. I knew a thousand characters that
would like to be in my position. Boys and girls that went on to study politics
because that's what their parents dreamed of and pushed them to do, while their
unrealized dreams of becoming writers, artists, musicians laid back stored in
the basement of their life pursuing prestigious, classical, money-making
careers. So, me, the privileged girl who got the chance of chasing her teenage
dream of becoming a story-writer and graced by the opportunity to dedicate two
and a half years of her life studying that in a rich, well known school, with
all paid - me wanting to give this all up in exchange for a doubtful course on
international politics, most probably incredibly boring, in a room crowded with
other sixty (!) students many of them much more intelligent and acquainted with
the problems of the world, well,&nbsp; I
thought I just didn't have the right to have this doubt. But you thought it was
legit. And more than that, you, yourself a former art's student, you shared
with me my fears and frustrated expectations with all this entertainment world
of the creative industry. You understood that I was in search of more and that
I wanted to become someone smarter, someone that knew deep intellectual things,
and you told me: you go for it, girly gal. Drop the arts, do your studies in
politics, no one is in the right to judge you.

So for the
past five years, every moment I started doubting my decision, I would try to
perform this mental exercise of looking back in that rainy night, your blue
eyes sitting across mine in the dark wet garden, and the sensation I had an
entire new world was opening up in front of me: a world of possibilities, of
various non-taken roads, a universe of complex and curvy trajectories. As if,
from now on, there wouldn't be such straightforward path for doing things as I
was used to or had been taught to desire. I would have to craft these roads
with my own bare hands, I would have to imagine the future ahead and create it,
instead of following the warned out easy already open pathways from those that
did things before me. And I was - and still am - fucking terrified.

Now, a
month after completing 23, I am looking back and looking ahead and thinking: it
is time to take a drift to the left and start again on a new road. I want to be
a writer, Dan. I have always wanted to be, I guess, but I wanted to write about
things that matter and back then I thought I had nothing to say. I didn't have
the content and I didn't know where to search for it, but now I do. Not all of
it, but a small portion and, most important, I think I've got the keys to open
the doors to new knowledge when I want and need it. It took me five years of
boring and sometimes very harsh lectures and discussions to learn how to make these
keys and now that I've got them I want to do something fucking useful and inspirational with them. I don't
want to be just another person seating behind a computer screen writing formal
response emails to investors around the world. Or the posh academic that spends
its life - and the people's money - researching and writing bullshit no one
cares about and no one will ever read. I want the eye-to-eye contact; and the
possibility of putting down words that will reach people, that will matter to
them. I just don't know exactly how to do it. Sometimes I think I should move
to an English-speaking country and learn once and for all to write well in this
imperialistic language, so no one will be able to criticize my weird,
unprofessional, non-native Portuguese-touched sentences. Others, I think the
best would be to stay here around people that I already know a bit, playing in
the safe net, maybe trying to go back to the old school that once gave me a
scholarship and ask them: hey, what you fellows think about sponsoring a
masters for me? They will most probably say no and then I would have to work
full-time in am unrelated office job in order to pay for a night course on
creative writing.&nbsp; It is not the success
I aim, but some kind of self-acknowledgment, the reassurance that I am doing
what I am supposed to be doing. Do you get it? Do you think it would be too
much to ask for a scholarship to study in the UK? Do you think I could get it?
What do you think I would have to do in order to gain it? Maybe if I published
a short story in an international acclaimed magazine I could have a shot. But
which one (story and magazine)?&nbsp; And do you think I could get it? I mean, do
you really think they would publish the story of an average Brazilian girl that
doesn't even know how to correctly use her ons
and ins and ats? I don't think so, but truth is, my insecurity's voice usually
speaks very loud, so I never know if it is her who is speaking or if it is my
good sense (just to make a point: I have used on purpose the "her" on
this last sentence. This is what I call a non-native appropriation of English
language to make the text more stylish. Please allow me to do so). 

Thank you,
Dan, thank you very much once again for your time and consideration. Thank you
for reading and replying to my letters all these years. And I hope to see you
again and talk to you again one day.

I will be eagerly waiting for your response - just
like you thought me to end letters in that Tuesday afternoon class. Be well, my
dear. 

Lots of
hugs,







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Luci.