Letters to Viv: Naming Myself in a Bordeaux Kitchen
Learning to introduce myself without shrinking.
Letters to Viv
Open, soul-packed letters to the kind of human I write for: the curious, creative, exhausted by the hustle, and craving something more. I’m writing to you (and me).
Dear Viv,
“What do you do?”
The question drifted across the shared kitchen before I could hide behind my matcha. I felt the familiar pause flicker inside me. The tiny breath. The nearly-answer.
I stood there in this Bordeaux kitchen, surrounded by strangers who already felt friend-adjacent. New faces. New rhythms. A city that speaks in fast French and faster bicycles. It’s my first stretch back out in the world after months of orbiting my closest people and then slipping into myself for October in Ireland. Quiet. Reflective. Rebuilding.
Now here I am again. Saying who I am without cushioning it. No long backstory. No softening. No pretending I’m something easier to explain.
Something moved in my core. A nudge that felt older than me.
“I’m a writer.”
I let it sit there. Raw. Simple. Oddly natural. Like I hadn’t spent half my life ducking from that exact sentence.
Viv, the first time it came out, I nearly looked around to check if someone else had said it on my behalf. It felt bold for ten in the morning. Like I’d opened a door I didn’t realize was finally unlocked.
I’m a writer.
It followed me through the day. Down cobblestone streets. Past cafés full of people who look effortlessly literary. Through conversations where I understood enough to nod confidently and then hoped for the best. Every time the words repeated themselves inside me, something settled. A kind of quiet certainty. A sense of, ah, there you are.
I’m meeting new people every day. People who don’t know the last year of my life. People who never saw me fall apart and rising once more. They ask and I answer without apologizing or hedging or offering a footnote explaining my entire personality.
I’m a writer.
It feels like choosing myself in real time. Like stepping into a room that had my name on the door the whole time. And I know you know that feeling, Viv. That moment where the truth is small, but the liberation is massive. The naming becomes a kind of breath.
Some labels suffocate.
Some labels save.
Some labels unlock the exact life you’ve been craving.
So ask yourself, what name have you been circling without saying? What truth have you been postponing? What identity would feel like slipping into your favourite jumper on a cold morning?
Say it once. Whisper it if you need to. Let it land in your core.
The work begins the moment you believe your own words.
And you deserve a label that lifts your life, not shrinks it.
I’m a writer.
What are you?
XO,
Tanya