Issue 3 - LET'S PLAY A GAME OF CHESS 

Photograph: Leire Cavia 

I have the sea in front of me while writing this. A cobbling, calm wave splashing on the sand. It calms the nerves system, resets the ongoing stream of thoughts and tells the body to slow down. It is also the place I work, where I earn my money and this morning, I realized I wish to be nowhere else but here. As a kid, till even in my mid-twenties, I had an unsettling hunger to go away, to always be moving around, from moving houses to staying in other countries, even so that the feeling of being ‘stuck’ gave me anxiety attacks. It became a pattern, a feeling I relied on, like an addiction, an unhealthy one (tell me one that isn’t). So, I gave up: my job, my home, even some friendships. Playing around is fun, until it isn’t and it is time to tell yourself, ‘Game over’. But this also counts for knowing when to give yourself a second chance, to know when you got it in you to try again instead of thinking you failed. You did not. It just didn’t go as you hoped it would. I kept on trying to fit in a city where I always felt like fleeing. Now I know why.

“Whatever it is you are seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”

- Haruki Murakami

I spent so much time with myself; on places I wasn’t known and knew nothing. I had saved up enough money and I took off. To different continents, to see where I would fit. I wrote, a lot, which became my first finished unpublished short story novel and sat with myself for hours and hours. I questioned myself, over and over again: what the f* am I doing? I was playing a game with myself and the thought I had about what others would think. And this game has no winners. I still see it around me, when people give up their dreams after one try, just because they think they failed. I saw it in Audrey when we first met and he talked about his passion, his dream to design and built a fashion house and while we talked, I saw the mix of fear and fire in his eyes. He too played the game and told himself ‘Gave over’ after his first collection. He thought he failed, like so many of us think because it didn’t leap into this realm of success we see around us and online. We think that we try, but to give my honest opinion, I think we try to be part of whatever world we want to be part of, just like the game of society let us believe. This is not why we are driven with passion, with love, with hunger to do what burns inside to come out, to be shown to the world. I thought I failed after sending my first novel to publishers and receiving nothing or a no, but now I know that even the biggest writers nowadays weren’t taken seriously with their first novels. Haruki Murakami got so many rejections he even chose to write in for him an unknown language, because he thought he had nothing to lose. He is now one of the biggest writers in the world. 

All I can say is: what if you toss the game of competing with the world and start playing with the passion inside you? I do believe that it will someday bring you the peace I feel, looking at the sea in front of me and knowing that we won the game of life.

Levine Louise