The Soft Power of a Work in Progress
Sometimes ideas arrive in the quietest moments—on a random Tuesday when I’m calm enough to notice them. They don’t wait until I’m sitting at my desk, though that is where I prefer to be. My office is my refuge, a place where I can lay out the words like small offerings. But more often than I’d like to admit, I end up writing on my phone, collecting sentences before they slip away.
I didn’t always have this impulse. Years ago, I wrote as a professional obligation—articles for La Prensa Gráfica, news pieces that had clear deadlines and a guaranteed audience. Back then, my words belonged to other people’s stories. My work won me the title of Correspondent of the Year, and for a moment, it felt like a path was opening. I almost moved to France. I almost took that job. I almost became someone else.
But life has its own sense of irony. I stayed. I stopped writing. And it wasn’t until nearly a decade later, in the small rituals of therapy, that words came back to claim me. My psychologist asked me to write letters that were less polished, more raw, more human. They became a habit—thirty letters to her alone, A Margarita, and countless notes stored in my phone that I never meant to show anyone.
Even now, I hesitate to call myself a writer. The word feels too grand, too certain. But I know I am someone who needs to give shape to the chaos, someone who can’t help documenting the beauty and the ache of existing. Sometimes I write in English because it feels like wearing someone else’s skin—a little safer, a little more detached. I can be honest without feeling entirely exposed.
That’s why I still write.
It’s why I gather small acts of courage, like submitting poems to The Sun, a journal so respected it feels almost mythical.
For me, The Sun is the literary equivalent of the big leagues—a place where the most luminous, devastating, unpretentious essays and poems find a home. Where the bar is impossibly high, and you submit anyway, because not submitting would be an even greater act of self-betrayal.
And then there is Orsai, a magazine I’ve admired for years. Hernán Casciari, one of my favorite writers, is behind it. Orsai feels like a constellation of everything I love about Latin American storytelling: humor, intimacy, a certain unapologetic freedom. When I sent my story Indeleble there, it felt like the literary equivalent of launching a message in a bottle, hoping that someone on the other side of the ocean would uncork it and care.
Every submission feels like an unremarkable miracle.
I’m terrified, always.
I’m embarrassed that someone will read something too intimate, too unguarded.
But I do it anyway.
Because even the act of sending is a way of honoring the words.
People often talk about capital as something you can measure in currency or assets. But there’s another kind—symbolic, cultural, emotional—that writing has given me. It’s the quiet power of daring to say, This is what I see. This is what I feel. And maybe it matters.
Right now, I have four poems in review. They may never be published. They may never find a reader beyond me. But their existence is already an assertion: that my experiences deserve language, that my memories deserve shape.
I don’t know if I will ever feel like a writer in the conventional sense. But I am learning that being in progress is enough. That the work itself—unfinished, unseen—is already proof of life.
If you’re reading this and wondering whether to send your own words into the world, let me tell you this:
The Sun and Orsai might feel like distant galaxies. The odds may seem laughable. But the “no” is never guaranteed. And sometimes, the softest “yes” can change everything you believe about yourself—and maybe even become exactly the words someone else has been waiting to find.
So send it.
You owe yourself that much courage.
P.S. “The Man” was inspired by a certain British gentleman whose quiet life and suspicious enthusiasm for courgettes somehow made me a softer human—and possibly a better cook. Let’s not tell him, though. He’d be unbearably smug.
Love you J.
