Parisian diaries

Bonjour tout le monde—hello, Vocal fam!

I’m writing to you from the French countryside, at a beautiful writers’ residency in the Champagne region. This opportunity first came to me in March 2025. It’s something I’ve been waiting for, fantasizing about, and obsessing over for a long time. Now I’m here.

I imagined myself stepping into this experience with wonder. I imagined being transformed by it.

The weather is a crisp 50 degrees. The leaves are beginning to change, and I’m staying in a very big pink château at the top of a hill overlooking a small village. For someone who came here to write, I’m having a challenging time finding the words for where I am.

Physically, yes.

But mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, too.

While I’m here, I’m working on a few projects. One is Consider the Ravens, the scripture-based poetry collection I started back home. I’m hoping to finish it here. Another began creating itself on the train to Orquevaux. Which will be a small collection of poems about the things that have touched me during this trip, especially when my expectations gave way to an itinerary with a major plot twist.

I arrived in Paris, first almost missing my flight by minutes, and then planning to spend the week collecting treasures, clothes, little keepsakes, and staple pieces that I would wear at the château to feel a little more like a princess in a castle. I had built the trip around those small fantasies. I wanted to find things that would remind me of the trip long after I returned home. I even imagined the music that I would play as I created in my Parisian apartment, looking at the Eiffel Tower view.

But something shifted when I reached the airport.

I had felt it in small doses leading up to the trip—a sense of disbelief. Going through customs in Paris, though, it all hit me at once. I’ve shared before that I struggle with PTSD following an experience with sickness in 2022. Somehow, that fear had found its way onto the ten-hour flight and into the moment I had spent so long looking forward to.

I felt disconnected from my body. Dissociated. I began questioning everything that had brought me there.

What was I doing here? Why had I come? Had I gotten so caught up in imagining this experience that I hadn’t understood what it would feel like to actually live it?

It’s one thing to imagine being far from home. It’s another to stand somewhere far from home and realize that everyone you love is an ocean away. The accents, the faces, the unfamiliar surroundings—all of it made the distance real.

I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Or, in my case, Florida.

I thought I could shake the anxiety off, but for a while, it only grew. Paris was gorgeous. I felt safe in the places I visited. There was so much I wanted to see, and still, I carried an ache through it all. I could be standing in front of something magnificent and wish I had one familiar person beside me.

I am living proof that it is possible to cry in front of the most beautiful tower in the world.

The trip I had imagined was still there, but it no longer looked the way I expected. The ‘writer in Pari’ version of the story had collided with the reality of being a person with a bruised body, a history, and fears I couldn’t simply leave at home.

I thought I could just drop all my trauma and head for the hills like it didn’t exist. I realized that wasn’t the case when, instead, it packed itself as my second piece of checked luggage.

But there were small things that met me where I was. A kindness. A conversation. Something beautiful I hadn’t planned to find. I began collecting those moments alongside the treasures I had come for.

Some of them have become poems, and I’ll be sharing those pieces here.

Now I’m in a house full of other writers, making connections I’m grateful for. It’s only my third day at the residency, and I’m beginning to feel present again.

Slowly, I’m finding my way back into my body. I’m settling into conversations, noticing the view, and letting myself sit with a good moment without asking how long it will last.

There is still some fear here. But this morning, I woke up in the pink château I had imagined for a year and a half, and all I wanted to do was tell you ALL about it. That’s the girl I’ve been waiting to see again.

Not because the experience unfolded not quite exactly as I pictured it, but because I’m learning that the unexpected parts belong to the story, too.