Letter to My Vanity

Edinburgh, 10th January 2020

Dear Vanity, 

Thanks for showing up.

Would you have stayed away if I had invited you? Maybe I should have used that as a preventive measure, like those people (myself) who fantasise with the worst-case scenarios to stop them happening.

The purpose of this blog is to change the way I think by focusing on the positive moments in everyday life, not to check the number of visitors, retweets or likes on Instagram constantly. And yet, you cannot stop asking me: does this blog have any meaning if people don’t read it? Why carry on? What’s the point of writing when there are hardly any readers? The most absurd example of your strong presence is that I’m toying with reopening my Facebook account (happily closed more than a year ago) only to promote this page. 

I’ve tried to ignore you. But the more I’ve wanted to get rid of you, the stronger you’ve become. So ultimately, I do accept your presence in spite of ego being poison for too many authors. You’re not the purpose of this blog, but the reminder of its purpose. The metaphor of a match relying on darkness to demonstrate its power is pretty pertinent here. Since I want to expand my horizons and develop other ways of looking, I need you around to remember where I don’t want to go. 

With gratitude, mi casa es tu casa.

Eduardo Rodríguez

P. S. The painting accompanying this text is one of Lucien Freud’s self-portraits. I had the luck to enjoy his retrospective at the Royal Academy in London recently. The naked artist was in some of his paintings, his bare soul; in others, your counterpart in him was clearly visible.