Bird by Christian Schloe

Dear readers, followers and friends,

I want to tell you a story about failure, courage and making the choice of being oneself in spite of anything else.

My name is Ioana Cristina Casapu and I am a yet unpublished writer. I am also a daughter, a friend, a lover, a shower singer (not a very good one), a generalized anxiety recovering patient and a believer in the power of passion, storytelling and good old fashioned home cooked meals.

A tad obsessed with the sneaky way social media protruded in our lives, I wrote a novel a couple years ago in the shape of a memoir sprinkled with thoughts, observations and pledges for going back to writing purely on paper and living/loving genuinely outside internet conventions. I was also many other things: a photographer, a news journalist, an antiques store sales person, a receptionist, an economist, a copywriter and a failed graphic designer. Like most people my age, I was also confused, had my fair share of losses and inconvenient dealings with monsters under the bed, depression, panic attacks, friends who left, people who betrayed and lessons learned the hard way.

Over the last ten years, I tried to be anything else but a writer. But, as time went by, there was always a quench, and always some sort of universal gratitude each time a piece of my writing stroke or dashed into a stranger’s heart like a seagull strikes into the wide open. I think writing is something rooted deep down in physiology, but we like to intellectualize it.

Then, one night at the beginning of 2015, when insomnia was taking its toll on me for many weeks already, like maybe many of you did, I decided to hit send on a poem I wrote to ArtParasites.

I never imagined it would be published.

But it was published on my birthday, and finding this out while heading home after a night out with friends made me scream of happiness in the back of a taxi.

It was a dream come true at the end of a long row of rejected writings, bragging around and about the meaning of self confidence or following one’s hopes and goals, and insecurities.

Which takes me to the story I want to tell you:

This year I switched 7 homes, packed my bags 22 times, lost several valuable possessions in random places in the world, including a bag filled with Polaroids, cell phones, and my mind. I wrote sixty five poems and slept under the sky. I had flatmates, roommates, failed miserably to learn how to ride bikes, cars, tides or to avoid sunburn. I fell in love twice, stopped dying my hair after 11 years, and remembered I like the color pink and the sound of life in transit. I tried to make the best of every scary, uneasy or unplanned experience, only to pursue the dream that was close to my heart.

Finally, having the privilege of working with ArtParasites, reading your wonderfully scribbled words, feeding on your poems, essays and confessions for breakfast, lunch and dinner taught me that life’s largest gift is learning that you can help others in their reasons to keep going, in their determination to move on with their dreams, inspiration, or simply that you made them feel. Talking to so many beautiful artists around the universe makes me feel like no mishap, no loss is in vain, especially when you tell us that publishing your work made you feel like Christmas came. We live for these moments at berlin-artparasites. Like Lena Dunham of American GIRLS TV Series used to say, and like one of my dear friends once wrote me, I wish you all to be the voice of your generation. Or any generation. Keep on writing and write us your stories. Keep on looking after your hearts and keep on loving what you do, because that’s where the passion, that’s where the truest gift lies. And we need people like you to spill their amazing gift, which is talent, over the world. We need to have a place to put out passions into, and we admire our passionate readers for the devotion with which they entrust us.

Always remember this: you CAN be whomever you want to be, you CAN be loved and love, you CAN be the maker of valuable things, you CAN touch others in meaningful ways. You just have to keep on loving and keep on fighting in the direction of your hopes and passions. 

While the world has found the right names for all chronic mental diseases, I believe poetry is also a brain dysfunction, yet the only one that owns itself the mastery for the cure. Isn’t it lovely to say, “He/She suffers of Poetry?”.

A wise man once said nothing. Charles Bukowski said “Nothing can save you, except writing”. Diesel said, BE STUPID. And I once said: “Stupid takes it all. So go out, live loud and WRITE”. The best of stories are yet to be written.

Keep on loving, and keep on creating!

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Painting by Catrin Walz Stein

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