How I’ve returned to myself through writing
1979. I’ve barely learned to speak, and my parents are recording my babbles. I am prattling incessantly, experimenting with words, tossing them around and rolling them in my mouth like they’re candy. To me, they have texture and taste. I am making up rhymes as I go along. My favourite activity? Being read to by Grandma. I succumb to the magic of books.
1985. Communism. At school, we have to write another boring composition about our summer vacation. Although I’ve always hated writing to a prompt, I seem incapable of botching it up. My compositions invariably garner praise and end up as exhibits on the “Examples to follow” board in our classroom. The downside?
I get pressured to author encomiastic essays about “Our Beloved Leader,” Ceaușescu. They’re formulaic and bland and, above all, fraudulent and untrue. I tell myself I want to be a poet instead. But there’s no real poetry in communism, only constraints and proletcultist propaganda. I’m beginning to question whether writing is a profession worth aspiring to. There’s so much Maths homework; writing takes a back seat.
1993. The Iron Curtain has collapsed. I’m flying to the U.S. as a high school exchange student on a Soros Foundation Scholarship. On the plane, I meet a man who claims to own Reader’s Digest. Upon landing, I discover National Geographic in an airport press shop. In wide-eyed wonder, I flip through its glossy pages.
I decide to become a journalist. Or a diplomat. Or a conference interpreter. The world has so much colour and so many options! For Christmas, I ask my host family for a Webster’s. But soon, my stay is over. I revere that dictionary like it is Scripture.
1995 and I’m back in Romania. Still dreaming of a career in journalism, but my parents have convinced me to study International Relations instead. I end up stranded between accounting and finance textbooks. International Relations turns out to mean International Business. I’m too non-confrontational to quit, too shy to change course. I take up photography and draft poems in the dark to make up for it. They’re syrupy. I feel like an impostor.
2003. After a few short stints in various mid-management roles, I’ve married and emigrated to Germany. I do not speak German; my words have all but deserted me. Cooped up inside the house, I suffer a miscarriage. I cannot write about it; I’m disconnected from my language, from my body.
I jot down heartfelt verses about home, our warm Balkan chaos. I journal about missing it. Nobody understands. My life has become slumber. I awaken from it only on vacation. It’s only during those short weeks that I feel alive.
2007. My first son is born with congenital problems. I’m terrified, exhausted – and responsible. Anxiety becomes my live-in partner. It settles in my chest; it shrouds my mind. To escape it, I fly back home for a summer that extends into autumn. I have to be persuaded to return. The slumber lurks again. But something else emerges.
An unknown fortitude. The sheer confidence of motherhood – of someone who has made it through hell and back and is still kicking. I’m alive; I contain multitudes.
2020. My son is thirteen, my daughter is nine. I’m in the last semester of my B.A. English at the University of London. For the first time in decades, I’ve abdicated my duties as mother, daughter, wife to focus on my dream, my spirit, my writing. We’re in the middle of a pandemic.
My husband cooks and deals with the children while I take my last online exams under draconian restrictions. I graduate with First Class Honours. I go on to complete a certificate of Advanced Creative Writing at Oxford. I can’t stop now. I won’t.
The winter of 2021. I’ve just finished a story that I’ve been carrying around in my heart since 1995. I hadn’t known how to approach it. How to not ruin it. And then, in a flash, it came to me. One December weekend, the story rolls out of me whole, consummate, like a child born healthy and at full term. I know in my bones that it’s good. I send it out to magazines. At first, a handful of rejections. Then, one night, a visitation. I have a vivid dream that my story gets published. Two weeks later, my inbox glows with an acceptance e-mail from an American magazine.
Early 2023. I go out on a limb and self-publish a storytelling travel guide of my hometown for the European Capital of Culture. Bookstores pick it up, and it goes on to win a silver medal in the FAPA President’s Book Awards 2024.
It is now June 2026. I’ve published two novels, countless poems, and a handful of stories in anthologies and literary magazines in Romania and abroad; my work has been shortlisted for a couple of literary competitions. At book fairs, people come up to me for autographs. I have three other novels outlined and a short story collection completed. My publisher asks, “Jeez, where have you been all this time?” “Out there, raising kids,” I tell him. But now, I’ve arrived. I’m at home in three different languages. I’ve finally found a hearth in my words, and I no longer shy away from my body, my trauma, my truth.
Name: Andreea Sepi
Professional Title: Author
Bio: Andreea Sepi (pseudonym Ada Herman) is a writer, translator, and published author with a multicultural background: born in Romania, educated in the U.S. and England (Goldsmiths, Oxford, Teesside), currently residing at the foot of the Alps.
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