Olim

March 20th (Happy Birthday, little brother!)

What happens when WFH is secretly work-from-hiding?

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Hey! Welcome to the 37th instalment of the Olim Love Letters - a weekly newsletter written by me, Eloise. Here, we talk about connection, copy, Really Weird Childhood Stories™, and the odd linguistic snippet thrown in for good measure.

Hey, Reader,

You know what I’ve loved ever since I was a tiny person?

Things in miniature.

I remember, vividly, the annual Peebles Arts Festival - a week-long celebration of art, culture, theatre, music - and, to my great delight, crafts. Crafts!!! Creative stuff!! Tiny things!

Held in the Burgh hall (also home of am-dram pantomimes, Ladies’ Circle coffee mornings, and the occasional excruciating teenage disco), the craft fair was, apart from World Book Day, the highlight of my year.

When we were allowed inside (as a child the class trips were thrilling: I can only now imagine the horror of the stall holders as 90-something small children were unleashed like a Mongol horde…) I knew precisely where I was going.

I was going to see… the dollhouse lady.

Sticky, sweaty pound coins hoarded in my fist, I would trot over and stare, silent and breathing heavily, at her creations. To her enormous credit, the dollhouse lady didn’t seem to mind that a feral child was making heavy eye contact with her display, and let me stand there, stock still, for a worryingly long time.

I remember exchanging said coins for a variety of miniature delights: a perfume bottle (a crystal bead with a smaller rhinestone glued on top), little folded paper books with ACTUAL words printed in them in 2pt font, tiny foam-filled quilts made from a single fat quarter of fabric, an artist’s palette clipped out of balsa and daubed with paint.

These riches would be tucked ceremoniously inside a paper bag, which I would then clutch, fierce with joy and quivering with excitement - also furious that I had to wait FOREVER for school to be done.

Once home, after a beaker of squash and what was probably a fairly incoherent account of the adventure in question, I’d hurtle upstairs to arrange these treasures in the medicine cabinet my creative mother had turned into a doll’s house for my Sylvanian families.

Weirdly, I didn’t so much want to play with them as I wanted to arrange it all artfully, pleasingly, and then just…look at it. I’d blu-tack the perfume bottle to the dressing table, fix the scene just-so.

It was the same with my Polly Pockets or my drawings of the Clow Cards from Cardcaptors (laminated in sellotape to protect them, naturally) - create something I was happy with, and just gaze at it.

From Beatrix Potter to Brambly Hedge books and Molly Brett’s animal tales, I was utterly delighted by miniscule details. Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Jolly Pocket Postman was particularly good - tiny drawings AND letters I could pull out and read?!

(C’mon, if you’ve subscribed for long enough then you’ll know that Eloise Poo-Teeth was an oddball - but for whatever reason, these tiny worlds were a source of genuine joy, a portal to an expansive imagination.)

As I grew older, that obsession changed to manga comics - Princess Ai and Sailor Moon - and all their intricate detail. Once I got to University, that evolved into a focus on the granularity of language, and so the rest of the story unfolds.

Back then, I had a cabin bed with a pull-out desk that I used to make forts under. I turned that medicine cabinet into a dollhouse for forest creatures in small smocks.

Today, I have an office, two screens, more books than I have bookcases for, multicolored rosary beads, collaged pieces, icons from Cyprus and Mexico (glitter and Our Lady go great together, in case you were wondering), and a number of other tchotchkes*.

*Please send thoughts and prayers to my husband who endures this, when his dream home would be a white, wipe-clean cube.

But something dawned on me recently. Working from home has become a hiding place, and it's brought fear with it.

It shows up when I read posts LinkedIn. It slouches into view when I open up a blank page. It sighs loudly and aggressively when I think about doing something new.

I am terrified of sharing my creations, so I hide them from the world.

By creations, I mean wins! I mean great work. I mean insights. I mean some damned good stuff. This is stuff that gives me the same glee as buying a perfume bottle made of two small iridescent beads!

Working from home has become working from hiding.

I sit in the dollhouse of my office, everything static and just-so, and have failed to realised that I’ve pulled the front of the house closed behind me. No one can see in. No one knows how fab it is in here.

Just one doll in a closed-over dollhouse is pretty sad stuff.

I stay inside, making brilliant, good things, and I blu-tack them down to keep them safe, rather than showing other people.

Then I open LinkedIn. I see someone post a Q1 win. And though I’m delighted for them, I suddenly feel like I’m all out of pound coins at the craft fair.

You know what the craziest thing is, Reader? I want people to hang out over here! Metaphorically speaking, this is one of those dollhouses with a merry-go-round pony, and battery-operated “electric” Christmas lights, and FIMO fruit bowls!

Vulnerability is inherent in any kind of creative pursuit.

So when it’s just me in my office, I don’t have to worry about someone else seeing the scene until I say it’s ready. That’s a kind of quality control, sure, but it also becomes a kind of paralysis if you hide from the world for too long.

WFH is a Godsend, don’t get me wrong. But when, like me, it’s where you spend 99.9% of your time, you don’t have colleagues around you to share snippets with or do a quick proof before you ship something.

You’re digitally connected, but emotionally distant. If you work on your own, it’s even worse.

You can’t share the wins so easily, and if, like me, you’re worried about being arrogant, then you just…let them go unremarked.

That becomes a habit. And the habit becomes a rut. And the rut becomes a weakness, Reader.

So here’s my question: are you excited about something, or proud of an achievement (however miniature!) that you want to talk about, but don’t because of *insert reason here*?

If that answer is no, go back and try again. If the answer’s yes, would you please tell me? Because you should have a friend to share your joy, whatever kind of dollhouse you make.

​Here’s mine.​

Big love,
​
Eloise x

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