on streamlined dreams

Exclusive: Writer Kelsey Clarke

The suspicion that what once felt like choice was, in fact, predetermined is inevitable. Careers that may have felt predetermined. Cities that may have felt structured to make you fail, to make you feel as if everyone else – those you loved, you’ve wanted to love – were on a different playing field than you.

It can also make it easy to forget what you want.

This is part of the reason why Kelsey Clarke is neither a writer nor an artist nor an actress nor an aspiring therapist. When I spoke with her recently regarding her recent Substack success and her work, she shared this sentiment. When you try to do twenty different things, it is hard to keep your hand in all of the cookie jars and come up with the treat you desire.

As with many creatives, Clarke chose the route of culture and money and surviving in misstructured cities for the larger portion of her young adulthood. Working in international relations and consulting before choosing her passion, it felt like the suspicion had manifested itself. One decision followed another until the shape of a life appeared without ever being chosen.

She has a name for it now – the streamlined dream – a way of moving through the world where life slowly narrows itself into something easier to carry, easier to explain, like a room that rearranges itself each night. By morning, you no longer remember where anything used to be.

However, it is not a streamlined dream to want to connect with others around you. It is not a streamlined dream to want to talk to your neighbor, to want someone to ask how your day’s been or how it will be or what your dream is. And yet, these are the desires that remain when everything else is stripped away. Small and inconvenient and difficult to quantify and thus so, so hard to ignore.

If you are to be a writer, your work begins with admitting that these small desires are not distractions from a life, but the material of it. That attention is not something you arrive at, but something you practice, again and again, until it begins to resemble meaning.

The protagonists of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango are nothing more than Hungarians wandering for purpose in their poverty-stricken town. They circle the same roads, follow the same rumors, and gather around the same hope that someone, someday, is coming to save them.

Still, there is something to keep them motivated on these rainy, gloomy winter days. Enough for them to know that they can control their environment, that they have the autonomy to persevere as a community. You have more agency than you believe, Clarke told me, as if she was speaking to the villagers themselves, enough to push them towards action and appreciation for the life around them.

Enough, perhaps, for her to hold multiple selves at once and thrive. A writer, an artist, an actress, a therapist. Lives that had moved through cities, through villages, through versions of herself that never fully disappeared. Something, somewhere, has not been lost.