Letters Without Sender: Cartas sin remitente, #1

By ANDREA SARMIENTO

Letters without sender is the vehicle that allows readers to feel the experience of intruding into the intimate space of a woman who is reflecting on her experiences with everyday concepts. Looking at the most honest and sincere moment that one has of her: sitting on her bed with a notebook as a mirror of her mind and the pen as a reflection of her soul.

It is a compilation of letters with an intimate writing style, where the author writes to concepts such as solitude, uncertainty, her love life, among others, as part of a process of search and self-knowledge.

Her readers find in these letters points of reflection about their own lives, from the relationship of the experiences reflected here with their own, to make a reinterpretation of their feelings and perseption over these concepts .

The book also has a graphic interpretation by the illustrator Yuseph Zapata where he makes an illustration as an artistic representation of the main letters, and as a final artwork, these illustrations make up the book's cover design, in doodle style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ANDREA SARMIENTO
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201692889

Book preview

ANDREA SARMIENTO

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An inexperienced writer who writes letters that are never sent, and that she also knows, will never be read by those to whom the letter is addressed.

Insatiable curious.

Restless as she is.

Has looked for a thousand ways to escape from conventional life and do what she wants, always.

This has led her to live in three countries outside of Colombia, her home country.

Professionally explore the world of entrepreneurship and enterprises.

Beyond the books, the universities, and the companies she has been her most praised knowledge has come from her family, pets, friends, co-workers, partners, and places she has encountered.

So fatuous is she, that she now has the nerve to publish a book in her infinite ignorance and immaturity in the world of literature. In her most lucid and serious moments, she pursues her marketing and advertising career at an agency in Bogotá, Colombia.

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To Pita and Brown. My retaining wall against avalanches and official sponsors of my craziness. 

To Rosi, Juli, and Anita who made me believe that what I wrote was worth sharing.

Thanks

Thanks to Camila who lifted me from my chair and to Margarita who showed me the steps in this delightfulness that is writing. Also to all the women who have dared to stand on the dance floor and encourage us

to dance with them.

(...) because that is when mental freedom begins or, rather, the possibility that, with the passage of time, the mind can enjoy the freedom to write whatever it wants.

Virginia Woolf

Foreword

—The foreword is very important —the editor tells me. I panic because I don't even know what a foreword is. ¿Y eso con qué se come? What is it for? I investigate. I understand that it is something someone else writes about my book. It serves as an introduction and adds a fragment on the back cover, so people want to read it. I panic again. I don't know who to tell. I get a little shy. Who is going to risk writing about this?

Until a few months ago I used books as a sleeping pill at night. That made me addicted to reading since I was a teenager, however, it never helped me with spelling. I wrote in my diaries, like a third grader, in my thirties. No idea about accents or punctuation. It wasn’t necessary because no one read my journal. At a work level, I was never in trouble thanks to the automatic spelling corrector of the computers. However, one day I shared the first letter of this book with my cousin. She said: —I need to share this letter now. Putting it up somewhere is easy to share —and that's how this project started.

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I had always written. I had journals since I was twelve, but I had never dared to share anything. But, this year something happened. I did not know that it was activated in me. A very powerful energy sat me for hours in front of the notebook, to write what I felt, about my life and the anecdotes that I had heard from my family. I wanted to write and keep on writing. So I did it. Today I fully understand what happened and what led me to write in that outrageous way.

Virginia Woolf states in her essay: A Room for One´s Own, that women need to have the intellectual freedom to enter the world of literature. After an investigation about women and literature, she concluded that women needed a room of their own and sufficient money to be able to dedicate themselves to reading and writing: Intellectual freedom depends on material matters In my case, my room, and money were there. And yet, I did not have that desired intellectual freedom, due to a material issue: the appearance and size of my body. I had put my mind in a cage with thick and heavy bars called: guilt and shame. Everything that my mind had to deliver was lost between the worries of the pounds that I had to lose. In the how, when, and what to do to modify this body that I believed was imperfect.

I had already thrown away diets, measurements control, weight loss, and calorie counting. I was not willing to continue suffering every time I sat down in front of a plate of food. However, the internal conversations continued: You are not enough, You are fat, There has to be a way to lose weight, and I cannot just do nothing with this incorrect body. I looked in the mirror and I didn't like what I saw. I felt guilty every time I ate something good. I was thinking about everything that I didn't have because of this body that I was ashamed of. Until I came across the book, Yo deberia ser flaca from Camila Serna. I devoured it. That book opened a door for me that I didn't know existed. A world where there were no perfect bodies and where a woman could live happily, without having to meet any beauty standard. That strange place got me. I started to explore it and fall in love with it.

I faced my fears. I cried. I kicked. And I broke free. The pen began to move very quickly over empty pages. An unstoppable flow of feelings and experiences began to take shape on paper and at that moment I realized that my ideas, my feelings, my imagination, and my stories had been held captive all my life. That intellectual freedom came when I opened the door of that mental cage that I had imposed on myself. By instinct, my mind ran to

write everything that had been caged for so many years.

Today I know that was the powerful force I felt. It had always been there, waiting for me to walk the path of self-acceptance and self-compassion to invest that energy in something that I was truly passionate about. That force permeated all areas of my life. I quote again this visionary woman who gave us a very clear route to follow: You will have to illuminate above all your soul, its depths and its surface, its vanities and its generosity and say what your beauty or your ugliness means to you, and what is your relationship with that world . And as if the writing had come into my life to do exactly what Virginia Woolf said, I began to wonder about concepts such as loneliness, uncertainty, injustices, my body, and my love life among many other reflections that you will find in this book.

Here you´ll find reflections on what I have experienced. Some letters are written to the void. Letters without sender, because my vocabulary is still so