Postroll

What’s funny is that Courtney Love and Zack de la Rocha are literally the last people I’d ever expect to probably have had selective mutism. As a teen, I consciously identified with “depressed, sensitive artist” types like Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke. Sadness felt much safer to express than anger. I grew up being seen as a “good, innocent Christian girl,” so anger felt like a forbidden emotion for me to express.

Can you import a CD from Japan and get a thank you note with a packet of matcha attached to it from Spotify? Didn't think so.

When you begin to decentralize your phone, you open yourself up for greater levels of self expression. I could try and put a digicam, iPod, notebook, phone, keys, wallet, and Nintendo DS into my pockets, but instead I opted to get a little backpack to hold my stuff in. It's green (my favorite color) and decorated with pins of my favorite bands and symbols from my favorite franchises

The sunk cost fallacy doesn’t always have to do with money. Imagine you’ve signed up for a new class offered at your university. After the first week, you realize that it doesn’t really match up with your interests and you’d much rather swap it out for something else. Luckily, you can still drop the class. Yet, when you think about it, and factor in that you've already handed in an assignment, you might still opt to stick with it. This is where the sunk cost fallacy kicks in, hand-in-hand with the status quo bias—our preference to keep things the way they are to avoid potential losses.

if you dial it all the way back over twenty years ago blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. Most of us didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.

If I've learned anything from searching through old personal websites and blogs, especially on my blackwork journey, it's that these windows into people's lives, their interests, and their art, are precious. They document triumphs and loss, creative journeys and mentorship, and mundane, everyday life. They exist long past the point they are abandoned, time capsules in 0s and 1s, and with the help of the Internet Archive they can even outlive their creator

So, dear reader, approach each game, practice, or project with a carefree spirit, a willingness to try new things without fear of failure, and, most of all, just enjoy the ride.

I could conclude with some paltry plea to not make jokes about schizos, because we are real people and you don't know shit about us, but the truth is I don't give a shit about your ignorance. The bigger enemy than bad jokes is the goddamn colonizer, and once we decolonize our relations and abolish profiteering as a mode of social organization, then suppression of people like me, like the suppression of billions of people, may finally fade away and be healed over. If you don't have your eyes on the big demon, you'll get crushed thinking the enemy is the muck between its toes.

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called Field Notes on Science & Nature, a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about notes? — but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.

You don't need a grand life to write. You need presence. Attention. An utter willingness to discern the details of your own life: questions you ask yourself in the quiet moments, conversations that make you ponder, complex feelings you want to untangle.