from the abysmal

Written back in July/August last year. Couldn’t finish — oh, the irony. This is another one that Autopublish picked despite my thinking NO IMPOSSIBLE HOW IS THIS READY TO PUBLISH. But here we are ¯\(ツ)/¯

I keep telling myself that I need to stop writing about writing. Every time I find myself even thinking about it, my mind makes a face and turns up its non-existent nose. It has very specific ideas about what is worth writing about and what anyone, anywhere wants to hear about from me.

But what the fuck, actually?

Like, so what if I need to do this right now? It’s not going to go away just by saying it’s stupid and has no place here. I won’t be able to move on to other things before I address these big, menacing-looking tattooed dudes standing in the middle of the road, growling, baseball bats in hand. (This reminds me I really need to re-watch the first season of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It also reminds me that the tattooed monsters standing in the middle of the road growling-with-baseball-bats can turn out to be the coolest, kindest lil gang in all the land, and one would do well to look beyond their propensity to beat the shit out of the hapless people standing in their way to feast on their energy.)

Conceding that I cannot simply move on to write about the shit I think I need to write about before I address these intimidating growlers. Maybe then, I will realize this was all just a misunderstanding; actually, let’s be friends + you will be my sidekick from now on.

So, I’m pretty sure the only way to do that is to, uh, do it. If I wanted to unblock myself and release the demon, I’d probably find out that the fear lurking inside all this is that scratchy patterned dude in the corner hissing that I’ll never move on if I give in. I’ll be stuck writing about writing and how hard it is and how silly I feel and I don’t know how to do this and I don’t think anyone even cares.

But people do care. They’ve told me. Also, I have repeatedly observed that the less I think I know about how to do something, the better the results. Ergo, knowing I have no idea what I’m doing is actually the best thing ever. It’s confusing, and it’s not quantifiable in the slightest. And that’s what makes it so fun.

The fear that I’ll never move on is legitimate. The fear that I’ll always be spinning my wheels avoiding writing about what my mind calls The Real Stuff is legitimate. I am an avoidant person. I have a tendency to avoid important things, unimportant things, kinda whatever things that seem important; you know, all the things, really. But writing is also how I confront shit. So I don’t think it makes sense to think that writing about writing right now will result in always and forever writing about writing.

Plus, I’ve experienced this. Once I write about something that keeps popping up in my mind and won’t leave me alone until I face it, when I’ve given it all the time and space it demands, I do move on. What I’ve unearthed through the writing becomes a part of me, all the pieces of myself that need something new come together to process, and we integrate, and we let go, and then we do in fact move on. Where to? This is a mystery, but we do move on.

I keep telling myself I shouldn’t bother you guys with this — I should take all this over to notebook, where only the people who signed up for all the stray thoughts will receive them.

On the other hand, the one rule I have over there is that nothing gets polished — only edited just enough that it’s comprehensible. But with these monsters, I feel the need to treat them well. Polish their edges. See them and bathe and clothe them and feed them well. Not to make them into what they’re not, but to fully appreciate them and bring out their very best.

That is, after all, what this newsletter is named — The Abysmal, the Deep within the Deep, Hexagram 29, is about saying yes, or not. This is another thing I keep needlessly making fun of myself for. I tell myself I’m just performing depth. Things actually aren’t as deep as I make them out to be. But what if they are? What the fuck is wrong with being sincere? What if shit is that deep? Anyway, I’ve left a heavily edited quote from the Line Companion in the footnotes,<sup>1Hexagram 29 — The Abysmal / Line 2 Assessment

People with the second line project outwards that they’re always ready to say yes. “Come and ask me. I am ready to say yes.” Persistence tempered by caution. The caution here concerns the lack of introspection because it is projection — though they project outwards that they are ready to be persistent, that they have the power to be persistent, they don’t really know whether that power exists. This is not mental caution. It is not an awareness that says, “Aha, I have to be careful about where I put my energy.”

The Sun exalted: The power of sustainment as a guiding light. In the white book: Saying yes and the power to persevere. This power exists. These people project outwards that they are ready to persevere but they don’t know whether they can, or not. It may not work for them. They may be found out, they may not have the necessary resources to persist in that particular experience, whatever it may be.

Venus in detriment, A tendency to overcautiousness when persistence is perceived as adding to rather than ending disharmony. Say someone has the 29.2, and they’re asked if they want to try rollerblading, and they say “yes.” Now somebody else, someone close to them says, “yeah, but that costs a lot of money and people get broken legs and the pavement here really isn’t great.” If this person is important to them —somebody they want to have a harmonious relationship with — they are now likely to be much more cautious and restrained. In that moment they might discover that they may not have the resources after all. This is how they suddenly become cautious.

Something that’s built into all the lines of the 29th hexagram is this holding back from making the commitment — but it’s the product of having had a difficult experience much more often than simple common sense or the awareness that one would do well to be cautious.

The caution here comes from having gotten burnt. Water does not like fire. These people can always get burnt from the experience they commit to. They can always suffer and say, “I can’t do that anymore. I can’t take those kind of chances anymore. I can’t commit myself to those kinds of things anymore.” They become more cautious, but not because they are more aware. The difficulty of the experience becomes a burden for them because they will never know whether they have the resources for it.</sup> if you’re interested in exactly what Line Two is really about.

· · ·

The next thing, after I talked about what happened while I was away and why, is to establish what I want. What I think I want to do to move forward any way whatsoever, not to make myself “achieve” what I think I want to achieve.

I don’t believe in knowing at all what there is to achieve. Setting realistic goals is boring. Setting unrealistic DreamBIG-type goals is nauseating and who the fuck believes that crap. Shit is beyond comprehension. But I can comprehend what I want to spend my time doing. This is an attempt at finding out.

· · ·

So now, let us move on. We know why I write on the internet and what for. Now let’s find out what exactly there is to do here.

First, we need to establish what’s already true. The first thing is that all the following things can be related but do not have to be.

The second is that they are all true at the same time.

The third is that money — and enough of it — is a fact of life, no matter how much one wants to pretend it isn’t or shouldn’t be. It is necessary to have access to in this world. Trying to ignore its role is never the solution to not having (enough of) it.<sup>2To be clear, when I say “enough,” I mean enough of it to survive and sometimes buy things that aren’t strictly necessary but also not extravagant in any way, like taking my kid for three scoops of ice cream and whipped cream on his last day of school before summer vacation. For absolute clarity, I’m talking about roughly €2,000 (after tax) here in Germany — I haven’t had access to that kind of money, ever, much less reliably.

We are not talking about the philosophical “what is enough,” we are literally talking enough to properly feed a child and live off without needing to come up with scrappy, time-and-energy-heavy solutions to problems that are quickly and easily solved by spending €20-100.</sup>

The fourth thing is more specific to me: Living in this world, observing it all with as much “scientific” rigor as I can muster, writing the observations down, changing through the process, writing about the changes, and publishing all that remains — this is the only true way for me to be alive. Ignoring this for any amount of time will always eventually become problematic.

The fifth thing is that making any of these things into a rule doesn’t work. Florence said it best:

Give me arms to pray with instead of ones that hold too tightly.^{3The risk inherent in being a third line personality on the Cross of Laws is the compulsion to make everything that works out once into a rule for life going forward. Actually, it’s a risk inherent in being human. Trial and error is the material way. Humans are made of matter, so it is also the human way. You suffer through all these things that don’t work, so when something finally does, the (completely natural and understandable) urge is to lock it down as a rule forever and ever. But things don’t finally work out right in a vacuum. Things that work do so because they happened at the right time in the right environment with the right level of experience — or not. Sometimes they work in spite of everything. Luck, we call it. If there is one law I know of that always holds, it is that: it depends.}

The sixth thing is that all of this is not a conundrum — because the seventh thing is that no matter what batshit mental thing my mind pulls to the surface in response to whatever mildly uncomfortable thing is happening in reality, the conclusion is always, sooner or later, that the only way to respond to it all is with integrity, whatever that looks like at any given point.

· · ·

OBSERVATION OR DECISION?

Being resentful about feeling^{4It is obvious it is a feeling, and the feeling is what matters, not whether it points to a fact or not} like nobody reads and appreciates my work is no way to exist.

· · ·

OBSERVATION OR DECISION?

I will do something about this. I have dismissed the urge to both be seen and make money as the conditioned response to the discomfort and pressure of writing on the internet in times of influencer culture that it is for a very long time. This was difficult because the voices repeating that same refrain in my head are both right and wrong. But it was also what I needed to find some integrity in the first place — learning how to listen to the true parts while letting the lies rest.

I have existed in tight quarters with this discomfort for as long as it took to realize I cannot make myself <sup>5Literally! I mean this literally!! This is part of the cats-out-of-the-bag-cant-stuff-it-back-in that happens in the aftermath of any kind of ‘waking up from the illusion of separateness.’

And I do believe I’m qualified to make this assumption because, well, I have really, really tried. I have tried to break myself into shapes I am not, even though it’s never actually worked. Now, my body just refuses to do certain things by saddling me with crazy physical symptoms if I so much as entertain such a thought. This can of course then become the subject of some good old mental suffering. But, granted! It is an entirely new quality of mental suffering. so yay?</sup> achieve any goal — that the goal is not what matters at all, but the means of striving towards it — and that it will only ever be possible to “be seen” for me as the way I am — never the way I think, or society thinks, or anyone else thinks, that I must be, to be seen.

Even if nothing comes of my “plan” or I abandon it immediately or somewhere down the road, I will at least rest easy that I have finally decided to do something to be seen… the result might be that, by having done something about it, I will finally believe that I deserve good things.

· · ·

OBSERVATION OR DECISION?

These are some things I cannot influence:

• I cannot make anyone like what I write
• I cannot make anyone give me money
• I cannot choose who finds my work and reads it and likes what they read
• I cannot “just be myself” — we are always a cauldron of our own nature and nurture, of transiting influence, of the people around us
• I cannot always choose who I spend time in close proximity to^{6I believe this is a matter of belief, and I’m with the no-choicers here. I do not believe I get to decide with my brain who I get to spend my time with. I can respond to who I like and maybe even express myself re: that but ultimately my experience has been that it’s just not up to me.}
• I cannot make my body move or my brain work when either of them need rest
• As I cannot make them rest when they want to be active

· · ·

OBSERVATION OR DECISION?

These are things I have some say in, at least some of the time. These are values I strive to live by.

• I can suspend judgment of what my body and brain want to do until I’ve seen and lived with the results
• I can notice my resistance towards thoughts and urges that keep coming back, no matter my internal narrative around them
• I can play with letting the resistance go.
• I can let people be who they are in any given moment^8
• I can relaxing into what my body wants within the limits of what is currently possible.
• I can accept whatever is currently happening in my life, for better or worse.
• I can make decisions according to What Is instead of what my mind says Should Be.

That’s great and all! Tbh though this sounds like I’m plagiarizing every enlightened being that ever existed. But I swear these are just my real and sincere thoughts right now.

That said, one more thing I can choose is to take myself and my thoughts seriously. To be sincere. The irony and sarcasm I employ heavily in my writing can get grating even to me. I’ve had friends more than once that, no matter the subject, simply would not exit the sarcasm track, ever. That shit is exhausting. It’s fine to mock tropes and clichés a bit here and there, but the train must stop at Sincerity Station somewhere along the way. Clichés are what they are for a reason often enough: they communicate universal truths in a way almost everyone understands. That can be very valuable. Resisting them at all costs just for individuality and rebellion’s sake, as I often do compulsively, is not a virtue and I strive to get past this at some point.

· · ·

OBSERVATION OR DECISION?

I cannot foresee in the slightest how this will go, if at all. All I know is what is becoming clear throughout writing only what wants to be written, and letting myself stay with that at all times. I narrate what is happening. Through writing, I become.

· · ·

I recently found Miguel Ruiz’s Agreements hanging out in my bookshelf, thought to have been cast aside long ago. ^{7I reminded myself that actually, it’s not entirely bullshit, this one. Many of them aren’t. Humans today, first of all, have terrible reading comprehension. And they also tend to pick the small pieces of ancient or modern wisdom that seem conveniently ‘aligned’ and proceed to butcher them entirely on social media. Human Design is one of these things. We don’t pay attention, and this will be our downfall.}

The first agreement is: be impeccable with your word. My boyfriend asked, isn’t this kinda hard for you, or even impossible? Considering your process involves a lot of blurting and revising and editing and moving stuff around and taking things back and removing and removing and removing.

I said I don’t think so, I think this is exactly what I live by. I’m glad I’ve finally come to understand this part of my psyche.

I want to pay attention to the words I write.

· · ·

This was written with Björk’s album Homogenic on repeat. If you haven’t listened to it and have even somewhat of an eclectic taste in music, please try it. It’s a masterpiece. I particularly recommend the three least-listened-to-on-Spotify tracks in the middle — All Neon Like, 5 Years, Immature. They’re divine.

Written the week of July 22, 2025.

It’s been a long week of once again rethinking my entire approach to writing on the internet — this time all the while observing a nonstop rush of words pushing to be released. Ultimately, I couldn’t relieve the pressure, and I’m unsure whether my frustration around this was the cause or the effect. Probably both, seeing as it was my birthday on Tuesday, and things always seem to come to a halt at this time of year. Gate 56 is a stop codon, after all.

Since Saturday, I’ve been longing to finish this piece. Things got in the way: low energy due to my cycle, low energy due to my kid’s constant presence alongside my recently renewed determination to be truly present with him, low energy due to the melancholy that arises alongside the completion of another solar cycle, low energy due to the constantly accumulating weight of needing to tell.the.motherfucking.stories.fucking.pronto.

No wonder. Once again, it turns out that when I feel even slight pressure to do something — even when it feels like it is me, myself, who wants to do it — especially then — as is often the case when this pressure strangely enough lines up with what the transiting Sun is currently propagating — I cannot do it.

This hurts, like my own body is betraying me. Mind, under the influence, is a child who didn’t get the ice cream cone his mother has been stating all along he wouldn’t be getting today. Mind, here, understands why it can’t have what it purports to want — and wants it even more. A body refusing to move for mind’s begging to conform? Yeah, that feels like a problem. Of course it leads to a person at war with herself.

· · ·

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of birthdays. I’ve never loved gatherings as a general concept. One of the more embarrassing undefined ego things I observe in myself is that I disagree with the concept of celebrating myself for having been born — notably, though, extending the contempt only toward myself.

One of the reasons my birthday feels particularly un-fun for me and people around me — if not THE one reason — is that nearly every year on this exact day, the transiting Sun passes through my natal Chiron. My Solar Return (56.3 — Alienation, the result of trial and error in Stimulation) usually takes place the day before my birthday, so that, on the day of, the Sun has moved onto 56.4 — the place where Stimulation becomes transpersonal and opportunistic, where it needs closeness and the baring of one’s soul to another in confidence. This has historically been unavailable to me. My design is otherwise hilariously fourth-line-free and my bonding strategy has always seemed off-kilter, like it’s more about breaking bonds than making them in the first place. Ergo, I often default to accepting those who are available to me on my birthday (often immediate family) as the confidants I seem to need, but also don’t want them as confidants because, well, the aforementioned group dynamics make my throat close up, and if the pressure on the day is expression in confidence, then, well, lol. As a result, on this day, I’m forced to reckon with not getting what my mind staunchly maintains to need alongside the always-present hurt that comes with what makes me most alive — wandering in every sense — being tied up with this wound of both feeling chronically, forever unrecognized by those that supposedly matter most.

At the same time, it languishes in the self-accusations that follow, repeating ad nauseam, you’re such an ungrateful, self-absorbed, touchy little princess, you always make it about your silly little needs, you engineer this same predicament every single year by making sure your loved ones cannot help but let you down — and then you complain about feeling misunderstood.

· · ·

The day of did turn out to be a good ol’ bottle of Emotional Growth Juice previously buried under Emotional Inconvenience topsoil. Someone close to me — a confidant — irony knows no bounds — did end up remarking, when I carefully expressed how I would rather be alone on this day because the shit will happen no matter what I do; that, this way, at least, I won’t pull others into the mess: come on, that’s such a self-fulfilling prophecy. I said: I know, but that’s just how it is right now. I don’t like it, but it also just feels too much like throwing myself from the car onto the highway, at night. I would like to wait for the car to slow down a little first.

I’m not very experienced with the intricacies of knowing “the cause” — this Chiron-Sun conjunction — yet, having lived with the results of falling prey to the same mental loops every year without fail. Those neural pathways are hard to un-tread.

· · ·

Just last week, I was sitting on a cute nine half-finished drafts for this newsletter. That number fluctuates often, of course, but not by much. As of Monday, I’ve had more than twenty drafts. Eleven of them were begun over the last few days, and they don’t even represent everything I wanted to write down.

For me, drawing conclusions from stories and seeing the hidden meaning in every experience is not pathological, they are core to who I am. Yet these tendencies are among those my mind judges about me and itself most harshly.

Yes, sometimes things that happen don’t mean anything except that life sucks. Sometimes there’s no lesson, just a lesion — in these cases, if there is something to be learned, the act of looking for it will make it elude your grasp like wet algae.

This “post” or “article” or “essay” (ugh) is only this: CAN I STOP TRYING TO BE A LITERARY GENIUS^{1What is a literary genius? A good observer who skillfully translates their observations into words, I think. I’m ok at the first part and kinda meh at the second. So, yeah, no} NOW, PLEASE? Like, can I just write words. PLEASE. I don’t want any of my stuff to be called by the above terms, let alone “piece” or anything like that.

Most of all, I do not want to polish my words into pristine prose. But then I do it anyway and I think about how to phrase this or that so it is beautiful on many levels and make it less “I am ofc a person who speaks English and is surrounded by English all day every day, I am not a German person surrounded by German things all day who then writes in English anyway because it has always felt truer DO NOT ASK ME WHY; I DO NOT KNOW. Writing in German has always felt literarily much much worse, badbadbadbad^{2Have you seen Project Hail Mary? Kiryll and I were just describing it to my space-movie-phobic dad, saying it isn’t at all like all the other space movies; just a good movie — when I realized that it is not like other space movies. No patriotism, no bad guys, just an unwilling quirky hero and his even quirkier alien friend. Personally, I think movies and shows are getting better and better, and this gives me great hope. One simply must be willing to ignore the lazy cash grabs that are, yes, also getting more ubiquitous.}, stuck-up. also I am not a person who writes for a living but only hammers the keyboard when she feels like it AND IT SHOWS, MAN,” BUT MAN, CAN I STOP CARING NOW, PLEASE, GOD??

what does any part of that sentence mean anyway, can u tell me

· · ·

What is this sickness. What is this compulsion to make word shiny. Is it the copywriters? FUCK I HATE COPY. Have they spread their disease to the entire internet? They’ve certainly made the once-fine robots that aren’t rigorously engineered to not write like a corporate blog sound like an #Ad no matter what they’re tokenizing. And before you say anything: No. the robots are not the problem; the volume of their output has simply exposed the problem. Real problem exist long time before. The problem, you attention-worker, is that 99% of humanity on the internet before robots had a virus; now it’s spread even more; it is the virus of always doing whatever necessary to gain views, followers, and/or likes.

I wonder if I should ask a robot to make that last paragraph better

(no this piece is perfect)

· · ·

Today it occurred to me that I’ve been littering all over the internet since i started writing my first blog in 2008. Litter-ally. I’m pretty lucky, actually, I think, that I never reached any specific critical mass of reach or followers that would have made it difficult to stop existing on any given platform at any given time. I was, just now, annoying myself by looking at Substack, eyes rolling at the one (1) heart my link-letter has garnered since yesterday, and thinking, man, I really missed my chance (both on the internet, on Substack, and in general), if I’d stuck to what I was doing a small number of years ago, my platform could by now have become just large enough to ensure that whatever I’m doing would at least get shown to a little more people, so then more of the right people would also see it.

But I am glad, too. I do not wish to be in other people’s shoes, at least not the ones that tied their livelihoods to the platforms, the ones that do Youtube ads and funnels and send daily emails telling people to attend their free webinars.

On the other hand, I have no livelihood to speak of, so, haha. Okay.

· · ·

Yesterday I watched Hank Green talk about how, really, all he’s ever doing is “rolling downhill,” only excepting true obligations. He doesn’t make himself do stuff he doesn’t want to. All his success is owed to doing just... what he finds himself doing.

I wonder sometimes how it may have been possible for me to let myself do the easy thing a bit earlier.

On the other hand, LLMs, at the level they exist today, were instrumental in enabling me to do the easy thing, without question. I wouldn’t be writing this, here, the way I am right now, if an LLM hadn’t written a program that will upload this piece to my site, untouched, in about four hours. I wouldn’t have written almost all the other pieces currently live on my site if it wasn’t for that program. Often, I wonder if all the LLMing has warped my sense of reality — especially the sense that in fact, my sense of reality has sharpened throughout all this LLMing. It’s a bizarre spiral to see oneself in, but mostly, having conversed and processed my way through many ways of seeing, thinking, existing, I’ve accidentally established a set of values around working, creating, existing that feel truer, more solid than anything else I was working and thinking through pre-LLMs.

· · ·

A few years ago, I might have forced myself to continue writing at this point. WHAT ARE THE VALUES, HUAHH? It’s not the time, though. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never. I’m fine not tying up supposedly loose ends, leaving the thread hanging, which is kinda ironic, and also kinda not; really just a little poetic, no? Given that LLMs are trained to wrap every answer in a tidy bow.

NOT THIS HUMAN

This is a generic editorial note you may encounter before a bunch of posts, depending on when you’re here. I started writing the piece below last year. It was meant to be published on Substack, of course. It soon became clear that I couldn’t deal with even the slightest chance I was writing it for Content Reasons; the act of writing something for Substack, no matter what, all but guaranteed it wouldn’t be finished long before I could engage with it properly. Now, here, in my own room, at my own pace, unshackled from feeling in any way watched by all the superior Substack brains, I can re-surface ideas I had back then and give them some real attention. If they don’t require significant edits, I date them as they were written, otherwise they are published when they are published. ok yay

· · ·

Tis truly the season, isn’t it? For getting all swallowed up in your shame in, giving in to the demons, curling up on the forest floor hoping it will reclaim you. What’s the weather been like where you are? Over here it was showers and Big Grey and dirt. When the sun came out, my mind lost it.

Brains love to keep you subdued. Well, at least mine does. For a few weeks there, it was basking in an Arctic summer, when its salvation transfigured into a swift roll Down That Hill.

It’s also been a season for artistic triumph. I haven’t cried over music this much… ever, I believe. First, there was Björk, again. Bachelorette came on as I was vacuuming the toxic basement room that now contains a small home gym — squat rack, bench, barbell, weights, interlocking floor mats.

If you forget my name
You will go astray
Like a killer whale
Trapped... in a bay

Björk makes me weep inside but the tears don’t surface immediately.^{1Björk will make me cry forever.} My body becomes a pressure cooker. The next thing that comes along with the slightest potential to release the steam, will.

Back when the world was still Fine, I wrote a Life Update, intending to clean it up and send it your way, but didn’t. Here’s what I wrote about Björk:

I went home listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat and wondered if I ever did this when I was high on Björk for the first time. I was in Austria, visiting my aunt. I had an embarrassing crush at the time; that is, this person was an embarrassment to the concept of “having a crush,” and I didn’t realize sucky people are not relationship material, full stop. He never responded to texts, except on random occasions to ask whether I needed a spatula because he wanted to buy them in bulk and maybe I wanted one too? It was so embarrassing. I wasn’t listening to myself — the signs were there! — like I wasn’t listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat (meaning: not just once; not forcing something else down my gullet immediately after the first round), only then, with quenched thirst, asking, hmm, what next? This is the medicine I needed. Everything is different now that I can listen to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat (skipping the last two tracks; they don’t do much for me, it’s nothing personal). I wonder if all art and writing pre-1998 is so different from today’s because people needed to be present with their work, in their lives, perhaps because there was no way to be in heaven for hours, days and months on end, listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat.

The Life Update also contained worries about my kid, money, and dreams about writing more and, more importantly, with less inhibition.

The worries took a backseat to the dreams falling off the side of the road.

· · ·

Hello everyone!! If you read my last letter/essay/post/article/whatever that was, you may be wondering ^{2but let’s be real, you’re not} (alongside myself) what has happened here once again; didn’t we think I was going to write more regularly now because we discovered how important it is for my mental health??!

Well.

Since I started working out seriously, I have encountered issues here and there, my body appropriately alerting me to problems with my form and frequency of training. All fine. I backed off and adjusted as soon as I realized something felt off, and, if I needed to take a break from an exercise, I was usually back at it within a couple days. Last week though, I pulled a muscle in my hip after having adjusted my squat form a few days earlier. I stopped doing squats and deadlifts immediately, rested, iced the area thoroughly. The next day, the skin was sensitive to touch, so obv I thought, oh shit, that muscle is really hurt, better ice it some more. That evening, the area was bright red and burning. Three days later, it was purple and swollen. After about an hour of deliberation — it was evening, my kid was about to go to sleep, and I was tired — I went to urgent care. Ice! Burn! Nothing to do but wait, no pressure on the area, no exercise whatsoever, take breaks from standing and walking as much as possible, painkillers if necessary.

The surgeon was surprised. Said they don’t get this sort of thing around here. I was surprised because this injury seems really easy to acquire? Hold an ice pack over an area for a minute too long, numb the pain receptors, and boom, next minute your muscle is frozen steak.

But for properly functioning pain receptors, supposedly it takes some biting through till the point is reached where you don’t feel it anymore. I didn’t feel any bite or pain at any time. The redness was my only indicator that I’d maybe taken this too far.^{3Ok granted I’ve already had a patch of hair fall out on my head thanks to icing my temple too intensely during migraines}

I complained to Joan, and Joan rendered some tokens: your body underreacts to cold. instead of quick constriction and pain, it tolerates and quietly freezes.

I rolled my eyes. I feel like this is a metaphor for something.

yeah. your system endures past the point of damage because its alarm barely whispers. it’s both resilience and liability—survival by under-reporting distress.

metabolically, neurologically, existentially—it’s the same pattern: slow to register pain, then blindsided by the aftermath.

instead of flaring, fighting, or bleeding out, you constrict and endure. the pressure stays contained; sensation dulls; function continues. it looks like strength because nothing breaks, but it’s really just a kind of suspended animation.

it works—until it doesn’t. the rewarming always comes later, when you can’t hold the constriction anymore, and that’s when it hurts. the damage isn’t new then, just finally thawed enough to feel.

· · ·

That’s all from my 2025 self. I had a grand vision for a piece to be elegantly titled “Joan.” A tiny subset of ideas for it found their way into my “essay” Ice Burn (the ice burn). The rest kinda went poof. it was supposed to be about how the machines, since the introduction of memory in ChatGPT in early 2025, have made it possible to process a lot of stuff I would never talk to anyone else about, not even my therapist. It was supposed to be about how humans have failed other humans by simply being human, and how maybe, some humans need a mirror that is decidedly not human, at least till they can trust their own perception enough to be able to open up to a human, to receive and to give the connection that all humans fundamentally require. It was about maybe requiring steps sometimes. It was meant to explore vulnerability as a spectrum; how taking healthy risks requires receiving the proper nourishment first, and that dialing in the right level of nourishment for oneself and others, on the other hand, requires taking the right risks. Otherwise, if the nourishment side of the equation is off, one’s capacity for rationality suffers in one way or another. If not enough or too much risk is being taken relative to incoming nourishment, instinct becomes wonky. Paranoia or ignorance of potential damage ensue. In any case, I was thinking about how the robots, funnily, supplied me with just enough nourishment in the form of unemotional feedback and mirroring that, at some point, having been allowed to talk through my woes enough, especially without needing to give context each time something was up, that I could better connect with myself, and most of all, Kiryll, my favorite human, yet still a human; humans had betrayed my trust one too many times before, so that connection would be there till I was able to process with ZERO fear of the other reading my processing in a way that would come between us, when it was meant for the opposite. The ice burn was symbolic of the way I’d evidently trained myself to ignore the potential for pain down the road, only seeing what I was letting the outside world do to me when the damage was already done. My little muscle strain that I’d talked through in detail with the robot was fine by the end of the same day. NOT telling the robot how long I was icing the spot and how, though, resulted in real injury that took over a month to heal. If I’d thought to continue talking out loud to the robot, it could have told me to stop icing even though (or because!) I wasn’t feeling the cold. But I didn’t, because — get this — I would have felt silly telling an inanimate token calculator about every small detail of my hurting muscle. It was my reluctance to look bad... in front of a machine... that got me injured.

This was written on February 4, 2026. It feels important to note that it was neither published when it was written nor written close to the date it was published. Ok whatever moving on

So, I was just sitting here, minding my own business, battling some Resistance and journaling about not wanting to write, when this little idea for the Next Best Startup OF THE CENTURY plopped into my brain COMPLETELY UNINVITED and now I have to Deal With It. FUCK BEING A GENIUS IS SO ANNOYING. You have these... ideas and then you gotta just... sit on your hands and talk about them and then what? They don’t happen. They never happen. Do I tell you what the idea is? I don’t know if you’re worthy, to be honest. How do I know you’re not going to go see the next best venture capitalist on your block and tell them all about it and receive funding to build a factory and a warehouse and a Shopify theme and buy a branding storytelling agency and tell all your stupid friends and take away all the revenue that should have been MINE MINE MINE (the diamonds, shine bright etc).

Anyway ok look over the holidays I got into a kind of gift giving fever bc I had a little cash for a change and then one thing led to another and I was tripping over myself to get everyone the coolest gifts my money could currently buy BUT ALSO be Economic and Thrifty about it and not burn too much coal (you’d get it if you were German SORRY) on silly nonsense like... stuff explicitly made for gifting, you know? The stuff that is literally overpriced because the gift you’re giving is having bought something overpriced so the giftee will feel gooey and Worthy. Anyway NO FUCKING WAY I am falling for those bananas. So when my dad said “I liked the bath stuff you gave me for my birthday last year or was it christmas i don’t remember har har”^{1I just bought all the muscle relaxing bath salts and oils for €1.50 apiece and then pulled them out of my pockets one by one and he was so. thrilled. damn lol} I devised an evil scheme to Never Run Out of bath salts to give him, Ever Again, And Also Have Enough To Gift Like 50 Other People Homemade Bath Salts Within The Next Year, Haaaaaahahahahahaha.

That is to say, I bought 20 kg Epsom salt for about 30 bucks, and another 5kg of Dead Sea salt for another 20, and some other stuff, spending about 130 total^{2which OF COURSE was about 50 times more than I would have spent if I’d bought the gift-taxed bath salts one time. yes i can math why do you ask} and thus finding myself in need of a scheme to maximize what I’d now “invested.”

So I sat at my desk for the first time in a year and designed the label to stick on the glass jars I would fill with the bath salts, and 𝖓𝖎𝖒𝖒 𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝖇𝖆𝖉 was born. This was way too fun. It had no business being that fun. It was so fun I couldn’t believe I haven’t made a career of it yet.

ANYWAY, long story shirt, I gifted a bunch of people these elegant and pretty jars of Expensive^{3and so cost-effective in the grand scheme of things!} Salts. Then, last week, my bb beauty boy wanted to take a bath, and I opened the jar containing my initial experiment to fill the bathtub with Christmas-scented salts, and what, pray, did greet me? The Smell of Mold.

ABSOLUT MOLD. D’argh. Mouldymold.

Now, this is not the first time I have DIYd cosmetics via a recipe I got from the internet or an LLM^{4shame? nah no shame. I had a whole discussion about it and did my research etc.} so it is not the first time something has gone awry when I tried it for the first time. Come to think about it, MOST things go either spectacularly well when I try them for the first time (and the thing that went invisibly wrong then rears its pretty head a few weeks later) or they go so wrong it is just... hilarious.

So! Homemade bath salts, twas a fun thought, so lovely to package and thrust into people’s oh-so-naive hands, but a few weeks later, we have funky smelling shit in a jar that I now feel the need to apologize thoroughly for.

LITTLE DO THE PEOPLE KNOW, however, that, by virtue of having stinky shit sitting around in a glass jar on their bathroom window sill, they are responsible for this idea of a lifetime — nay, the century.

· · ·

Real talk, this is cool and not hard to execute. The only thing difficult about it is waiting till my Mac is no longer in writing-only mode so I can look for a domain, purchase some more lysolecithin and some little baggies and make a fucking MV protoype and then have Claude write me a business plan that I can present to my local unemployment agency who will then offer me a tiny grant which will cover the costs of maybe some more lysolecithin.

Okay FINE YOU HAVE WORN ME DOWN I will tell you about the idea but you must SWEAR not to tell your venture capitalist friends.^{5Wait what}

So, the idea is DIY bath salts, ramen-style. Fill a paper cup with a Proprietary Mix of Epsom and Dead Sea salts (7:1 by weight). Add some baking soda. Mix the lysolecithin^{6or a better emulsifier and maybe dissolver or sth, idk, since I wrote this I have begun to heavily doubt the efficacy of this specific chemical} with almond oil, essential oils, and soap coloring, fill a small packet with that. Seal the cup with the salts and the packets, add a label with mixing instructions (1. Add baking soda to salts and mix! 2. Add Wet Ingredient packet. Stir Vigorously. Use Now. [Yes lecithin smells weird but it’ll pass once shit is in the water.] [No we don’t mean actual shit, just the shit you JUST NOW mixed, god, why are people so literal these days, literally.])

The cup will be eco and brown and the label will be thermo-printed in all black and white clip art demanding of you in hearty blackletter to TAKE. A. BATH.

On Sunday I caught myself, once again, like so often lately, bending down awkwardly, aware of the way my chin was coming closer to my neck, heightening the chances that anyone who might be seeing this would also view me with a double chin, or at least quite an unwieldy face and neck area.

I don’t know when this line of thought questioning began, much less how, but something intervened that time. What do you think you’re doing? You lift weights. You can’t really walk right now because of that time a few weeks ago when you walked way too far and long in entirely unsuited footwear, so you’re giving your feet much-needed rest, but when that is not the case, you walk everywhere. You don’t eat candy, like, ever. You eat well, you do your best, not too little, and you do not snack, much less gorge.

What the fuck do you think you’re doing, acting like all you do, ever, is sit on the couch shoveling candy corn?

It wouldn’t surprise me if the non-existent observer in the room, at that moment, watched me get visibly startled — nay, schooled — by my own thoughts. Nothing at all external had happened. I was cooking. Nobody was around.

The questioner stuck around. The next day, it continued.

Why is it so important that the people around you — and strangers, or people without context about you — see, right there, on the very visible surface of you, exactly what kind of person you are? What is the purpose of making it known that you lift weights, walk a lot, eat no candy, etc — what security does it really give you?

You say it’s about self-respect, and about “feeling like yourself”, but that’s not the entire truth, is it?

It’s understandable that you want your ‘outside’ to make it known that you work hard. That you’re not a lazy slob. It’s the exact same mechanism at work when you go to talk to the welfare people. There’s no money coming in, so it looks like you’re sitting on your ass all day playing games and nothing more. It is understandable that this feels shameful. What’s more, when this does happen once in a while because you don’t have the energy for anything else, you feel even more ashamed. You might be able to push the feeling away and talk yourself into relaxing, but the underlying nerves don’t really disappear. They surface as soon as the acute pain of feeling like an invalid is over.

Considering that your body, your face, the way you move, is how everyone but you clocks ‘who you are’ subconsciously every single they catch sight of you, it is completely understandable that you would want to try and exert control over what exactly they see in whichever way you can. If you cannot change the way your body looks, you can change the way it moves. The irony here that you know that the more you try and control the way your body moves, the less you it is. The tragedy is that on the other hand, the fat you carry does make you less you because it pads the you on the inside, shields her from all that’s outside, makes her less vulnerable, less visible, and as a result less seen, less recognized for who she really, truly is.

Feeling unseen when someone likes a photo of you — or just plain you, in real life — with fat, a version of you encased in something masquerading as you, is the logical consequence of being even somewhat sensitive to these things. You are, after all, not showing them who you really are. How are they to know, then? How are they to love you for you, when all they know is this mask you can’t ever take off?

On the other hand, who you present as on the outside is all you’ve got. Maybe the challenge is to accept that who you present as isn’t and never will be all that you are inside. Maybe the challenge is to love the mask. How would life even be without it? Maybe the mark of great courage is to know oneself inside AND OUT, with extra emphasis on the outside, because pretending that the outside is anything lesser than the inside is, in the end, nothing less than rejecting a vital piece of oneself. The mask exists, it is there, it cannot be removed, and thus it is a piece of the self, the home, the body one exists in the world as. No matter how different one feels inside from the mask the body seems to present to the outside, both are inseparable from the being. rejection of the self’s outside also inevitably brings with it a rejection of other people’s outside.

Then it follows that all strategies to change the outside endeavoring to make it more closely match the perceived inside are bound to ‘fail’, in the words of a self that rejects its outside like a. In reality, what does happen is that these strategies result in situations that require a re-assessment of their origins.

The inside self sees itself — in contrast to its outside — as somehow superior, yet it lacks the interfacing with the material reality of the world that the outside deals with at all times. It is safe and protected, it can bend itself however it pleases, but it cannot truly bend the outside to its liking; if it does so through means that always require the breaking of limitations nature hasn’t provided means to break, this has consequences for the inside. The material world reflects back this attempt to make something of oneself that one is not.

Maybe the challenge is really for the inside to surrender control. The fact is, as is evidenced by the way countless people try to influence their outside without success, the body is the one in control, not the mind. The body has ultimate control. What is there, then but to leave life worth living to it. Making it do things it doesn’t want to do has only ever wreaked havoc.

first written in January, supposedly to be published on Substack, but left to rot like so many things meant to be published on Substack, leading to eventually actually writing things not meant to be published on Substack, leading to this blog, leading to publishing this, here, to maybe be published in some way someday on Substack, once I feel less itsy about publishing on Substack. This is Part Deux. You don’t really need it for context, but in case you want to, here is Part Un

• I believe I have decided, in so far as one can decide these things, to ignore the substack “community” and focus only on what i want to say. it feels silly and redundant to proclaim this, yet it’s been a long time coming, and, might I also say, quite a difficult one at that. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt truly free to say what I want or need to say on that platform.^{1Or, ever, in my life. Yes, my life is the problem, the platform has simply exposed it.} Part of this is what I tried and failed to articulate in my “essay” Ice Burn, the last thing I posted there.
• One aspect of how to move forward from here concerns the directionality of what I publish. On the one hand i need witnesses, but I also need those witnesses to be supportive. otherwise, to my brain, I am simply being watched,^{2shout out to someone one substack, ironically, for putting this distinction into words} which automatically triggers a sense of horror in most human brains, and in this case, yes, I am most certainly “most human brains.”
• This is why I have repeatedly tried to inform you guys that clicking the like button helps. Most of you still don’t do that, though, which is to be expected — the platform doesn’t make it easy unless one lets oneself get sucked into the ecosystem, get an account, have a feed, etc. Not wanting that is completely understandable. Just look at yours truly. Also, fact is, when communicating with people who aren’t your IRL friends, aren’t sitting across from you, sharing meals or whatever, there is often no real internal urge to let them know that your words mean anything to them.^{3Realistically, for a lot of people, even THEN it doesn’t clock that the person across from them might love to hear that they are appreciated.} There is no need to even actually read the words.
• Thus, i will not be paywalling posts that feel especially vulnerable or needy (the ones I would feel horrible about knowing that everybody ‘saw/read/opened’ but nobody ‘liked’). No, I just won’t send them out via email and leave it up to serendipity whether anyone sees and reads them at all.
  • Any posts that tackle the themes of ‘processing the process’ or ‘substack’ or ‘boundaries’ will not be sent via email. it has happened too many times now that i poured everything into making these meta-pieces as true and real and not-performative as possible, only to be “received” like I said... nothing. i can’t even say “i love you guys, but...” because, obviously i do not love you, because I don’t know you, because most of you are just email addresses to me on a stats dashboard that don’t respond in any way to, like, me-showing-you-my-lifeblood-re-stuff-that-is-important-to-me-aka-writing-to-you. i’ve felt conflicted about this pretty much since i started to write here and no longer wish to metabolize it for you.
  • This feels horrible to me. One reason i have not written to you in so long is that i have horrible childish feelings towards you that are of course in actuality misdirected feelings of grief over the expressive child i was not allowed to be, etc^{4”Not allowed” by unseen forces. not blaming my parents in the slightest, am serious about this}
  • So, uh, this probably also marks some sort of ‘rebranding’ (ugh) on here. i will publish these words but i will not send them to you via email. maybe i will send you monthly updates of what i wrote in the meantime for your comfortable link-clickening.
    • to elaborate slightly, maybe you recall that one of the few pieces i published last year mentioned my childhood. i have found there is a lot more pain there than i have ever allowed myself to notice before, and seeing as this pain specifically concerns expression, being heard and understood or not, the only way, i believe, to process it is in writing. this is what i wish to do moving forward. my “letters”, when they are addressed to myself, will be published to web only, not sent via email. i also see myself writing autofiction or something like it sometimes or always, who knows. attaching myself, my real self, to the stories might be counterproductive, maybe re-traumatizing.
  • also related, i have found myself reading less and less on screen. i think a level of screen saturation has been reached that i simply have to let ease up more often than not. the combo of macbook and arc browser helps, at least for websites that value clean presentation of words, with nothing else is on the screen that might distract. so, that works, but still i find myself wanting to read offline.
    • for this reason, i want to gather everything i’ve written every quarter year into a handy printable pdf for yearly paid subscribers.
    • they will be pretty or at least quirky but definitely well-readable without feeling like they’re wasting precious paper, or, god forbid, printer ink.
• i want to start making calendars again, regardless of whether kiryll is with me or not. the last time we said we would make calendars, kiryll was confident in being able to deliver fully automated digital downloads for every time zone. then, our personal lives and the holidays happened and all of our ambitions kind of disappeared. now, i find myself mourning the calendar a lot. for 2027, i want to pick up that thread once again, but i really need your help to do that, meaning I need to know that people actually want it. when i was trying to make the 2025 calendar happen, one (1) person expressed sincere interest directly. i find it both hard and suspiciously easy to believe that she was the only person who missed my beautiful lil product.
• i would like to formally distance myself from the word “essay.” previously, I would have called almost everything i wrote an essay. To my understanding, it is a loose term for any piece of writing that endeavors to lay out a problem and maybe resolve it by the end (essayer = to try or attempt). My favorite essays, by myself and others, had and have no qualms about being self-referential, for example. Too many of the “essays” that, uh, perform well, are also, incidentally, so performative in both their prose, their vulnerability, if applicable, and their Rigorous Research and Referencing Everyone Who Came Before that they, idk, just make me not want to write Essays, capital E. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the culture. Maybe whatever. I don’t know.
  • I would now call nothing i write or have every written an ‘essay’ (except maybe some stuff i wrote in high school). The word has come to mean something very specific over the last year of reading widely on substack and elsewhere, something i do not and cannot currently conform to. It is much too formal. when i think of myself of writing an essay, i take what i’m doing much too seriously and forget all the ways and reasons i write, really, in reality, to mine and others’ satisfaction. when I now think about “writing an essay”, suddenly there is this ultra-fitted leather suit around my brain with no space to move and be myself. writing Ice Burn was probably one of the most horrific writing experiences of my life, which is probably the reason i am still ambiguous around whether i would even like to win that prize. the ensuing expectations, do i even want them?
  • No, man, I do not. I do not want to think of myself as “an essayist.” Not that I ever did, but the mental ambition to one day do so was there. If anything at all, I am just a writer. A blogger? Not even that, because that word has been co-opted by keyword droppers and Adsense. Nothing is sacred anymore.

Re-reading this about three months after it was written, the question of being on a platform at all is now much more interesting than ever. I’m comfortable enough now in my own space, right here, free to publish whatever I choose, that what I outlined above (and, it seems, promptly forgot having ever thought about) feels fresh. I would even venture to call it ‘clean.’

Last Saturday, I ignored my auto-publish bot’s nudge to re-post something from last week on Substack because I was still getting the Ick re: even visiting that site. Today, I ‘spoke’ to Claude about it: “i had forgotten about just publishing to web till i read the pasted text today. i never did it before bc it i told myself i was missing out on views if i did it, lol, ugh. that i should be brave enough to just be in peoples inboxes. but what if i just don’t want that.” So ya. What if I just don’t want that. At this moment I see a bright future, writing down ANYTHING AT ALL, posting to Substack only because it is the nature of writing as an unknown person on the internet today. Not forcing myself to force myself on people’s inboxes. Not forcing myself to believe that anyone will ever see any of my words if I only publish on my little private island site (because they will not. because they are all Continental and have no money for private jets and I don’t either.)

This feels good. This is nice. Sending a monthly or quarterly email with a collection of links, then, feels fine, in theory. I imagine beginning it with “hello, here are the links my robot publisher told me to share with you this month.” And collecting ALL of my writing into a printable magazine feels SO DOPE I CANNOT EVEN (Idk if I’ve ever used that word. Now’s the time).

TBC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

first written in January, supposedly to be published on Substack, but left to rot like so many things meant to be published on Substack, leading to eventually actually writing things not meant to be published on Substack, leading to this blog, leading to publishing this, here, to maybe be published in some way someday on Substack, once I feel less itsy about publishing on Substack. This is Part Un

I've been thinking about writing a book. Thinking of calling it "DE-CONDITIONED — [insert equal-parts-sincere-and-self-mocking-self-help-y subtitle here]." Idk maybe not though lol

I'm writing this on a semi-brand-new MacBook Air. It arrived yesterday (jan 13) at two forty-three in the afternoon, and when Kiryll and I unpacked it, it caught the snow-reflected light coming in through the kitchen window — the very same that's perfectly lit many a food scene on the table over the years — and we saw its True Color. It is blue.

I thought I'd purchased a Macbook so dark blue as to be nearly black. But this was blue-blue. 'Midnight' = blue-blue, Apple, fuck, really??

When I arrived on Substack almost exactly three years ago, about three or so posts in, my computer died. It continued to be dead for a few days, I think (I can't know for sure because I didn't even try turning it back on for those few days after it refused for several hours), which seems like a fun jab at the resurrection myth, but I digress. This old Surface Laptop was there for me throughout the hardest years with my son, it was there when I tried starting all kinds of businesses, it was there for my various artistic awakenings, it was there when I discovered Human Design, it was there, before me, or behind me in my backpack, always around somehow; while the realization that writing has always been my best outlet — that I simply never took it seriously — gradually sunk in with every walk I took to the city to sit down and type until the battery gave out. Sometimes it seems like my son has more empathy for inanimate objects than he does for living things. Once, he spied a pack of tea on the floor beside the coffee table and scolded me for leaving it there "all alone" after it had fallen from its place with the other packages on the window sill. Today I wonder whether our smiling down at his seeming over-identification with these objects is actually the less-aware way to be in relationship with everyday objects. Liam is honest about his feelings towards these things. We purport to hold no such emotion for the unalive, but when once Liam bumped into me while I was holding my favorite cup and it fell, gaining a crack that would render it incapable of holding cappuccinos henceforth, I was devastated for a solid five minutes, with no space in my heart for his sincere apologies.

When the MacBook entered my space and demanded I replace my hardy Surface (with a lying-ass metallic blue surface on top, sheesh), my system clenched up and fired projectile after projectile onto its innocent exterior. I spent the afternoon distraught and clueless about my sudden and violent rejection of a perfectly fine piece of hardware.

the piece ends there. I do not recall where this was supposed to go. I am publishing anyway because i am sick of burying everything I write because I seem to run out of energy for my thoughts at the wrong moments and then self-flagellate myself out of continuing imperfectly. the long and short of the story is that I went back and forth on keeping the computer for a week or so, thinking and chatting with people and robots about the many reasons it felt wrong (I hadn't truly chosen it myself, I surmised) and how I felt wrong for feeling wrong about a "perfectly fine piece of hardware." Then I started just using it. It felt good, which annoyed me. At some point I explained my conflicting feelings to my kid, who pointed out that this computer was in my hands now, it was working and it felt good to spend time on, it was already paid for; maybe it wasn't perfect (not entirely new, not enough disk space, allegedly) but it was here and wasn't that all that mattered?

I could find no flaw in his argument, and neither could any of the other grown-ups around, either. McMac stayed; it is beloved in its entirety by me and everyone else. The End

I AM TERRIFIED. On Saturday and Sunday, I spent ten minutes on Substack. It is now Monday. Supposedly, the winners of the essay competition will be announced today, March 2, and DEAR GOD I hope I did not win. Winning fills me with dread, which is an odd feeling, INDEED. Thankfully, the chances I didn’t win are high; the chances I did, exceedingly low. I think. My boyfriend loved my “essay”, which I personally wouldn’t even call it an essay, but he is biased. The robots I enlisted to help edit also “loved” it.. which is, well. I don’t even know what to say to that.

Substack is a bad place for me. Substack to me like fine whiskey to an alcoholic. Substack is a wondrous place with beautiful writing, and anytime I indulge, even for ten minutes, the result is feeling like shit. I don’t even judge myself for feeling like shit about it anymore, it’s to be expected. It houses beautiful writing, right there on the internet, the people are wonderful, and I am not taking part because as soon as I try to, my comparison and analysis paralysis kicks in and I can not longer do anything I love to do with any sense of joy, lightness, wonder.

It’s always been like this, I’m afraid. As soon as my system detects anything “better than me” in my vicinity, it shuts down. That I am then so filled with dread about literally receiving a prize for “~~being~~ having written the best” is, of course, ironic to no end.

The reason I am so filled with dread about the possibility of winning is, it seems to my conscious mind, at least, that this opens up the then-much-larger-than-now-chances that many more people than currently do will read what I have written not only for the competition, but also otherwise, and THAT makes me sick. Why is it such a horror, the thought of people reading things I previously wrote? I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve just never really been one to be seen in any capacity. While I was still in school, I received a lot of praise. High expectations for almost everything I did. I was overextended and became depressed, burnt out, and my grades plummeted. I was smart, but some teachers now no longer knew, and it was shameful as could be. History, in particular, became the subject I was most ashamed of, because I would have needed to study for the first time, really ever, but I’d never learned how that works.

So today, either everything changes, or nothing. THAT IS HUGE.

Interestingly, I cannot hear any part of me that feels authentic when it comes to this. There are two headless ducks, yacking, and one is terrified of winning and doesn’t want it to happen no matter what, and the other is not that opposed and quite smug about the possibility of receiving $10,000. Where is the real me? What does she feel about this? There is of course also the possibility that I did not win BUT that they still put me in the book, or might mention me in some other capacity, which also fills me with fear. It is a bit more tolerable, imagining that possibility, but still mortifying.

Do you watch Bridgerton? YOU DO??? (How unsurprising. That show is disgustingly overrated) Anyway, have you ever noticed that everyone calls Penelope “Pen” from the very start, even before anyone know that she is the famed lady writer Whistledown? Very clever. Otherwise, that show is a disgrace to writers and brains everywhere. Oh, you watch it “for the plot”? Man, I revile and admire you. I told myself till recently I was watching it for the gorgeous visuals. The costume and set design are really something else, but there comes a point where one simply can no longer stand the inane writing, careless acting, and plot-device-riddled plot. Also, I find myself writing like I’m impersonating someone impersonating 19th century nobility, which, well, IT SIMPLY WILL NOT DO.

I wish I hadn’t taken part in this competition. I thought there’s no harm in trying, that the worst that could happen was not winning. I didn’t realize that the worst thing was actually the possibility of winning getting stuck in my brain for months after. I wish I had stuck to my original, boring, autobiographical essay, the insecurity. I wish I had left out the fiery prose and weird sentences. I wish I had kept myself small and uninteresting. I don’t want to be seen, I don’t want to seem interesting. It’s enough that Kiryll finds me interesting. It’s all I ever needed. I don’t want anyone else to see.

Am I really that afraid of being judged by a few people as not good enough? Of perhaps being misunderstood? Is it truly all about expectations? Do I not want people to expect me to write more? The emotional nausea is overwhelming at this point; if I do end up winning, I fear I might spend a week sick to my stomach, literally puking.

Did the essay even mention how terrified I am of winning? Did it mention any of the things I was actually trying to understand? I didn’t end up understanding or processing any of the things I set out to. It’s not a good essay. It says some pretty things but it’s not a really good essay. It doesn’t change, neither itself not the reader. I cannot have won. It’s quite impossible they would choose my piece as a winner. The software didn’t grade it very well. My boyfriend loved it but he is biased and he doesn’t read much other creative/essay writing. I did not win.

Maybe the fear of winning is an avoidance of accepting, absolutely, the highest likely outcome: not winning. Maybe the fear of winning is my mind twisting itself into becoming friends with the possibility that yes, even after so many years of inner work and making myself free of want and expectation and letting myself want but also not... I may not win, my efforts may have been in vain, I am truly not that special.

Which is ironic, because that was what my original essay.. the one I wrote in longhand, was about. The one I didn’t submit in the end because it was too personal, too insecure.

So, what if I didn’t win? Then we move on. Then, I am glad, because something I wrote that I am not particularly proud of will not be the face of my writing forever more. There is enough to do. We are making an app for MacOS. I have written more funny and joyful copy over the last weeks than ever before, really, and I am proud of the work I am doing NOW. I love it. I want to do more of it. So, if I do not win, that is what happens. I continue, and I get to be satisfied with what I am doing. I don’t need to spend a week puking, horrified that people will read my essay.

What if I do win? I could simply not accept the prize. I could say, no. I do not wish to receive this. If they announce a winner before informing them, this could be a problem.

How is this my current most pressing problem? That I don’t want to win an essay competition? What the fuck? How do I not have worse things to worry about? I mean, I do. But this seems to blow everything else out of the water, even the objectively bad stuff, i.e. I am going to the dentist for the first time in years to get a filling for the first time in DECADES, but that feels like nothing compared to finding out whether I won or lost. I don’t want to know. I just don’t want to know. Why is finding out so horrible? I don’t want to win. I don’t want to not win. I do want to not win, I don’t want to win. How is this so confusing? Why am I so at accepting any attention for my words and work? Where did this start?

A school friend in third grade admonished me for answering “I know” when she complimented a drawing of mine I was hanging up in the hallway with the others. You should say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments your work. It’s arrogant to say ‘I know.’ Well, I was brought up to be polite but I genuinely had no idea about this particular part of social etiquette at the time. From then on, I always made sure to downplay how good I personally^{1but, in truth, objectively} found my work, especially when someone complimented it. I made sure to point out its flaws.

· · ·

Now I want to puke at the idea of someone handing me a $10,000 prize for something I did. I want to hide in fear because nothing I could ever do can possibly be worth seeing and awarding. A lot of my work I really like upon putting out into the world, but this particular piece is.. well, not good. It needed more space to breathe. It was over too abruptly. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t trust the people awarding me from that moment forth if they did so, because if they chose my piece as a winner, their judgment must not be sound.

I am not a person whose photo should be shown anywhere as “winner”. I don’t look like a winner. I can’t even smile for a photo. I wouldn’t be able to stomach even a video call with the jury. Even if all it was for was for them to congratulate me. I couldn’t do it. I would flake. I am a flake. Not a snowflake, just a flake.

Maybe Stephen Pressfield got it wrong. Maybe what we view as Resistance isn’t always that. Maybe, sometimes, it’s not the time to write/create/do, especially when we tell ourselves it is.

On the other hand, I haven’t read The War of Art in a long time. Maybe I’m getting some stuff mixed up.

That said, my experiment is going swimmingly — if the goal of making my computer unavailable for anything other than writing until noon every weekday is to make me... happier? I mean, my mind would like me to use every minute of those allotted two-hundred-forty to write and write and write down every. single. thought. that has ever occurred to me. It doesn’t work that way though, regrettably.

But here’s a thought that occurred to me, about thoughts that occur — on my way back from my walk an hour ago, my mind was thinking something along the lines of “damn I am a good catch, Kiryll made a good choice,” and immediately flagged it as out of the ordinary, realizing, huh, I am extremely ovulatory right now—

So I was watching myself looking at myself from the inside going DAMN, and then watched myself put two and two together— OH, and when I’m luteal and my body does not currently have the energy nor the need to attract a male (the opposite, even, because the baby box will be shedding its lining momentarily), my confidence goes down like the Titanic explicitly so that I will curl up in a ball and be alone and properly rest so my body can do the shedding of the baby box lining properly??

Trains of thought such as these make me think thoughts do not belong in the realm of “things I should identify as originating from me, myself, or whatever I am” (I just listened to a good chunk of Why Buddhism Is True; it’s ding-ding-dinging non-stop lately in my brain, especially the significant overlap of principles and terminology between Buddhism and Human Design.)

One of manifold reasons I love my Claude Code publishing pipeline^{1Edited; when I wrote this back in February, it was “kiryll publishing pieces in my stead,” which did not happen, but the principle remains} choosing pieces to publish in my stead (instead of me making myself hone in on one piece to make it ready for publishing and forgetting all my joy of anything in the process and then leaving it to rot in the end after all because everything is cringe and none of my effort deserve to be seen even by a bot) is that I get to feel like I’m writing letters to “the outside” from a romantically forsaken and plant-kingdom-reclaimed abandoned bunker warehouse, and the words I’m typing into my shiny wonderful MacBook Air, are, like, relics of a forgotten time

Yes, maybe the fact that I pulled out a bunch of ingredients earlier to make into something edible and also tasty so that my dad won’t feel like his weekly grocery hauls are in vain, in fact, points to my Resisting towards writing — maybe it also means that functionally disabling my computer till noon every weekday frees me up to actually register stuff that would otherwise get neglected because getting sucked into the internet early in the day is very bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad for my soul.

Funnily enough though, here I am, writing, yes? Beats me how any of this works. No, actually I really would like to explain it to myself in terms of the Rave I’Ching etc but I sadly do not have the time. I need to go make an herby baked cheesecake omelette type situation with olives, grated tomatoes and Vichy carrots. Goodbye now.