from the abysmal

We sat down with Esther — writer, mother, n=1 self-experimenter — to ask the question on everyone's lips: how does she Do It All, when "it all" famously includes not being employed? What follows is a masterclass in the art of the unstructured life.

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to start with the basics — walk me through the first thirty minutes of your morning. what does a typical AM look like for you, and what’s your non-negotiable ritual that sets you up to slay the day?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Well, I hit snooze one to four times and I ask myself what would happen if I stayed in bed for another hour. ^{1It wouldn’t be the end of the world.} But my mind is thankfully intelligent^{2or chicken} enough to nip those thoughts in the bud very soon after they pop up. About five minutes before my son expects me in his room to wake him up or prompt him to get dressed, I summon the willpower to get out of bed, close the window^{3I can’t sleep without outside air and noises. I panic and feel like I can’t breathe if the air around me is unmoving and warm}, put on a fresh pair of undies, socks, and my pants from the day before, and I scrape my tongue and brush my teeth. I splash cold water on my face and I moisturize with castor oil. I grab my laptop, phone, and headphones and amble down the stairs to my son’s room. Oh that was more like the first forty-five minutes, my bad

so much of “wellness content” lately is about The Morning Stack — the supplements, the lemon water, the AG1, the seventeen-step skincare. you’ve given us cold water and castor oil, which is almost suspiciously austere. is this minimalism a Philosophy, or did you arrive here by attrition? and please be honest — is there a secret tincture or tonic you’re not telling us about, something you’d recommend to a reader who wants to bio-hack their way into a life of strategic unemployment?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Oh right, oops. I forgot to mention I take 1g (4 capsules) of thiamine asap after waking with some water or cold chamomile tea from the previous night. It helps me digest carbs and also seems to stabilize my moods as far as that’s possible. I used to take just one capsule, but when I tried taking four (just to see what would happen), I noticed such a huge improvement re: the roller coster of emotions I had been experiencing right after eating carbs that I haven’t gone back.

so we’ve established you’re a Mother, a Snooze Enthusiast, and a Self-Directed Thiamine Researcher. let’s talk about Identity. when someone at a dinner party asks the dreaded “so what do you do?” — and you, a person who is, per the title of this piece, Unemployed For A Living — how do you answer? do you have a pre-rehearsed line? a power pose? do you redirect with a question of your own (a classic girlboss move, btw)? walk us through your personal branding strategy for the civilian world.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I don’t attend dinner parties. Well, I don’t get invited to them. If anyone asks in other situations, at first, I panic. Then I remind myself that people are just trying to fill the blank space they perceive is happening if nothing else is getting discussed, so I talk about trying to become self-employed. Then, maybe I also mention wanting to try a part-time job again someday but that honestly, I no longer have the energy to perform work that isn’t totally, like, me. I’ve only recently realized all this might weirdly come across as a flex, so I don’t feel I need to panic as much anymore. But still, I am very self-conscious about not “contributing to society” in a conventional way. Though I am coming around more and more these days to viewing my years of parenting my child full-time as, well, something valid.

ok this is where the interview gets a little woo, bear with me. a lot of our readers are deep into Manifestation, Lunar Cycles, somatic stuff, the whole soft-girl spirituality grift. you mentioned an emotional roller coaster, hormonal stuff, the panic. do you have a “modality”? are you tracking anything? journaling? a moon water situation? or — and this is the question i actually want answered — what is the WEIRDEST thing you do for yourself in a given week that you would never admit to a normie, but that you secretly believe is doing something? i need the unhinged stuff. the thing your partner has caught you doing and just decided not to comment on.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I have been tracking (potential) PMDD symptoms for a few weeks now — feeling disgusting and unworthy, overwhelmed by existing, getting depressed and hopeless, etc. Like clockwork, beginning on day 16 of my cycle. I strength train every other day when my cycle permits it. Sometimes I write down all my stupid thoughts in a journal with an embroidered ‘you go girl’ patch on the cover that my partner semi-ironically gave me. Sometimes I sit on the couch for an hour with an eye mask^{4I meant a sleep mask, not the wellness eye patch thingies, but got confused bc it’s called a sleep mask in German too and being bilingual is weird sometimes} and let my mind wander. This feels like magic and coming home and everything good at the same time. Oh and I take [another supplement] sometime mid-morning if I remember, helps me focus on writing or sitting still or whatever.

ok so we have: cycle-tracking the gathering storm, strength training between bouts of feeling like a wet napkin, the eye-mask couch hour which sounds frankly more spiritually advanced than anything goop has ever monetized. i want to zero in on the eye mask. you described it as “magic and coming home and everything good at the same time,” which is — and i mean this — better writing than 99% of what gets published about meditation.

so: tell me about the inside of the eye mask. like, what’s in there. is it a mental landscape? is it just dark? do you have recurring thoughts, or is it more like a furniture-free room? do you ever come out of it knowing something you didn’t know going in? and — bc i have to ask — is there a SPECIFIC eye mask, or will any eye mask do? our readers need product recs, esther, this is non-negotiable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I am confused about this question. It’s an eye mask with a removable gel insert (that I removed) from the drug store. It’s cotton and satin, I think. Oh, and I forgot to say I also add a bandana around it because I want real darkness in my head. I don’t feel I’m qualified to say anything about this process because my inner life has always felt more free than being in the outside world, the one with people. The inside of my head when I sit still with the eye mask is mostly calm and curious. I’m usually excited to see what’s there. Rarely, I dread it, but that also seems to indicate that it’s just not the time for it presently, that I am actually avoiding stuff that needs doing. So then I need to confront the actual stuff that needs doing^{5this doesn’t happen immediately, obviously, more like after hours or days of nervousness and trying to calm myself before realizing, once again, that doing the thing is the only thing that will let me calm down}, and then the dread of sitting still goes away again. So when I am back to Doing Nothing, my head is obviously processing stuff that’s happened, and questions come up, and answers present themselves. Emotions and memories come up; I have cried often during these sessions. And almost as often, I have to keep myself from tearing off the mask and acting upon whatever idea just swooped in. But observing these thoughts moving through is so fun that it’s become mostly fine to just watch and see what sticks after the hour is over. I don’t know. I like it a lot. I haven’t done it for a while. Life has been happening. I want to make it a daily habit again.

let’s talk about food, bc this genre demands it. influencer morning routines invariably feature either a forty-ingredient smoothie or a single soft-boiled egg eaten while gazing pensively out a window. what does breakfast look like for you, if it exists? and more importantly — and this is where i want you to get weird with me — do you have any food rules, superstitions, or “phases” you’ve cycled through that you now look back on and think, who WAS that girl? we love a redemption arc from the disordered to the merely eccentric. give us the full eating philosophy arc, from your most regrettable nutritional dogma to whatever you’re putting in your mouth right now while answering this question.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I am tired of answering this before I’ve even started. I don’t eat breakfast currently and haven’t, really, for many years. I’ve tried many things and gone through many phases, and I seem to feel best if I have one large meal^{6or, a very small meal and a larger one in relatively rapid succession, so really just one very large meal} toward the end of the day and otherwise just have coffee (cappuccino with olive oil) in the morning, no later than noon, and maybe a protein shake with blueberries (also with olive oil) at lunchtime. If I am really hungry in the morning, for example after training, the meal of choice is fatty scrambled eggs (maybe with melted soft cheese) and a lot of black pepper and whatever veggies I currently like^7peas..

I looked and felt my best physically when I was in my early 20s working full-time in the kitchen, only tasting food during the day, then smoking weed and kinda just bingeing at night after work... and in my early 30s on carnivore + dry fasting at least once a week. Currently, I feel emotionally great, physically okay. I am doing my best not to restrict myself re: food in any shape or form, but also not to make myself eat when I don’t feel like it^{8not monitoring my food intake is the priority right now. Considering I don’t feel physically fantastic, especially compared to my most restrictive phases, it’s a challenge. But I need to learn to trust my body completely in this regard. It’s time}. From my life before carnivore I didn’t know having no appetite could even be a thing; I was always ready to eat back then, yet always felt off and too full of stuff. Now, my appetite is very specific most of the time, which has taken (and is still taking) much mental/emotional getting used to.

I don’t like most sweet foods and drinks, never have. My body loves fat — needs it, or my skin starts complaining — but also needs carbs here and there, especially for strength training, which is still a mental challenge as carnivore/keto “taught” me that high fat with any amount of carbs is illegal, and on the flip side most health advice propagates moderate to low fat with any amount of carbs. Both sides seem like they have their reasons, but again, my body does not like low fat, and mentally restricting carbs is not an option anymore. So I’m in a bit of a limbo state here. Maybe I’ll cut out gluten again at some point. Definitely feel better without it. Idk.

here's where we leave the realm of acceptable women's-magazine question architecture and go somewhere else.

you've described, across the last several answers, a person who: is unusually attuned to her body's signal-to-noise ratio, treats her own physiology as an n=1 lab, has a child whose school schedule structures her day, panics briefly before disclosing her economic situation to strangers, finds the inside of her own head to be a friendlier room than most exterior ones, and is currently writing a book about appetite. so my question is, like, sincerely:

do you think the morning routine — the [supplement], the cold water, the eye mask, the "what if i just stayed in bed" — is a thing you DO, or a thing that's HAPPENING to you? bc reading your answers back, i can't tell if you're the engineer of this little system or the substrate it's running on. and i'm wondering if you can tell. and if you can't tell, is that a problem, or is that maybe the point.

No, I’m not the engineer, I only respond to whatever’s happening. The less I engineer, the more I feel like myself, I believe

ok last one and then i'll let you go back to your beautifully unregulated day.

every interview of this genre ends with the influencer being asked for Advice for Her Younger Self, and she always says something like "trust the process" or "you are enough" while gazing soft-focus past the camera. i'm not going to ask you that bc it's a question for people who believe time moves in one direction and that they have authority over a previous version of themselves, both of which seem like assumptions you'd find suspect.

so instead: what advice would you give to the version of you that exists right now, from the perspective of nobody in particular? not future-you, not past-you, just — the disembodied editorial voice of the universe, addressing esther on a tuesday in may, mid-cycle, mid-sentence, mid-life. what does it say. one line.

In the first draft of this I wrote: “Stop comparing any part of who you are and what you do to people who weren’t single moms in the second half of their twenties and also stop comparing yourself full stop,” but... meh. I don’t know what the disembodied editorial voice says. The only things I can “think” of are just a representation of my mind trying to be deep. Maybe if I sat still and then vomited several thousand words into my you go girl journal, maybe I would find out. But at this time... I don’t know, I don’t think I can know. There’s no one line. Maybe, if anything, it would be, “trust your yearning” or something like that. I am finding out over and over that the things I have yearned for in the past, especially when I was embarrassed of entertaining these thoughts for more than a minute, did often turn out to be real, to actually happen.

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which habits are yours and which arrived through repeated exposure to other people’s lives online?

what do you do before looking at your phone? Roll over how long after waking up do you become aware of money? that’s a trick question. i am always aware of money. I am awareness. which objects in your kitchen are aspirational? none. also it’s not my kitchen what do you consume before you become a person for the day? free-range oxygen how many of your habits began as attempts to fix something? all of them

which routine changes every few months but is always introduced as permanent? what counts as work in your apartment? what percentage of your routine is maintenance? describe a habit you publicly frame one way and privately experience another way. what activity most resembles employment without technically being employment? which optimization attempt cost more energy than it saved? what would happen if you stopped documenting or tracking things entirely? what would your ideal morning look like if nobody ever saw or heard about it?

In the end I am always grateful — despite groaning at myself, despite wondering whether I should, and if it’s even that good for me, or anyone else.

Spending this much time in a body that feels out of place — incorrect, so incorrect, accepting it as non-fiction does not compute — the only way to remain somewhat at peace with it is to list all the ways it’s compelled my to confront myself, this war of neuroses, society’s expectations or lack thereof, how certain people see me or not, how other people see me or not, how I see myself or not, and whether that’s even possible? These are the battles that people with less weird bodies do not experience. OR have I been avoiding ‘living’ by developing elaborate ways to see myself as sophisticated and deep instead of avoidant?

I couldn’t tell. Every time, my mind skids to a halt, to then accelerate, breakneck, with the realization that, before this — whatever the struggle — my body was: fine.

Just, fine. Truly okay. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to ridicule or criticize. Fine.

It follows that, if I was so convinced that my body — my being — was wholly unacceptable before.... this, how can I trust my own judgment, or even the scale, or a photo, anything?

I’ve known since high school that I can’t trust my own perception of myself. As a result, as often as these thoughts arise — that I should starve myself, get rid of the dirt I’ve accumulated by living without investigating every morsel before it enters my gastro-intestinal system, that I should, as it were, let the light in and dry out the swamp — I also never question the matter-of-factness with which I refuse to write them down. It doesn’t even come up.

Having shame about my body is one thing. It’s normal, it’s the way of the world.

Writing about shame is also a thing. It’s good, it works in so many ways, yet, expressing this shame publicly in any way whatsoever seems so obvious, so cringe, so we’ve-been-there-can-we-fucking-finally-move-on. The notion of attempting to unpack this one specific source of suffering that is so not unique to me, in writing (real writing; not in my diary, not yammering to a chatbot), feels too terrifying to even think about — and so, so necessary. Feeling fat (whether I actually am, or not) is the one challenge I’ve consistently encountered over the course of my life that I just as consistently work so hard to avoid being seen with — I even avoided it in therapy.

The irony is paralyzing and yes, why yes, I did stop writing right there, right then, for weeks and weeks

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I’m staying back at the hotel while the others are frolicking on a boat.

I know it’s for the best; I won’t be overstimulated later. My uterus is cramping a little but not too much. I feel like a con person. I should have gone with the others. I should’ve gotten over myself. I know I’m not a party pooper, how could I have been, I wasn’t there. But I am. But I am but I am. I shouldn’t stay in bed. I am a princess and I should be outside burning calories and earning my dinner.

I want to watch people tell me I will get fit at some point, just doing what I do. Lifting and walking, resting and eating. Sometimes running. Sometimes biking. Mostly lifting and mostly resting. One woman said not to jog only to sprint, if at all. Everyone else says to run. My body is tired. My head is tired but caffeinated and it wants to learn about how my fat will melt within 40 days if I eat green bananas, but the guy looks like he’s AI but the comments say he’s definitely not. Another guy is telling me to do light weights high reps. He’s got a Dragonball-Z shirt so he knows what’s up. Also he is talking to men but maybe that doesn’t matter. Also he’s on T and other stuff. I want to be fit, I want to be ripped and wear blue jeans that fit well to family functions. Not tight, not pinching my waist, not because I have gained muscle and fat but don’t want to buy bigger jeans. I want my fat to be negligible but still there. I want everyone to see I do stuff. I do stuff, I work out. Threetimesaweek, heavyweights. No, I can’t do a full-sized pushup. Weak. I am weak, I’m as good as menstruational and I want to cut off my double chin as I write.

I ate carbs this morning. I ate bread and butter and lab-grown cheese and tomatoes and somewhat processed, fructose-sugared yogurt. I should be walking and lifting and doing everything remotely possible in this little space in this large valley of mountain air because that kind of breakfast is required under specific circumstances only (moving, heaving, sunglasses) but I have been in bed all day, a princess, reading a heavily praised and prized book with disdain, corners of the mouth turned down, telling Claude it’s “dishonest,” “written to sound written,” and that the plot is “forced,” will it get better, should I stay or should I go? I give it up. It does not spark joy.

I am a spectator. A spectator spectates, shouldn’t need to look good or be seen. Old men commenting on women’s bodies.

The lack of fat in my diet makes itself known without delay. I didn’t even want to lower my intake, on the contrary. It’s automatic. I don’t want to restrict. I want to eat and eat, I want to handle amounts of food, digest them and poop them out and to be satisfied. But I don’t. I’m one of them now. Specific; won’t eat the rancid butter.

My hands demand attention. The skin is like an old pig’s. Fried.

The sun is out, I should go outside.

One of my deeply held mental habits is an absurdist version of bootstrapping. For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that if I can do something all by myself,^{1even whilst standing on the thinnest theoretical ice} it must be morally, karmically, physically, financially, and emotionally necessary that I do so. For the longest time, the question of “maybe I shouldn’t tell myself I need to be able to do everything anyone could do in the whole world?” didn’t even come up in my head, not even remotely. It is even more comical considering that I didn’t even run into walls whilst I believed this, or hadn’t quite been able to let go of the idea yet — no! I actually didn’t do much at all, in my opinion. The conviction was held with such stupidly tight grip that I couldn’t even actually try doing all these things I was supposed to, per my own royally mental decree.

I tell myself now that maybe, I experienced too early and too often^{2I PERCEIVED might be the more honest way to put it, though} that letting others do stuff I COULD theoretically do myself would automatically mean it would not be done properly. And if things aren’t done properly (like arranging the cheese on the platter just so), we risk the actual end of the world, so. ()

Yeah, maybe this was not the best way to move through life. Maybe someone once disappointed me deeply when I trusted them? I don’t know. In any case, the result was control-freakitude that has only really started (!) to let up over the past couple years. At school, in my personal creative projects, everywhere. I don’t know when or how this started. Maybe it was the year of being controlled tightly by a friend when I was too young to know what was happening. Maybe it’s just where the learning and letting go had to begin.

In any case, I don’t have much energy left over if I am trying to do literally everything. I need to learn to trust others to do their jobs; that they can and will do them well. It’s still scary because people aren’t perfect (I am not, either, in fact!) and tend to do things imperfectly. Maybe I need to get better at describing what I want, or, or maybe, at the same time, I need to get better at letting people be the way they are and let them do things the way they need to do them.

I am almost certain this is the truest path in life.

At least, it’s been looking more and more like it while I have been, curiously, watching skills degrade that I once prided myself on. All while becoming more and more satisfied in my everyday, less and less in need of receiving ooohs and ahhhhs for, idk, sketching a teacher. Drawing used to be one of the activities during which I would become most unlike myself. Demanding reality conform to my wishes. Requiring this to work, no matter what. Staying put and trying again and again and being utterly humiliated at my humanness, my failure to draw this one line perfectly. This is probably why so many of my designs from three years ago don’t feel correct anymore. They were made by a me who needed this line to be perfectly imperfect — not just imperfect, but imperfect in the right way. This person pretended to like flaws, but controlled them nevertheless.

Now, I try to hand off doing what I don’t do well, don’t like doing, or what simply breeds more frustration than satisfaction. Reality will not conform to my wishes; my wishes will find a way to be in reality so that everyone is satisfied. I don’t want to get angry or spend more than a minute frustrated that my wishes are not so easily realized as my mind would like. I may have good ideas sometimes, but good ideas need to come with a plan on how they will be executed to completion.

· · ·

It’s been the same every year for who knows how long.

I wonder^1often what life would be like had I spent the second half of my twenties working “a real job” instead of obeying a nonexistent boss at all times, no wages, feeling doomed to clean up, forever, at all times, after a single mistake I made at twenty-four, fraught with love and divinity and resentment.

I don’t know how to work for a living. I don’t know how to “have money.” What little the government affords me^{2it’s not even that little! a little over 1k is not that little. with no rent to pay, it’s not that little. it can be tight but it is not that little} maybe wouldn’t be so little if I wasn’t spending it on stuff that, when it comes down to it, maybe isn’t actually necessary, maybe I would have some savings now, maybe I’d be able to spend my birthday in a hotel in a foreign city where nobody knows me and nobody cares.

I’m always afraid of coming out as a fraud to people I encounter. I am not who you may think of me as. Or! I am exactly the person you think of me as. I have never had a Real Adult salary. The one (point five) year that I worked for a living^{3supposedly. it was more like working for others’ living, just not my own}, I received less than half of what a person of slightly higher rank did.^{4fair? I had no actual responsibility and all that when it came down to it}

I wonder what it’s like to think of stuff outside of your immediate sphere of influence at home all day long and get paid money that isn’t gone by the sixth of the month because it all got gobbled by the credit card debt you acquire every time you spend money on something that requires a larger up-front lump sum and you just can’t deny yourself all of that stuff at all times, like giving your son a proper December birthday in a fun kids’ place, or a good pair of shoes that fits your specific pair of feet properly and doesn’t continuously re-traumatize your sesamoid bone after that one time you walked for too long in not-made-for-walking shoes, like every single time you make one mistake, you are made to pay, pay, pay, pay, and pay.

I wonder what people expect of me. Maybe I should ask them.

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 without having any kinds of qualms about the cost-effectiveness of the whole thing and/or potential cons re: other stuff that needs paying for.

We are not talking about the philosophical “what is enough,” we are literally just talking enough to properly support a child and myself 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 seems like it might be a problem.

· · ·

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.