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.

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Last revised May 13, 2026.