On the road to making and keeping connections, knowing when a relationship is working is as important as knowing when it isn’t. One reliably useful indicator is your own discomfort.

I want to distinguish between two different types of “social anxiety”—one is a generalized kind, which makes all interactions with people scary regardless of who they are. With this one, the very act of being perceived and possibly judged is stressful and paralyzing. Talking to the cashier is scary, crossing the street in front of a stopped car is scary, ordering at Chipotle is scary, meeting strangers at a party is scary. All interactions are shrouded in a blanket of vigilance. Because the contexts tend to be benign, the anxiety has a quality of the absurd to it—you know the distress is an internal hallucination. This is not The Truman Show; there is no great conspiracy. It’s you.

The second type is caused not by a universal fear of being seen, but rather by a lack of fit. This is most apparent when you notice that being around some people makes you self-conscious, people-pleasing, insecure, or low-grade uncomfortable, but with others you can be unfiltered, spontaneous, and effortlessly relaxed. You aren’t anxious all the time with everyone, just with the people who you feel like you can’t fully be yourself around.

This does not mean other people are necessarily doing anything intentionally to elicit this response. In fact, they might be quite kind and personable. But somehow you’re not feeling it. The bargaining begins: “But they’re so nice, smart, well-liked, graceful, etc.! I don’t know why I feel this way.”

Or, say, the feeling that one “should” be closer friends with someone because you’re both into the same hobby, or share a friend group, or because it would just make so much sense. But things don’t work like that. Connection cannot be approximated. Like in music, no matter how much you enjoy a genre, you still have to listen to each song individually to see if you like it.

Sometimes they are doing something unhealthy or predatory, and your discomfort is the sign of a well-functioning social immune system. Some people are obviously transactional, rude, or committed to misunderstanding you. In these cases, listening to your discomfort can help you dodge bullets.

Sometimes it’s you. Maybe there is a friend you admire and envy, and being around them triggers so much comparison and insecurity that you can’t enjoy your interactions with them. You could consider this “your” fault, and think if you work things out internally it should resolve. This may be true.

But let me propose something: There is a way to interpret discomfort as a sign that something has to change about the relationship instead of as a personal failing. Whose fault it is doesn’t matter as much as answering the question: Given that something about this relationship isn’t enjoyable right now, what can be done about it?

If you follow this line of inquiry, you can discover a series of potential moves you can try. Maybe you need to communicate something, take space, set boundaries, or even leave the relationship. If you have no idea, you can just start trying stuff. The cost of not doing anything is way higher. When people override their own discomfort over long periods, it can turn into pain or resentment, which they also suppress until it eventually blows up. You can lose decades to discontent. People stay in bloodless marriages, friendships tinged with malaise, and crowds that will never know them. They blame themselves, or other people, or hold out for perfect information before they do something about it.

You do not need perfect clarity to act. The discomfort itself is information.

Imagine there is a rose in a garden. You grab it by the thorns and it pierces your skin. I say to you, “Woah, are you okay? You’re bleeding.” You say, “But I’m just bleeding because I’m not wearing any gloves! If I just get some gloves I will be fine.” You turn and grab another by the stem. You are brilliant; you have diagnosed the problem. But there is still blood running down your wrist.

What if you tried meeting yourself where you’re really at? To accept, for example, how immature and petty you are right now instead of comparing yourself to the hypothetically more evolved and virtuous version of yourself. How hurt you are, instead of enlightened and unaffected. How you really feel, instead of how you wish you felt.

This is not to discourage growth. I believe you can keep your eyes on the ways you wish to be better while still being honest and kind to yourself about where you currently are, and adjust relationships to support both who you are and who you wish to become. People can change, especially if they’re making a conscious effort to and have the right resources. But before effort or intention translates into showing up differently, there is the reality of the relationship now. And if reality shows persistent distress, that’s reason enough to change things.

Make the moves and let reality surprise you. Sometimes you discover you actually are compatible with someone but you feel like you weren’t because you had misjudged the amount of closeness you wanted with them, or the role they play in your life. There are some friends I could never discuss philosophy with, but if my life was falling apart I’d go over to their house and cry over a bowl of pasta.

Let it break your heart. There are people I discovered, after trying everything, that I would never be compatible with, no matter how much either of us wanted it. We wanted different things, different lives; we had hungers, for intimacy or ambition; we had fears, primal or imagined. When this happens there is grief. That too is part of living. The cast reshuffles, the scenery changes.

Discomfort is a gift. Not a pleasant one, but if you learn how to listen, it will teach you how to not settle, how to not swallow your pain, how to not run away from your emotional reality. Finding the people who are right for you requires rejecting countless others who aren’t. You don’t have to give up growth or sink into a sad complacency. You just have to be honest about when things don’t feel quite right, and make a move anyway.

This one’s coming a little later than usual because the last essay wiped me out and I had to take a few days off. But here it is!

Posts covered:

This Month’s Writing

This was not a piece that I “wanted” to write, but it needed to exist. It was an exercise in self-expression, an owning of my life and its pain. The fact that I can write about it means I can look at it matter-of-factly and it doesn’t rule me anymore. I’ll carry it across the cusp, to the beginning of the rest of my life.

I had missed the emotional warmth from my earliest Substack posts. For a while I looked at those posts sadly, as if they were artifacts from a bygone time of innocence. The years after were very hard in some ways, and I think a part of me saw my younger innocence as the culprit for the difficulty that followed, so I locked it away. But I’m glad to have recovered it. I don’t feel like it makes me weak anymore.

At first this may look like an essay about suicide, but it’s actually about desire. I don’t think I’ve let myself openly want things for a long time. It’s a vulnerable act, because it’s never entirely in your control whether you get it or not. We can ask and act to make them real, but that final swish, that little movement of the world, eludes our conquest and understanding. But it is that very possibility of being denied which breeds aliveness.

I constructed the first half to be about escape. I wanted it to feel depressing and suffocating, and then disorienting in the middle, then full of warmth and possibility. It transitions from wanting to escape to wanting to stay.

I did not realize this at the time of writing it, but my roommate pointed out that several times in the beginning I start a section light and end it dark, or start it dark and end it light, and that flip-flopping creates surprise. A little bit of whiplash for fun.

The beginning and ending are both strong. I’m proud of that here. The last line is a nod to Macbeth, but I reverse the original nihilist take. Most of the second half is significantly weaker. One reason is I had a lifetime’s worth of material to draw from for the first half and only a year’s worth for the second. If I had more time I could have sharpened it, but I had to get it out the door.

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I remember the first watercolor painting I composed. It was a landscape of the sea. In the dead center was the setting sun, big and orange. The middle, a block of azure. And in the bottom right corner, a small pair of flip-flops in the sand. And from the flip-flops, a trail of footprints leading into the sea.

I must have been around eight or nine.

I tell people that children are astonishingly bright. They may not know much about the world on the level of facts and logistics, but they know when something is wrong. They know when they are trapped, and naturally look for an escape. Finding themselves closer to the womb than the end of the long miserable life they see laid out in front of them, they wish to crawl back, but it is impossible. Death to a child is another womb.

There was yelling in the house, always yelling. I grew up in a working class town in the suburbs of Baltimore. All our parents were seamstresses, hairdressers, electricians, postal workers; people who served others. After a long week of crack cocaine and waitressing you’d walk into the tiki bar and hope to meet a guy who hit you less than the last one. My mother’s boyfriend had the letters spelling “FUCK” tattooed on his fingers under each knuckle. I was in elementary school when I first saw it, and I asked him what it meant. He seemed flustered and quickly covered his hand with the other. I could tell he had a lot of anger, but also a good heart.

My mother took me to church a few times, not because we believed, but because she thought it would be good for my cultural education—“when in Rome.” I would sit there and listen to what sounded like drivel. I didn’t believe in God then. One of my friends growing up did, sweet girl, and she still slit her wrists.

My closest friends growing up were girls, and we all wanted to kill ourselves. There was no pact. It was independent evolution, the carcinization of our hometown. Running from the cops, running from our parents, running from ourselves. In my sleep I saw train platforms and ascending staircases that never ended.

But I was lucky; I had been born in America. Because America is where you can always dream of leaving and making another place your own.

It got worse when I was seventeen. My own voice spoke to me in my head telling me “I want to die” thousands of times a day, like a mantra. I would scribble it in the margins of my calculus notes during class, usually in English, sometimes in Japanese, but never in Chinese. My grades were perfect, always perfect. I took 19 AP classes and would have taken more if they had let me. Everyone thought I was crazy, they didn’t understand. What was I running from, and how was I pulling it off?

From The Lover: “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

When it got bad I’d take a shower in the dark, navigating by touch alone. I’d move slowly, reaching for the slippery shampoo bottle or cold metal handle. What is death but the erasure of your senses? For that brief period I disposed of my sight. In my head I was a fifth of the way to dying, and it was sublime.

When it got really bad, I’d close my eyes and imagine a room of pure white. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all cushioned, and it was quiet, so quiet. I imagined that I had been taken to an asylum, and that no one could hurt me, not even myself. I would be wearing a gown of white linen that ran down to my knees, and I’d gently lie down, crawl into a fetal position, and pretend time had come to a standstill.

That was the year I learned to meditate. My best friend shared that it had been helping her, but she didn’t really give me instructions. So I Googled “how to meditate” and clicked on the first thing that popped up: the WikiHow article for how to meditate. The first time I tried it, nothing happened and I wasn’t sure if it was working. But the second time, I sat for 40 minutes. I knew I had found something special, because the voice would go away.

When it was time to apply to colleges I knew I wanted to go out of state. Anywhere but here, but preferably somewhere good. Leaving home helped a lot. I would spend the next decade meditating. Casually for a few years, then seriously. After a lot of therapy, psychedelics, and journaling, I got to a point where I barely thought about ending my own life. Many days I’d be so happy I’d cry.

But there was still this subtle, nonverbal impulse to leave whenever things got hard.

After last March, that went away.

At first I didn’t know what to do. I got so used to living with that impulse that not having it felt foreign. My escape hatch, my phantom limb. What was I to do?

And wasn’t this supposed to be a cause for celebration? I mean, I made it, right? I expected the credits to roll, or a “You Win!” screen to appear. There was nothing. Life just kept going.

I finally got what I had wanted my entire life, the thing I felt the other kids had that I didn’t and after so much time passed began to think maybe I never would: the sense that it was okay to be here, to be alive. With one foot out the door my life always felt provisional; not mine. Something loaned to me. But now it was mine.

I was sitting in Dolores Park, talking with a friend who had spent time in Zen monasteries. The same shift I experienced he also had a few years prior, and I had one question for him: For the people who experience this and quit after all those years meditating, who leave it behind to live normal lives, how do they do it? Because for me it felt like the relief of most of my suffering only made the remaining bits more obvious. I could feel, more viscerally and clearly than ever before, the contractions of my conditioned impulses. It was like a mosquito buzzing in my ear. Don’t they hear it too?

He said they probably do, but they ignore it. That they got what they came for.

I don’t know if I can do that.

So, what now?

Well, whatever you want.

Wait, what the hell do I want? If this life really were mine, and I could live it exactly how I wished?

I decided I’m going to keep meditating. Not because I am trying to get someplace, but because there is joy in it. There is a lot in me I haven’t yet learned to let go of. With every movement of the mind I observe with loving awareness, a bit more opens up.

It’s the same with my writing. I used to write because I had to. For a decade I couldn’t go a day without journaling because life was so overwhelming I needed to dissect and understand it, to take life piecemeal. But now I go days not needing to. But I still do. Isn’t that strange? Maybe this is what it means for your life to belong to you.

As for my public writing, I partly used to do it because I wanted to prove myself. But that wasn’t the case anymore, and I had to find new motivations. What remained was the ecstatic enjoyment of writing itself, and how other people seemed to find clarity and comfort in the things I shared. Sometimes I print out the messages I receive and hang them up above my desk.

A few weeks ago, I quit my job to focus on writing. Even if I need to get another one, I’ll still be writing. I’m going to figure out how to make this work.

And with my friends—I think it is tempting once you unlock enough personal liberation in your moment-to-moment experience to almost prefer a lack of entanglement with others. Because, well, I don’t really need other people. Not in the way I used to; I don’t need other people to give me validation or regulate my emotions. And with my introverted temperament and how much I loved writing, I really could be a hermit.

But I found that once I didn’t need them anymore, I could begin to love them. I could see them more clearly, in their radiance as well as their flaws, which did nothing to diminish their radiance but rather amplified it, like facets on a jewel.

In my journal I wrote: “How did I love anybody before when I needed them so badly to love me?”

Now I want, more than ever, to stay and fight and show up, to go on spontaneous road trips and stay up texting about nothing in particular. That seems to me more beautiful than an undisturbed, isolated peace. I want people I can come back to, over and over and over. And when they’re gone I miss them, and when I’m gone they miss me. It doesn’t have to be serious or dramatic. It’s just delightful and free. What could be better than that?

Iris Murdoch: “What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

I think San Francisco is the first place I’ve ever chosen. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be here forever. It just means I want to be here for now. When August comes I’ll get a group together to watch the meteor shower. We’ll eat mangoes in the dry grass and pretend like we still have our whole lives ahead of us. If a parking cop gives us a ticket we’ll just laugh about it. I am going to listen to jazz, and read lots of books, and melt my eyes into the sunset. The writing will come, and so will the pain, and I will keep choosing it. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, there will be more life.

It is hard to say you really know someone until you know how they wince around their wounds. Our lives are shaped by our insecurities like plaster in a mold. To know what hurts you is to know what controls you, what organizes your attention, what distorts your behavior, what you move towards, and what you avoid.

Insecurities can be surprisingly persistent. A kid in second grade can make a comment about your weight and you could spend decades thinking about it. You could be a world-class figure skater and still feel like you’re so-so despite the accolades. Insecurities seem immune to the passage of time, and can even be delusionally detached from reality.

To understand why this happens, we have to understand what an insecurity is and how it forms.

An insecurity is a comparative judgement that you believe reflects on your worth. It is believing that you are “too much” or “not enough” in some regard, compared to other people or an external standard that you have internalized. But this alone is not enough to make an insecurity. You have to also believe that this somehow makes you less deserving of love.

These two parts, the evaluative component and worth component, are both required. Taken alone they are innocuous: you can be bad at cooking but feel no shame over it, because you don’t hold the expectation that you should be good at it, or that being bad at cooking says anything about you. On the other hand, simply being told you are “undeserving of love” doesn’t really mean anything without some rationale: it is always that you are undeserving of love because of your being “dumb,” or “short,” or “too sensitive”—which sticks to your mind and stings.

Insecurities can form from conditional approval or shameful experiences. Conditional approval teaches you to jump through certain hoops for validation, and feel ashamed when you fall short. But being explicitly shamed can be even worse because there may be nothing you can “do” about it. You don’t even know how it feels to experience the win condition. You only know that how you are is wrong.

This is usually instilled by someone you trust to have knowledge or authority you lack. For most kids that means their parents, but it can also be someone you respect in a particular domain, or even the broader culture.

Insecurities form by installing external judges/evaluators because you think they’re better judges than you and you want to maximize your chances of getting love and acceptance from your tribe. They may not even be right, but you believed them. Somewhere along the way, you trusted someone’s judgement over your own and inferred it said something about your worth as a human being.

Insecurities have a way of sharpening and organizing your attention. You can become vigilant, scanning the room to compare yourself against other people or against a harsh internal standard. Or, you can go out of your way to avoid comparison entirely—getting lost in perfectionism and never sharing your work because you may be exposed as not talented or skilled, or avoiding parties because you can’t stand the possibility of rejection.

This avoidance can create a self-perpetuating loop: by avoiding situations where the insecurity may be exposed, you close yourself off from ever receiving contradictory information and updating your understanding. In some cases the shame is so overwhelming that you can’t internally reflect on or investigate it. Your belief in your own unworthiness becomes hermetically sealed.

Another way insecurities can self-perpetuate is by compelling you to seek out and re-enact scenarios where you can prove you don’t have that insecurity. For example, a girl who is insecure about her appearance may repeatedly enter beauty pageants in an attempt to prove that she is beautiful. She may win them, but the more she participates the more she entrenches the belief that her beauty is something that needs proving.

I lost years to this compulsion by choosing the wrong school. I went to Wharton, but I didn’t care about business. I just wanted my credentials to provide me with the sense of worth I felt I lacked. I felt that if I chose the most arbitrarily prestigious environment and excelled in it, my competence would then be undeniable. But no matter how hard I worked, there was no winning.

The main thing I learned going to Wharton was how disappointing a life optimized around prestige was. The people I envied the most weren’t the ones with the most impressive grades or job offers, but the ones who genuinely enjoyed what they were doing for the sake of it. I didn’t know how to live like that. I was raised to believe that achievement would be the vehicle for my happiness and freedom, and spent the first half of college chasing clubs and communities and competitions. They kept me so busy I forgot I was operating within the frame of needing to prove I deserved to be there.

From the inside, it did not look like insecurity. It looked like ambition, or conscientiousness. It looked admirable. I eventually exited the rat race and spent years untangling my identity from achievement, but what scares me is that I could have kept playing that game.

You’re stuck in the self-perpetuating loop as long as you believe you have something to prove. You can get so busy trying to win at this game that you forget the frame you are operating within—the frame that you are not enough as you are. But you can challenge this.

Ask: Where did I get the idea that I’m not good enough because of XYZ? Who is speaking when I feel that way? Is it my coach, my mom, my ex? Are they right? Which part? The evaluative part, or the worth part? Do I actually want to be doing this, or am I just doing this because succeeding will say something about me?

Both strategies of avoidance and re-enactment are ways of refusing to look at an insecurity. We’d rather tuck it away or chase temporary proof in an attempt to convince ourselves it doesn’t exist. If these worked, the insecurity would have disappeared long ago. But you cannot change something you never touch.

Highlights in this one: Books about the dark night and specific passages, etymology of “dark night of the soul,” psychological framework of internalizers/externalizers

This Month’s Writing

I wrote this because multiple people told me they would be interested in reading about my dark night. I don’t think I would have otherwise—the material is too dark, personal, and niche—but I thought if this could help someone, I should do it. People don’t really talk about the dark night because it makes meditation seem terrifying, and those who have been through one struggle to put it in words. The people who do talk about it sound paranoid and focus on giving advice and frameworks. But I just wanted to describe what it was like, without telling people what to think or do about it.

The personal cost of writing it outweighed what I could expect to get from it. It’s not a piece that would go viral or get a lot of reach. Many people who do read it won’t openly engage with it. I knew it would change how some people saw me. And in the course of writing it, I would have to relive the worst of those months. But if, through choosing to write it anyway, I could offer even one person the comfort they need to get through something similar, it would make the whole thing worth it. I’m glad to see from its reception that this has come true. It is responses like the ones to this piece that remind me why I write publicly at all.

One of my favorite poets, Louise Glück, said in her Nobel Prize lecture:

Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.

They come one by one. I am not writing for “the people.” I am writing for the one person who needs it, who can see how I am pointing to experience and say, yes, that is how it is for me as well.

Many months ago that image of the mouse in a maze came to me while I was curled up in bed, overcome with shame. I felt about it the way I do about Macabéa in The Hour of the Star, a sad young girl who subsists on hot dogs and Coca-Cola—you can’t help but love her because even though she doesn’t know how to live a life, she’s trying. I built the rest of the essay around that image of a mouse as a seed.

It is the most “literary” thing I’ve written. There is no easy takeaway; reading and experiencing it is the point. The emotional arc for the reader was deliberately designed: I start with the hook about dissociation, shock you with the journal entry from my lowest point, reset and gradually build it back up again so by the climax you can feel the exhaustion I did going through it, give breathing room with the grounding passages, add surprise and nuance, and leave the ending a bit unresolved. At every point I knew what I wanted the reader to feel, and made intentional choices to engineer that effect. Two months ago I had no idea how to write an “essay” but now I am really starting to understand. It’s about leading the reader through an experience as the piece unfolds.

I was worried that it would come out depressing, but that wasn’t the case at all. In a way I am still scared of my own writing, because it takes me places I can never plan for. That is the beauty and terror of it.

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Dissociation is the mind’s natural anesthetic. In situations that are otherwise too overwhelming or painful to process entirely, it provides comfort by dividing up reality and only showing the parts you can handle in any given moment, like a compassionate lunchlady who never scoops you a portion too big.

Last year after my meditation shift, I lost the ability to dissociate. What followed was about nine of the most emotionally overwhelming and excruciating months of my life. Journal entry from November 20, 2025:

I felt so helpless today I started praying to Christ—not God in the abstract, but the figure of Jesus Christ, as well as Avalokiteshvara. I’m fucked. I could sit like this for a hundred days and nights in a row and I still probably won’t feel close to okay.

That was me at the lowest point. I consider it the second most difficult year of my life so far, just behind 2020 when I had to navigate a breakup, pandemic, and financial crisis while finishing school.

I experienced what people in spiritual communities call the “dark night of the soul,” a term coined by St. John of the Cross to describe a period of purification marked by confusion, helplessness, and feeling abandoned by God. Its modern definition has since expanded to mean a period of disorientation and personal difficulty.

I can tell you now that that was what I experienced, but I didn’t know it at the time. I did not have the luxury to ponder about maps of spiritual development and put names to things. All my effort was instead spent getting through it, day by day. Anything less than my complete willingness to welcome the deluge of psychological and sensory content flooding into my system, no matter how inconvenient or painful it may be, only made things worse. There was an easy way and a hard way, except the easy way was still excruciatingly hard.

Those months were monotonous on the surface. I kept my job—I don’t know how since I don’t have much memory of it, but I did, because I needed to. It was one of my few tethers to the world, and without it I would be even more adrift and at risk of a downward spiral. I set guardrails within which I allowed myself to fall apart.

I saw virtually no one, except for my two closest friends in the city. I ceased to know how to relate to people because I didn’t know who I was and what I was to do. Most people exist with some sort of social persona, a set of scripts and habits they use to interface with the world. I lost that, along with the usual social graces. At one of the few parties I went to before I dialed back on socializing, I remember an older woman glancing at me in disdain as she watched me talk. I reckoned with the horror coming home that without the mask, people didn’t like who I was underneath, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was too fragile and exposed to be around people I didn’t know well so I mostly kept to myself.

Emotions came at full intensity, including ones that were previously suppressed. Before, if I was in a relationship that caused me pain, I could focus on the good parts and ignore how much I was hurting. But now when someone crossed a boundary I felt anger. When they let me down I felt grief for the connection we could have had. When they treated me unfairly I felt resentment. I was used to these appearing long after events had occurred, not in real time.

Feelings I had not processed from events earlier in my life also showed themselves. My best friend had attempted suicide in high school, and I had never fully processed it. I got to the roots of my own suicidal ideation as a child. I saw our lives for what they were. Not the stories we told ourselves, but how it really happened and how we were shaped. I got answers to questions I had been asking for twenty-some years.

Every day I would wake up and face something buried deep in me that had been freshly excavated. I felt like a tender, open wound. I would go days without speaking. There were no names, no words I could put to the grief of my understanding.

With the influx of emotions came an intimate awareness of the ways I had caused or perpetuated my own suffering. I saw my misplaced loyalties in friendships. My compulsion to pursue emotionally unavailable men because I believed that love always had to be earned. The years I wasted getting a degree I didn’t care about because of how estranged I was from my own desires. How much of my life was driven by unconscious patterns that stretched into the present day, and how powerless I felt in the face of them.

It’s like spending your whole life as a mouse moving through a maze and then suddenly getting the bird’s eye view: you see the mouse but also the dead ends and turns and how to get to the cheese. You see it, but you still have to watch the mouse screw up, bumping into walls and hurting itself. I started wishing I had never seen it at all.

Near the height of my exhaustion, I remember crying in my friend’s car while we were on a trip. November 16:

In the back seat of V’s rented Tesla I listened to his psychedelic music and it reminded me of how overwhelming all of life is and has been for a while now, it feels like I’ve been on acid for eight straight months and it’s not ending, I’m scared and overwhelmed and it’s not fun anymore, it’s not, I want to go back, I feel everything now, like a newborn baby. I started crying.

I wondered what I had done to myself. If maybe I should never have gone down this long winding route towards the dissolution of my mental structures, should never have listened to those people on Twitter, should never have hung around in the formless jhanas. I wanted to turn back, I wanted to pound on that locked door behind me—I didn’t know, I didn’t know!—but the exits were sealed. I could only move forward, grieving the loss of my innocence.

Meditation intensified all of this, so I avoided it. Instead I journaled for three to six hours a day, or however long it took for me to feel entirely emptied. Around the winter solstice I believe there was a week I didn’t see the sun. (In this regard my dark night was quite literal.)

For comfort I listened to sad Taylor Swift songs on loop and wandered in and out of fragrance stores. My room was filled with hundreds of blotter strips I had brought home and meticulously labeled, and I spent a lot of time on Fragrantica looking up notes and writing my thoughts on each one. It was genuinely enjoyable and grounded me in the senses. And besides, it was something new. All these ugly things in my past were coming back to haunt me and there I was, finding something new in one nozzle or another.

I watched a lot of movies too, a hundred that year. Twenty in December alone. I watched most of them on my own, but sometimes my roommate and I would screen one on the living room wall from our janky $20 projector balanced on a stack of books. In line with my fragrance obsession we bought a candle to light during our screenings: Amber & Moss by P.F. Candle Co. We still burn that now whenever we watch a movie.

Despite all I’ve said, it was also a beautiful and liberating time. There is a sort of striking aliveness that results from living unarmored. Fear is immediate and electric, grief wraps around like a spasming womb, and shame burns like life-giving fire. Even the worst emotions are not so bad when received head-on. There were so many times I thought—this one is going to kill me, I’m sure of it. But then it wouldn’t. There’s nothing in the mind so scary you cannot bring it into the light.

I don’t feel like I suffered very much. It may seem strange to hear me say that, but I really believe it. When people talk about the dark night they envision this constant, horrible state. But mine was more variable. Meditation teacher Shinzen Young has a formula that Suffering = Pain x Resistance. I had a lot of pain, but I barely resisted it. The only times I felt I suffered were when I tried to turn away from an emotion that I didn’t want to feel or a realization I didn’t want to accept. But once I turned toward it, it would dissolve and I would reach this empty, ecstatic state. This happened over and over.

The intensity eventually tapered off. Maybe it just ran its course and there wasn’t anything left to dredge up, and even if I had done nothing it would have passed. But the second reason, which I suspect to be closer to the truth, is that I started to change the ways in which I lived.

I feel like the dark night asked something of me. Because once I was shown the ways I had caused my own suffering, I was made responsible for it. There were no more excuses for my life continuing to be the way it had been. There opened this little gap of choice, and it scared me. I didn’t know if I had the courage to step into it. Even worse, it felt like the process was already underway.

A lot changed after that. I ended things with people who repeatedly hurt me. I stopped chasing people who kept me guessing. Stopped worrying how I came off at parties. Stopped delaying my dreams of writing. Things that used to feel impossibly hard, like conflict, seemed obviously important.

I regained the ability to dissociate, though it isn’t as necessary as it used to be, because I created a life I no longer feel the need to run from. Still, it is nice to have. These days I’m the most content and emotionally stable I’ve ever felt. I have healthy, reciprocal relationships that make me feel seen and loved. I became someone my younger self would feel safe with. Every day I wake up and do what I love most, which is write.

But in some strange way I feel I am still in it, that the night is ongoing. By that I mean the work doesn’t end. There are surely corners of my mind I haven’t peered into, which I trust in time will be shown to me. But more than any insight, more than any tidy conclusion, what I got was the experience of looking at my darkest elements head-on, and finding I could survive it.

I gained the ability to face the immensity of my own life.

For the longest time I had the fantasy that if I could perfectly understand and mold myself to other people, no one would be upset with me and I would be loved.

It worked well enough for a while. Schoolmates voted me for class president, bosses loved that I could work 16 hour days without flinching, and frat boys marveled at how “easy” I was to date. It didn’t take much to elevate my pathological people-pleasing to virtue: I was the hard worker, the thoughtful self-reflector, the world-class empathizer.

The truth was confrontation terrified me. Years ago I did some graphic design work for some friends of mine, and afterwards they asked me to name my price. I made up a number and could sense from their reaction that it was higher than they expected, but they agreed and asked for my payment details. I shared them, but the payment never came through. I think they just forgot, but I felt so guilty about charging them that I just…didn’t. I never followed up.

But a lot changed for me last year. I ended a relationship during which, over the course of years, I felt like I completely lost myself. Immediately following that, meditation removed my ability to dissociate from the difficult emotions I habitually swept under the rug to keep the peace. Suddenly, the humiliation, anger, and grief came at full force. Avoiding conflict hurt in a way that it didn’t used to.

I realized that the whole time I had been shooting myself in the foot—loving people who couldn’t fully choose me, ghosting friends instead of having hard conversations, refusing to charge money for my writing—and I couldn’t live like that anymore. My limited life was a shitty consolation prize for my self-effacement.

I wanted to live. I wanted to take risks, and I wanted to really know the people around me, and I wanted to fall in love with someone who knew the shape of my edges and chose me precisely because of them. It was terrifying, but I started telling people how their actions made me feel and putting my foot down. Initial attempts were clumsy: one conversation with a friend had me crying and monologuing to him, with impassioned hand gestures, about how he had hurt me months prior. On another occasion I set a boundary abruptly and harshly, in a way that was so out of character, that I’m still embarrassed about it.

But I needed the practice. Even though I knew intellectually that nothing catastrophic would happen if I asserted myself, emotionally it felt like being asked to step on a landmine. At my peak I had five hard conversations in one month. Some friendships got stronger. Others fell apart. All in all, I found stress-testing my relationships incredibly valuable.

I learned preferences and boundaries are necessary for intimacy because they reveal what we desire and fear—when the cloak of plausible deniability drops away we are left standing, naked and wanting.

Once I started being willing to disappoint others I stopped disappointing myself as much. The tension, instead of being solely internalized, got partly diffused by externalizing in conflict. Instead of rationalizing away my discontent, I gained the ability to influence my environment so that the discontent wouldn’t arise in the first place. I had more energy, peace of mind, and a felt sense of safety. The world felt less scary, because I believed that if I got into uncomfortable or hurtful situations, I could count on myself to get out of them.

There is always friction that results from living. You scrape against reality constantly—that is just the cost of being alive. That friction and hurt has to go somewhere. To exist at all as a differentiated individual means to have preferences that differ from those of others, and to more or less hold that shape out of self-respect and care for yourself. A relationship that falls apart when you assert yourself was never built on a stable foundation in the first place; what you have done is simply expose this fact. A job that retaliates when you refuse to be exploited would never have made you happy anyway. So you choose: will you let it burn you up inside, or let it burn up what doesn’t suit you?

The recap post is meant to be a behind-the-scenes look at my writing process and thinking. I’ll share fragments that didn’t make it into essays, sources I referenced for research, reflections on that month’s posts, and what I’m reading and thinking about.

My hope is also for it to be a space for you guys to co-create with me. I can float essay ideas and you tell me what you would find interesting to read, or ask you to share specific experiences if they’re relevant to a piece I’m writing. The fun part about this is that I don’t know exactly what it can become, and I’d like to discover that together.

All my essays will remain free. The monthly recaps will be paywalled starting from next month’s issue, but this first one will be free. After giving it some thought, I think this is the best structure to balance my desire for my writing to be a public good and to make this project sustainable. If you enjoy my writing and want to see more of it, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This Month’s Writing

This was the first essay I put out after I committed to posting regularly, so it felt like starting up an old rusty car. A lot of questions came up: Am I going to be able to do it? I’ve always written sporadically; can I do it by the date I set out for myself? I’ve never had a process for my writing; am I actually going to be able to see the essay improve over several iterations? Up until the last day, I still wasn’t sure. But something clicked in that final draft. I saw two weeks of effort condense into a single point. That’s when I knew. I did it once, and I can do it again.

One weakness of my writing is that I overly rely on internally derived conclusions. Because my perception is sharp and I have a good internal bullshit meter, this gets me pretty far, but at a certain point it was handicapping my writing. No matter what I come up with, someone thought about it hundreds of years ago, and probably did it better. It would be a crazy act of hubris to think I could cook up genius in my own head. I needed more rigor: bringing up half-formed ideas with friends encouraging them to tear them apart, reading books about the topic, discarding disproven points.

My initial thesis was “Hatred is a result of miscalculated distance” because I noticed that setting boundaries or adjusting the distance I had from people I was resentful toward tended to help. But then I realized that once we made contact again the same feelings would surface, so that couldn’t have been it. I knew I was missing something. Reading The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen (good book btw, I recommend) taught me that resentment is actually caused by dependency, so I changed my thesis. I also learned resentment and hatred were different, and that I was writing about resentment instead of hatred.

I think it’s great that I don’t need to have it all figured out in my head before putting it on the page. I tell myself: it has to exist first, before I can make it better.

I have gotten a lot out of decoupling my self-worth from the quality of my ideas and writing. It has made writing more fun and helped me produce better work. Before, if I posted a piece after writing it in one sitting and people pointed out something I failed to consider, I felt like an impostor. Now, I consciously interrogate the ideas during the process itself so the end product is more completely considered. Subjecting your work to pressure and iteration is actually an act of great care for the reader, and for the ideas themselves.

Other thoughts/fragments

• Distinction between resentment and hatred. Resentment is more internal, caused by feeling wounded or treated unfairly. Hatred is more external and malicious, like actively wanting to cause harm to another. Unaddressed resentment can intensify into hatred, but they aren’t the same. I use the two slightly interchangeably in the essay, because “to hate is to feel helpless” had a better ring to it with the alliteration, but I will admit it’s a bit sloppy of me to do that.

• I don’t address cases of injustice in the essay. Resentment is a natural and healthy response to being mistreated, and I don’t want people who have been wronged to blame themselves. But I do think at a certain point it’s beneficial to make peace with past events and fully feel the anger or grief of those experiences, not because what happened to us was okay, but because we no longer want to be bound by the ways in which we were hurt.

• Nietzsche has a concept from Genealogy of Morals called ressentiment, which is when the weak/oppressed turn their envy and resentment towards the strong into a new moral system. It’s a way to cope with their powerlessness: instead of facing the pain of feeling inferior, they can reframe morality so that their weakness is actually good. It is a self-destructive attitude that keeps them stuck.

• Resentment can serve an important social function as a tool to influence other people’s behavior and help group cohesion. If I resent you for hurting me, and expressing that gets you to stop doing things that hurt me, then it could improve our relationship. The version where you hold on to resentment long after there is anything to be done about it, however, mostly just hurts the person holding it.
  

I’ve been meaning to write this for months. The primary feeling that kept me circling back was amusement. I wanted to point to an unusual experience I was having and say, “Isn’t this bizarre?” I found the gnome imagery really funny and wanted to make it more central, but the more I worked on the essay, the less congruent with the tone it seemed. It took a more bittersweet and devotional turn instead.

It’s easy to focus on the positive effects of meditation, especially if you experience a change as drastic as the one I did, but it wouldn’t be the full story. The grief and disorientation were just as real to me as the ecstasy. I want to talk about these things.

As Hemingway wrote:

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

Reality is so rarely as tidy as we’d like to tell it.

In terms of technique, this essay was more ambitious and difficult to execute than the resentment one. It’s told in a non-linear manner: it starts with the night in the airport (last July), jumps to a few months prior to explain the shift (last March), implicitly traverses the rest of the year, and ends in the present (March). On top of that, I wanted to do a conceptual tie-in with Augustine’s distentio animi but somehow make it feel natural jumping to and back from the concept. It needed to feel seamless, because it’s cognitively demanding for readers to switch contexts. Eyes start glazing over when you throw in quotes and references unless the relevance to the point is made extremely clear.

I’m pretty happy with how I did it, but it did introduce a challenge. After I explain intentio as the opposite of distentio, I present writing as the main focus of my life.

The problem was it didn’t happen as neatly as that. I didn’t read Augustine, get the sudden revelation that I needed a central organizing principle, realize writing was the answer, and instantly reverse the time blindness. For over a year now, I’ve been obsessively thinking about writing and slowly orienting my life around it—the most recent step was simply formalizing this commitment and creating structure to support it. There was also more to it than just the writing—things like yoga and socializing helped ground me so that I could ease back into structure.

So I had to make a decision. Do I tell it exactly as it happened (which would be messy and harder to follow), or do I tell it in a way that ultimately takes the reader to the same conclusion via a smoother reading experience of a simplified (but not dishonest) account of things? I chose the latter.

Another problem was that I needed to express my love for writing without doing some soapbox speech about how passionate I am. I kept talking about my feelings and what writing meant to me, but it seemed unconvincing. At that point I had written like 80% of the essay, and I loved what I had. But that part was so weak it made the whole thing fall flat. I remember being 14 hours into that writing session, losing my mind. I couldn’t publish it as it was, but I also couldn’t turn back.

A few days prior to that, I read Intimations by Zadie Smith. In one essay, she mentions how she never gets manicures because she can’t read a book at the same time, how even when she gets her eyebrows threaded (which only takes minutes) she tries to hold a folded New Yorker above her head, and how she never gets massages because she tried balancing a Kindle in her hand under the hole in the table before and it didn’t work. She doesn’t say: I can’t stop reading. I do it anywhere and everywhere. She shows us her life instead, and it’s obvious that she’s obsessed with reading.

So I settled on the “show, don’t tell” method. Instead of explaining how much I loved writing, I would share concrete examples like how I drafted essays on retreat and journaled while standing next to the tennis court, and they’d do the talking for me. It worked well enough.

I told my roommate that the same way you get stronger in the gym by lifting close to failure, I think that’s the way you get better at anything. You get better at relationships by ending up in situations where you don’t know what the right thing to do or say is, but trying your best and getting through it anyway. You get better at essays by thrashing around not knowing how to make certain parts work and finishing it anyway.

Other thoughts/fragments

• Grounding activities like yoga and socializing helped me become functional again. Feeling my arms tremble against the mat in downward dog pulled me into my body. Making more plans to see friends forced me to show up at certain places at certain times. These were anchors against my tendency to let hours go by.

• I stuck to the ADHD analogy but another comparable experience is time distortion on psychedelics. I wanted to work the time knife meme into the essay somehow, but it didn’t fit.

• I could have elaborated more on the negative effects. One was that my sleep schedule got even worse than it already was, because I never wanted to go to bed. I’d get excited about a rabbit hole or stay up writing and before I knew it, the sun would be coming up.

• E. R. Clay coined the term “specious present” to describe the short duration of time we experience as the immediate present. William James expands on it in “The Perception of Time,” likening it to a saddle-back:

  The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived.”

• Augustine’s discussion of time in Confessions is in Book XI. The emotional climax occurs when he realizes devotion to God is the antidote to fragmentation of the mind:

  But because Thy loving-kindness is better than all lives, behold, my life is but a distraction, and Thy right hand upheld me, in my Lord the Son of man, the Mediator betwixt Thee, The One, and us many, many also through our manifold distractions amid many things, that by Him I may apprehend in Whom I have been apprehended, and may be re-collected from my old conversation, to follow The One, forgetting what is behind, and not distended but extended, not to things which shall be and shall pass away, but to those things which are before, not distractedly but intently, I follow on for the prize of my heavenly calling, where I may hear the voice of Thy praise, and contemplate Thy delights, neither to come, nor to pass away. But now are my years spent in mourning. And Thou, O Lord, art my comfort, my Father everlasting, but I have been severed amid times, whose order I know not; and my thoughts, even the inmost bowels of my soul, are rent and mangled with tumultuous varieties, until I flow together into Thee, purified and molten by the fire of Thy love.

• When my life started moving again in early March, I was overwhelmed with a sense of urgency and awareness of my own mortality. It made time feel precious in a way it hadn’t before. I started selling things I didn’t need, reaching out to people I would regret not meeting if I moved tomorrow, and going to spots in SF I’ve been meaning to see. But mostly I felt the desire to write all the things I’ve been meaning to, as if I were dying.

What I’m Reading

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – Fictional story told through letters written by a dying minister to his young son. Easily becoming one of my favorite books. It reads like a prayer.

• The Drama of the Gifted Child by Anne Miller (finished) – Classic self-help book. I agree with the main ideas, but found it simplistic and moralistic at points. Worth a read if you grew up in an emotionally difficult home.

• The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen (finished) – Already mentioned earlier, but great book on resentment and forgiveness if you’re actively wrestling with these themes. Mostly therapy vignettes. Extremely slept-on.

• Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (finished) – Lush and expressive writing about Hollywood in the 60s. Struggled to make it through the last third after the novelty of the writing style wore off; too much gossip for my liking. My favorite chapter was “Heroine” in which she talks about fame.

• Intimations by Zadie Smith (finished) – Essay collection written during the pandemic about race, class, creative work, and life in NYC/London. It’s good. The way she writes is respectable, measured, and widely palatable, but not risky enough for me.

• The Abundance by Annie Dillard – Incredible essays about nature. No one does it like Dillard.

• Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century (Vanity Fair)

• The Radical Woman Behind “Good Night Moon” (The New Yorker)

• Emma Kunz: The Researcher Who Refused to Become a Guru (Frieze)

• Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert (The Guardian)

What I’m Thinking About

Things I might write about. If you’d be particularly interested in reading any of these or have other suggestions, please share in the comments.

• More on meditation effects, like my mild dark night of the soul experience

• How having an essay go viral taught me I feared success more than I feared failure

• How I use LLMs for therapy (anyone want to share their experiences with me?)

• Learnings from using psychedelics therapeutically

• Comparing frozen broccoli brands in the Bay Area

• Phenomenology of different menstrual phases

One evening last July, I found myself sitting in an airport lounge in Dallas, Texas. I had just missed my connection to San Francisco on my way back from working a meditation retreat in Costa Rica and got booked on the next flight out in the morning. With all the stores and restaurants shuttered, there was nothing to do but wait, so I found a quiet carpeted nook with a gray leather lounge chair and plopped down.

I don’t remember much of that night. I think I did some journaling, listened to music, and reflected on the past week, but mostly I stared at the fluorescent tube lights above me in a state of reverie. The lights seemed to blur and dance, leaving trails behind them every time my eyes shifted slightly or relaxed out of focus. Tiny rainbows refracted off my lashes and the water in my eyes, and I watched those, too, as if they were part of a meticulously choreographed light show put on for a private audience. I remember crying because I found it beautiful.

Before I knew it, it was six in the morning. My flight would be boarding soon, so I collected my things and headed to the gate. I was tired since I had not slept, but a warm contentment filled my chest.

This unusual incident had a cause: a few months prior, I had experienced a permanent shift as a result of meditation that upended my life. The result was overwhelmingly positive, but I struggled with adjusting after what felt like an existential and emotional atomic bomb had gone off. One of the effects I found particularly fascinating and challenging was my distortion of time.

I developed something similar to “time blindness” as mentioned by people with ADHD: trouble estimating how much time has elapsed, losing hours while deeply absorbed in tasks, and running late to appointments. But unlike their descriptions, I did not experience anxiety or shame about it. They seemed to yo-yo between being blissfully unaware of time and freaking out about it once they regained awareness because they feared how it affected their work or relationships. But for me it just felt nice.

Before, life was divided into “flow” and “not flow,” with the latter making up the majority of my experience. I could regularly induce flow through meditation, writing, nature, or good conversation, but it wasn’t the default state. Now it was, and the activities that used to induce flow would simply put me in even deeper flow. Even the most mundane things could capture my attention indefinitely until faced with external constraints (a party ending, a cafe closing) or my vitals demanding attention (food, sleep, water), but until those showed themselves, I found myself extremely absorbed with whatever was immediately in front of me with no concern for time.

My preoccupation with the present was so severe that it affected my short-term memory. The reason why I was late to parties was because while I was getting ready to go, I would forget that there was a party at all and that I was preparing to go to it. I would think: Okay, I need to be out of the door in twenty minutes. Then I’d go to the bathroom to wash my face so I could put on makeup, and then enjoy the feeling of the water on my face and hands so much it was all I could hold in my mind. I would catch myself remembering: Oh yeah, there’s a party. It’s at 7. I’m getting ready. I’m washing my face and then I need to get dressed. This would repeat at each step until I made it out the door.

A similar incident unfolded in the kitchen once, when my roommate and I were both preparing breakfast. I have a habit of eating half an avocado with my eggs every morning and refrigerating the other half, so I always check the fridge before opening one in case I have some from the previous day. That day, there was no avocado inside, so I opened one and put the rest in the fridge. Maybe a minute later, I opened the door again for an unrelated reason, saw the avocado inside, and said to my roommate, "Aw man, there was one here the whole time!”

He furrowed his brows and told me I had just put that in there. There was a long pause as I stared at him and blinked. When the realization hit me I started laughing. We couldn’t believe it.

Socializing got strange as well. I would go to parties and regularly have three-hour-long conversations with strangers because it felt effortless. Most of them were men, and this caused a bunch of misunderstandings where they thought I was romantically interested in them. This happened enough times that my friends learned to retrieve me if they saw me from across the room talking to someone long enough to give them the wrong idea.

I jokingly called this state being “gnomed up,” in reference to being a garden gnome, the mythical smiling creature that remains indefinitely wherever it is planted. I could post up anywhere and have a great time, experiencing whatever the opposite of boredom was.

Despite the drawbacks, it was liberating. The way I saw it, my previous awareness of time corresponded to a physical tension I held in my body at all times like a flexed muscle. Relaxing it was a relief, and a whole cluster of neuroses around time dropped away: worrying that someone would be disappointed in me if I came late to a party, worrying that I needed to be at my next appointment during a preceding one, worrying that I was “behind” in some sense and didn’t have enough time to do the things I wanted to do. Considering that most of my life had been dominated by work and school schedules I found suffocating, I was grateful to be relieved of this genre of concerns.

I experienced time as a flexible, sprawling object with a life of its own: sometimes it expanded and infinities passed in an afternoon, or days would zip by as if they had taken only an instant. What remained the same was how each present moment seemed to take the place of the one before it. As far as I was concerned, each moment had the same structure and only the contents changed like individual frames in a movie.

But at a certain point it got old. Not the moments themselves—no, each was beautiful and born anew. It was more like the movie of my life that I was watching had a boring plot that left some wishes unfulfilled. I could only take so many afternoons staying in cafes until close and conversations where I was left holding the thread before I realized I lived an off-beat existence that was beginning to cost me.

I found my answer not in Buddhism, as one might expect, but in Christianity. In Confessions, the Catholic bishop Augustine of Hippo defines time as being made up of three presents: a present of things past (memory), a present of things present (attention), and a present of things future (expectation).

Because the past has gone and the future has not yet happened, only the present exists outside of us, but the human mind is stretched across all three. He calls this distentio animi, translated from Latin as “stretching or fragmentation of the soul,” and proposes we resolve this fragmentation through intentio—a gathered, directed attention toward God.

Now, I did not want to become a nun or monk. My spiritual practice was a cherished and significant part of my life, but I couldn’t see it as my primary vocation. But reading Augustine helped me realize where I had gone wrong: I did not have a central object of devotion in my life. I stopped stretching myself across the past and future, but I was not organized around something greater.

I talked to a friend who went through a similar change a few years ago, but his relationship to time wasn’t as distorted because it happened while he was in a Zen monastery where he had a rigid daily schedule and set of responsibilities. I, on the other hand, was a modern layperson who worked from home and spent a lot of time staring at clouds.

What, then, could be the central axis for my life to revolve around?

The answer came quickly, as if spring-loaded: my writing. The one invariant in my life, the bug I can’t shake off, the ritual I have engaged in daily for over a decade. The affliction that has me composing phrases in the shower and editing sentences as I fall asleep. I remember being so busy on the first meditation retreat I worked that I had no time to write; by the end of the week, I started experiencing withdrawal and stayed up drafting three essays. I remember standing next to the tennis courts in Dolores, furiously scribbling in my journal mid-walk as the sky darkened.

The more I looked into my past, the more I saw myself glued to a page. When I turned toward the future, I saw the same; the possibilities and challenges excited me. But the present did not reflect this awareness.

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by,” Annie Dillard wrote. Stranded in the present, I had overlooked the type of continuity that allows daily effort to compound into a life worth living.

The wingspan of the present is too narrow to sustain a deeply meaningful life. It is not sufficient to be relieved of our fragmentation. To reach into our unique pasts while glancing at the unactualized future is to balance the scale of the present and guide our actions. We look backward and forward not to grasp at regrets or future threats, but to stitch ourselves into the chronology of our own lives in a way that enables flight.

Once I committed to my writing, life lurched forward and started moving again. I regained the ability to arrive on time. I learned how to excuse myself from conversations. I came up with a posting schedule and created a process for my essays. I still can’t estimate time very well, but there are tools to help: calendars, timers, reminders. My days became infused with the urgency of excitement. And with the arrival of spring, my year of timelessness came to a close.

I reckon I will still see the beauty in those fluorescent lights, but next time I will admire them for only a few minutes before turning back to the page.

Resentment is a difficult topic to talk about, mostly because it tends to lie under the surface of relationships and is socially frowned upon to possess. Some people are more prone to feeling it than others, but even those who appear otherwise good-hearted and well-adjusted have, at one point or another, felt resentment for another person in their lives.

I certainly have, and at times have been surprised by my capacity for it. But even more surprising was how much it could change—I could go from hating someone to feeling neutral or slightly positive about them after some time and distance, or start loving someone and slowly watch that affection curdle into hatred. Given that it ebbs and flows, it must not be an inherent quality of my character. So I wondered: what are the conditions that reliably produce it, and how does one navigate it? Or even better, prevent it from arising at all?

What I have come to is that resentment is rooted in dependency. It is the need for others to be different in some way—to give you something you want but feel you are being denied, to stop doing the things you find distasteful, to conform to your ideas of how a person ought to live. In other words, to be the version of them you want them to be.

To elaborate on the aspect of need: for resentment to form, it is not enough to simply want someone to be different. You have to require it, to feel that it is necessary, that there are stakes if they don’t change. That your well-being or identity or desired future is threatened by their rigidity, and there is something to be protected or gained if they do change.

And on top of the personal need, there has to be resistance. You have to be wanting the thing and not getting it. It is the feeling of “Why don’t they just ____?” or “Why can’t they ____?” in the face of a reality where they clearly aren’t doing or being those things. It is an awkward stalemate, a desire locked in suspension.1

But to cling to resentment is to cling to your own helplessness. If you maintain the belief that it is on others to change to make you happy, then the burden doesn’t fall on you. You can stay the same, and wait for what you want to fall out of the sky. You can stay in a perpetual adolescence, refusing to take responsibility for your own life.

This became clear to me recently when I processed lingering resentment I had for my mother. I realized that I hated her because at some level I still needed her to be the mother I wanted but didn’t have. But then I realized, “Oh wait, I’m the adult now.” I am responsible for getting my own emotional needs met. If someone is not meeting those needs, it’s on me to adjust my expectations and behavior accordingly and find others who can. Holding on, waiting and hoping for a parent to change is the behavior of a child, of one who believes themself to be helpless in a stork-delivered basket.

In freeing her from the responsibility of meeting my emotional needs, I freed myself from the illusion of helplessness. I could focus on creating the life I want in the present and future instead of fixating on what someone couldn’t give me in the past.

You don’t need to know someone well in order to resent them. For example, envy can trigger resentment. This, too, has its roots in helplessness. In the times when I was envious and resentful of someone else, it was because I didn’t want to accept that I was in a world where they would be the thing I wanted and I couldn’t. It wasn’t them I hated, it was a hypothetical world that I didn’t want to live in. But they weren’t doing anything that was actually keeping me down or standing in my way. When I cultivated the trait or ability I felt I was missing, my resentment for them would disappear because I realized I wasn’t inferior like I had feared.

If you are dealing with resentment, it can be helpful to ask: what is the unfulfilled promise that exists between us? And if there isn’t one, what do they threaten about my sense of the world, what is possible, or who I am? In what ways do I feel like they need to change, so that I can stay the same?

An easy way to find out what you are resentful about is to imagine the person you resent apologizing to you. What would you want them to say? That is the sticking point, the part you cannot forgive, the thing you need to be different.

And once you have identified that, you can challenge it. You can find a way out of your perceived helplessness. The most loving people I know, those who seem constitutionally incapable of harboring resentment for others, possess a grounded confidence in their own ability to get what they want and become who they want to be. It is not arrogance, but faith. It makes no sense for them to hate, because it doesn’t get them what they want. It only traps them in believing they can’t get it.2

I was talking to my friend Grant the other day about this essay, and he said something beautiful. He said if resentment is needing someone to be different, love is wanting them to be exactly the same. It is feeling they are perfect exactly how they are. For this reason, the two are antithetical—it is hard for love to exist in the presence of resentment.

I aspire to feel love, which I define as a sense of uncomplicated goodwill and acceptance, towards everyone in my life. In order for this to happen, I need to notice when resentment is brewing and take steps to address it. One simple and often-overlooked way is to set boundaries.

I like to believe that boundaries are the distance we need from someone to still love them. Sometimes resentment is simply a result of miscalculated distance. There are people I can only be friends with even if we both have feelings for each other, because either we tried to date and it went horribly, or we know that if we were to date we would make each other miserable. With them, being friends is the appropriate distance.

Some people I can only be acquaintances with, because our worldviews are too different or we trigger each other in ways that make friendship impossible. Some people I can’t talk to at all, because the history is just that painful or their presence is actively harmful. Even though it’s sad they can’t be in my life, I find that is the distance I need to hold them in goodwill, to not resent them for being who they are.

It is important to find the distance at which resentment cannot form, and to find a configuration in which your demands match the other’s ability and willingness to meet them. This removes the need for bargaining and makes room for enthusiastic participation.

When we work through our resentment, we open ourselves up to possibility. Our lives become ours to self-determine, to dream up and make real. In giving ourselves the freedom to be how we wish, we give others that same freedom. We make love possible.

2

They believe you can “just move around.” The field is open to them. Hating someone is being the guy in the middle.

So I watched 102 of them. I started with the AFI 100 list and movies people were usually shocked I had never watched (e.g., Titanic, Inception), then quickly branched out to tailored recommendations from ChatGPT and friends.

The first thing I noticed—I think while watching The Godfather—is that movies are rich with detail and nuance. For example, if a character says one thing with their face showing a contradicting emotion, the viewer picks up the dissonance between the two as subtext. In the beginning of the movie, there is a wedding where a singer named Johnny Fontane (inspired by the real-life Frank Sinatra) performs. Michael, the youngest son of the mafia family, explains to his girlfriend Kay how his father helped Fontane’s career by freeing him from a contract so he could go solo. How did he do that? By putting a gun to the boss’ head. Kay, learning about the nature of his family for the first time, looks at him in shock, and he says, “That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.” The line is reassuring, but somehow you can’t quite believe him, because he’s averting her gaze for most of its delivery—as if he’s saying it in an attempt to convince himself. This unease lingers with the audience as the movie progresses over the next three hours to show Michael taking over as head of his family, doing all the things he swore he wouldn’t do.

The amount of information embedded in the backgrounds and interiors is also stunning. Movies feel like time capsules containing artifacts from the period they were filmed, and a good set manufactures believability. In The Apartment, I noticed two Tiffany lamps (stained glass lamps made by Louis Comfort Tiffany, popular in the late 19th and early 20th century and now priced in the tens of thousands) in the apartment of the supposedly poor protagonist and was confused, until I learned that by 1960 when the film was made, those lamps had temporarily fallen out of fashion and were frequently found in thrift stores. The set designers had made a deliberate choice to depict his social standing. Every detail, whether it went consciously noticed or not, existed to serve the story and augment its plausibility, its immersiveness.

This ruined anime for me, save for some rare exceptions. By that point I had watched a lifetime total of over 5,000 episodes, and it was like realizing I had been drinking diluted Kool-Aid without knowing it. In anime, the expressions are flat and exaggerated, the characters speak every thought they have out loud, and the backgrounds are usually an afterthought. The exceptions are those that leverage the medium of animation to do what would be impossible or implausible with cameras: tell fantastical stories divorced from reality through sequences of drawings. I came away appreciating the best of animation (e.g., Paprika, Spirited Away) even more than before, and most of the rest of anime much less.

The second thing I noticed was: There really is something for everybody. You could learn about the Watergate scandal and political corruption in All the President’s Men, watch the janitor with impeccable music taste in Perfect Days clean toilets, or smoke opium with the flower girls in the high-end brothels of Flowers of Shanghai. There doesn’t even have to be dialogue—long stretches of 2001: A Space Odyssey are devoted to the vastness and silence of space. Or it can be all dialogue: One, Two, Three is a frenzied stream of jokes as its characters snake across both sides of the Berlin Wall.

Given that there are so many choices, enough to simulate the multifaceted nature of reality at large, getting into movies will inevitably reveal your default mental inclinations. The movies that fascinate you are a reflection of how you like to parse reality, or which aspects of experience you like to tune into. You learn you do, after all, have preferences. You have an aesthetic. And once you know roughly what that is, you can find more of it—more self-organizing clusters of stimuli that evoke resonance, meaning, and beauty as experienced by you. You discover what is called your sensibility.

Looking back at the films that moved me the most this year, many were tender, contemplative, or related to personal transformation, which also happens to be what this blog is about. I probably could have guessed that, but I wanted to go through the discovery process to let themes emerge on their own. I’m grateful that I now have pieces of media I can point to to share the things I care about and find beautiful.

Which brings me to my list of favorites below. If you end up watching them or have recommendations for other movies based off this list, please share in the comments.

Top 10 films from this year:

1. Drive My Car (2021)

   The first thing you need to know about Drive My Car is that it’s a beautiful story about two people who help each other process grief and regret. The second thing you need to know is that the aesthetics are godly. I mean, look at that red Saab 900 Turbo. The movie is loosely based off of a Haruki Murakami short story by the same name in which the car is originally yellow (I’m so glad they changed it). Despite all the shots of the two main characters together, it’s not a romance, which in my opinion makes it better. It has the vibe of going on a long, intimate road trip by the sea.

   

   

2. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003)
   If you like meditation, you have to watch this. It features a floating temple in a lake in Korea where an elderly man raises a boy and teaches him how to be a monk. The passage of time and the endless cycle of life, death, and suffering are central themes. My favorite scene is the one where he carves the Heart Sutra out of wood. If you like nature, philosophy, Buddhism, and movies that feel unrushed, you’ll enjoy this.

   

   

3. Columbus (2017)

   Drop dead gorgeous film about architecture. Cassie dreams of becoming an architect and regularly stares at modernist buildings around town in awe, but her troubled past keeps her from leaving. Her passion is so pure; it’s one of the best media representations I’ve seen of aesthetic appreciation with some scenes bordering on spiritual transcendence. It’s almost entirely still shots (the camera barely moves, intensifying the meditative mood) with lots of Wes Anderson-inspired symmetry.

   

   

4. Yi Yi (2000)

   The way I pitch this film to people is that it’s like watching samsara. You are waterboarded with a never-ending stream of chaotic events in and around a Taiwanese family: business deals, debts, illness, death, unrequited love…but somehow it feels fundamentally okay. This has been going on since the beginning of time, and will continue even after we are gone. There is no build-up and climax followed by a resolution. Don’t sit waiting for something to occur—just watch. This is true slice of life, with all its complexity and bittersweetness.

   

5. The Apartment (1960)
   I love rom-coms. This one is hilarious and charming and will probably make you want to move to New York City. I’m a sucker for the outfits and interiors. The premise is absurd: a low-level employee at a bureaucratic insurance company rents out his apartment to his superiors for them to take their mistresses to. The events of these affairs, as well as his budding romance with the company’s elevator girl, all take place one after another in his apartment as things get increasingly out of control.

   

   

6. Little Women (2019)

   I don't know if there's a better film to express the ambitions, fears, and internal conflicts of being a woman. This takes place during the American Civil War, a time when marriage was all a woman was good for. Each of the four sisters has a unique temperament and path in life, but they are all equally valid. I find Jo, an aspiring writer, incredibly relatable. (One of my favorite scenes is when she becomes a hermit in her attic and writes her novel by candlelight. I’m also obsessed with this devastating proposal scene.) The aesthetics are peak cozy. I want my life to be imbued with the same warmth and liveliness found in their home.

   

   

7. Paris, Texas (1984)

   A mysterious and dreamlike movie that gradually reveals the backstory of Travis, a man you meet in the first scene stumbling in the desert wearing a red cap. He had been missing for four years and his brother tries to figure out what happened to him, but this is made difficult by the fact that Travis refuses to talk at all. Heartbreaking and entrancing. I could say it's about fatherhood, or the American West, or love, or memory, or longing, but you should just watch it for the vibe. Same director as Perfect Days, but I preferred this.

   

   

8. The Godfather (1972)

   There is one word that comes to mind when I think of The Godfather, and that is gravitas. Don Corleone is a powerful man, and every word and action of his holds weight. Even though it presents a romanticized account of 1950s New York and mafia families, it’s based on the real lives of Sicilian immigrants who came in contact with the grittiness and optimism of America while upholding traditional values of family and loyalty. My favorite line, which was apparently improvised, is “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” Widely recognized as one of the greatest films of all time and I think it’s deserved. The second one is just as good, but the third one sucks.

   

   

9. Past Lives (2023)

   Loving a childhood friend for decades and not ending up with them in this life due to circumstances outside your control is just painful. Nora lost touch with Hae Sung after she moved from Korea to Canada, and this is the story of their reunion in New York. You can feel the heartbreak and longing as they think about what could have been. If a part of you still loves every person you’ve ever loved even if you’re not in each other’s lives anymore, this one is for you. Prepare tissues.

   

   

10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

    Watching this feels like reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It’s about two women who secretly fall in love by the sea. Marianne is a painter, hired by a mother to paint her daughter Héloïse’s portrait in secret under the guise of being a companion for her daily walks. Visually gorgeous and so thick with tension you could cut it with a knife; even the smallest glances and most subtle movements are charged. They share a quiet but burning passion.

    

    

Runners-up:

11. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017) but watch Man on the Moon first

12. Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

13. An Autumn’s Tale (1987)

14. Incendies (2010)

15. It Happened One Night (1934)

For the sake of completeness, here are the other 87 alphabetized:

(500) Days of Summer / 10 Things I Hate About You / 2001: A Space Odyssey / Adaptation. / Aftersun / All About Lily Chou-Chou / All the President’s Men / Amélie / Annie Hall / Anora / Apocalypse Now / At Eternity’s Gate / A Spy in the House of Love / Before Midnight / Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Black Swan / Blade Runner / Blue Valentine / Breakfast at Tiffany’s / Casablanca / Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc / Challengers / Chungking Express / Close-Up / Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon / Dìdi (弟弟) / Fight Club / Flowers of Shanghai / Flow / Fallen Angels / Ghost in the Shell / Gone Girl / Gone with the Wind / GoodFellas / Hard Boiled / How Drug Trafficking Actually Works — From Heroin to Cocaine / How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days / Inception / Interstellar / It’s a Wonderful Life / Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold / Kill Bill: Vol. 1 / Kill Bill: Vol. 2 / Koyaanisqatsi / KPop Demon Hunters / Lady Bird / Legally Blonde / Lost in Translation / Man on the Moon / Me Before You / Miss Americana / Midsommar / Mulholland Drive / Nightcrawler / Oldboy / One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest / One, Two, Three / Paprika / Perfect Days / Pride & Prejudice / Pulp Fiction / Rental Family / Rocky / Rounders / She is a Shaman / Sylvia Plath: Inside The Bell Jar / Taxi Driver / Tampopo / Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour / Taylor Swift | The Official Release Party of a Showgirl / The Brutalist / The Devil Wears Prada / The Godfather Part II / The Godfather Part III / The Graduate / The Handmaiden / The Princess Diaries / The Social Network / The Tree of Life / This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is The Massage / Titanic / Tokyo Godfathers / Vertigo / Wake Up Dead Man / When Harry Met Sally… / Whiplash

AUG 10 2025

If you don’t want people to pedestalize you then tell the truth. Make it ugly because it is. The exact things I wish to hide are the ones I need to show.

AUG 11 2025

But then again, if you put your heart into it, there is no way it can be ugly. Even if it may be unpopular, it will never be ugly. Someone like me will find it, the way I like looking at dusty, discarded objects in flea markets and vintage shops to inherit another person’s cherished possessions.

AUG 18 2025

We lock up our wishes for ourselves in other people, and throw the keys away in the labyrinths of our subconscious.

AUG 20 2025

The problem is not when the work is difficult. All things worth their salt require sweat. The problem is when the work is difficult and it is not worth the difficulty for you to do, and you lie to yourself to keep it going.

AUG 21 2025

Your reputation will never be unanimous so give up attempts to establish certainty, give up attempts to establish identity, to do or be things and then be known for having done or been them.

AUG 22 2025

Some are born kind and wise, but people like us have to earn it like the pilgrims at Fátima walking on their knees facing the Capelinha, repenting.

AUG 24 2025

There is nothing in this life we are truly insulated from. We are exposed if we are to live and love others. There is no intimacy without the possibility of destruction.

AUG 25 2025

My hair still smells like smoke from the bonfire.

AUG 26 2025

I ask too much of the people around me. I demand them to see me without projection because that is the standard I set for myself and I spend an inordinate amount of time and effort seeing through my own distorted perceptions of people who mean anything to me. In a way it is all I do. But other people are not me, they are not obsessed with figuring out how their insides work, why we love and hate and suffer and how exactly we can stop it.

AUG 28 2025

You curse your sensitivity because you resist what is most difficult for you to feel.

…

How does it feel to say: I will love you no matter how you experience me? Even if you hate my guts, even if you find me prideful or annoying? How does it feel to set my sights on embodying the heart of Christ, of Tara?

SEP 03 2025

You’re afraid if you dig out your own darkness that it will subsume you. But it doesn’t. The moment you look at it, it loses its grip and mystique. There is a calming, a settling into deeper stillness.

SEP 06 2025

I slept with half my blinds open for the flower. I’d like to name her, but I’m not sure what yet.

SEP 10 2025

God was with me in those moments, those brief respites. He did not make many appearances in those days, but he showed when he could; I saw him. Weren’t those moments beautiful? Just as those times were painful, weren’t they just perfect? Do you see what I mean?

SEP 13 2025

There is nothing wrong with you. You are simply human.

SEP 14 2025

The people born in California so rarely want to leave. They really believe it to be the best—and what can we, those who moved from as far as across the country to settle in the Golden State, say about it? Who are we to disagree? ____ has never been to the East Coast. Her world is so small, just a sliver, a sliver shaped like a golden crew sock, a rich, bountiful one full of fresh blueberries, award-winning vineyards, and possibility.

…

If I want it I can have it. I just have to actually want it, not want to want it.

SEP 18 2025

To be intimate with someone means to join together into a larger system—their hurt becomes your hurt.

SEP 20 2025

The stakes are never higher, the system never more strained, the temptation to succumb to our worse natures more gravitationally apparent than when love is on the line. Because in those moments it is not merely love—it is survival. Of course you get angry, you get defensive. But if you manage to maintain goodwill and keep what is holy in your heart, if you accept the possibility of complete death and annihilation willingly and openly, if you lie down flat in the aisle waiting for the light to take you, I swear you become it. A miracle happens.

SEP 25 2025

Keep digging barehanded. There are no rules.

SEP 26 2025

I have been punished for impurity of intent far more than I have been rewarded for my ability to dissociate to get the things I thought I wanted.

SEP 28 2025

If you rely on your defenses to survive you will confuse tenderness in others for weakness.

…

Someone who cannot set boundaries secretly hopes other people will cross their own boundaries for them, and that this would serve as proof they are lovable, worth the other’s self-betrayal, worth crossing the perilous sea for. It is the hope for a fantasy.

SEP 29 2025

Without the gift of writing I would still be nothing to myself, a total and complete stranger.

SEP 30 2025

It’s not fame I want. I just want a piece of this world where I can feel my feet on the ground.

…

If I didn’t voluntarily face it now, it would only force me to face it later under the worst of circumstances, demanding principal, interest, compliance, everything. If you refuse to look at your past your future does not really belong to you.

OCT 02 2025

I wrestled with the costs of intimacy because it had been so long since I had seen its fruits.

…

I was in more pain than I was even willing to admit, and the words came out strained on paper. On many occasions my hands trembled like writing the wrong or true thing would result in lashes—who had terrified me so? Well, it was none other than myself. I had been my own worst enemy all along, and the lashing I had done privately behind the closed doors of my mind was now made broadcast and I no longer had an appetite for snuff films in which I was the starring lead because all she did was bleed and take it.

OCT 03 2025

Make the best of what is at your disposal, and stand by what you have made with grace.

OCT 06 2025

I am losing interest in talking about the thing itself—awakening, meditation, et cetera. I would much rather fully internalize the mystical experiences I have had and have that understanding suffuse my actions.

OCT 10 2025

My inability to stay in connection with you is, of course, my own inability to face myself—all the shame and disappointment that arises when I feel I have fallen short in the essential duties of being human. You make it unbearable to be myself. So you have to go.

OCT 13 2025

Your problems outline your eccentricities. Isn’t it funny how they’re always tailor-made for you?

OCT 14 2025

If my guardian angel were watching me, she’d wonder why I’m crying all the time, if life on Earth was really that bad. But it’s not that it’s bad, it’s more that it is too much, and what I can’t hold flows out of me in tears.

…

I love myself when I am crying over the pain more than I like myself when I am charming a room full of people I’ve just met and have them by my jokes, because in the former I am letting myself feel it. I am allowing myself to make contact with reality.

…

Either she has to give or the light has to go out. Something has to break.

OCT 15 2025

Isn’t this what you wanted: the ability to see the truth, the full-bodied thing?

OCT 18 2025

I’m willing to see it through.

OCT 20 2025

To yearn for the approval of people who don’t really care for you, to punish yourself because you are still yet to be (and frankly never will be) perfect, is to do injustice to your past and everything you did to overcome it.

OCT 21 2025

I am essentially doing mental surgery completely unaided and unanesthetized and getting great results but it is a real bitch—

OCT 22 2025

I finally found the emotion I’m feeling. It’s humiliation.

OCT 23 2025

When I heard you had overdosed on Nyquil, my immediate reaction wasn’t anxiety, it was despair. Despair at our lives and what they continued to bring against our will. I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in. I didn’t want to lose you, I didn’t want to lose myself. But I was forced to contend with the very real possibility that both had a high chance of happening.

OCT 27 2025

Oh, for all that is holy please find the strength to open your eyes. One for the money, two for the show.

OCT 28 2025

Remember: the things you love and hate the most in someone are connected. It’s only the angle that changes; all looking has intention embedded in it.

…

Don’t worry about your words being misinterpreted. They will be—by the wrong people. You can’t say the wrong thing to the right person. Those who are on the same journey will get it, immediately and without explanation, even before their minds get a chance to catch up. You are not speaking to their minds. That’s like courting a vixen. Go for the jugular.

OCT 29 2025

My desire to dismantle the projections of others onto me is still rooted in my desire for control. I feel they are wrong, they have misunderstood me, they cannot really see me, so I wish to control it. But who really benefits when I do that? Me, in that tyrannical way.

OCT 31 2025

Truth will not make you popular, but any loss in likability is well-compensated by integrity and an authentic life. I want the austere clarity, the intensity under pressure, the beast under control. I want diamonds in clay, I want the rips in chambray.

…

I can be reborn again and again but it will never be like the first. If I have been my greatest tormentor I surely know how to bring about my own flourishing—just flip the sign. Only someone who knows all the right answers can manage to get them all wrong. Only the fool can become the wise man. Inhale sharply. Don’t you see? You are so close to the cusp of everything you know, of being. Keep going: the birth canal is only so long.

NOV 01 2025

The world will not comply; you are what must change.

NOV 06 2025

I beg God for a break, he says no, I say fine, I learn the lesson, I learn not to beg.

NOV 07 2025

Do I have to remain absolutely lucid in every moment?

…

Don’t you think you’ve grown enough? How much more do you need? It’s not in the amount, you’ll never be satisfied that way. You just want soft eyes, you want to be able to look and not have it burn.

…

Life goes on. People say things. You say things back. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they love you. Sometimes they can’t stand you. That is just how it goes. That is part of the fun.

NOV 17 2025

It was snowing outside—big flakes, slow and heavy, drifting down like shredded cotton. I stood by the bedroom window and watched them for a while.

NOV 26 2025

I found the shape of that fear in me today. When I touched it I was struck with fear and tenderness and I wanted to scream. It was in the shape of a rectangular slab, of stone or maybe of brass—it had a jagged, irregular surface on the top left portion, the rest was smooth. I ran my fingers over it in my imagination, I felt the scars and the pain, the long forgotten wound. And I embraced it. I held it to my chest, I let it enter and become a part of me, I made the thing I had wanted all this time, this license for existence, and gave it to myself.

NOV 29 2025

They’re selling Christmas trees in front of the hardware store already—when I passed them I caught a whiff of pine.

DEC 09 2025

When we expose ourselves we know there is risk—that’s why it’s scary. We know there’s a chance the other person will respond with indifference or even cruelty, that taking off our armor may result in our being stabbed, but we hope for it not to happen. So when it does, it hurts doubly—there is the pain of the wound itself but also the betrayal of expectations and wishes. There is the fear of what it means as our hardworking brains try to package the event into tidy explanations: it is because I am not worthy of love, it will happen again, I will have to design my life around this, around not being able to have something I dreamed of and really wanted to have. It is the sound of childhood dreams dying, the heart’s hard closing, the clattering of a metal shutter as the shop closes for the night.

DEC 17 2025

When you are close to the edge the only thing you can do is watch your feet.

DEC 25 2025

My own writing scares me. As it should.

After reading this post, please listen to the song “Creatures in Heaven” by Glass Animals.

There’s a specific genre of person who uses feedback to subsidize their emotional recklessness by placing the burden on others to tell them whenever they have done something wrong instead of reflecting on the patterns in their lives and making appropriate changes. The hostile version of this even uses feedback as a vehicle to assert their own superiority through conflict.

I call these people “feedback eaters” because they have a great appetite for feedback, but when you give it to them it seems to enter a black hole.

This can look like:

• high disagreeableness

• conflict-seeking

• positioning themself as the reasonable, peaceful, open to negotiate one (and subtly casting you as the dramatic, immature one)

• actively soliciting feedback when the situation doesn’t call for it, or you two aren’t actually that close

There’s nuance to this—feedback from others is valuable and if you never receive it then you can’t learn effectively. But if you make your ability to take feedback a point of pride or strong part of your identity, it can sabotage relationships.

I wrestled with this type of person for a long time trying to figure out why they left me feeling bad even though the behavior itself seemed to be in good faith.

My thoughts would sound something like: “Taking feedback is usually really hard. This person seems to do it with ease, so they are admirable, impressive, and stronger than me. They are more committed to their growth. Wow, they’re even asking me for feedback. They’re so humble and care about how their actions impact others.”

And then I’d give the feedback and one or more of the following would happen:

1. No change in behavior, which revealed they weren’t actually committed to improving our relationship. Totally cool to want to exit a relationship, but not cool to pretend you care when you don’t.

2. They argue with the feedback instead of graciously accepting it or asking thoughtful follow-up questions. I feel betrayed because they baited me with receptivity and vulnerability, and then switched to aggression.

3. Subtle ego plays (making digs back at me). It’s mean and irrelevant to the topic at hand to bring up my faults. Neither of us is perfect but we’re trying to help each other.

That’s when I realized that they were using feedback solicitation as a way to dodge accountability. This is actually a genius strategy:

• If they position themself as open to feedback no one can claim they’re closed-off and unwilling to cooperate (even if they’re uncooperative in the discussions themselves). This protects their reputation by appearing pro-social.

• If they can surface the object-level argument and successfully refute it (”prove” the person offering feedback was wrong about them), then they’re actually fine/not a bad person, and nothing has to change.

• If they open themself up to feedback, it gives them permission to offer feedback in return “because it’s only fair” even if they’re putting you down. If they can make it feel like you’re no better than they are, then they can’t be that bad.

• If they make it other people’s jobs to tell them when their behavior is out of line, they don’t need to expend the energy to maintain a filter or internal checker. It’s easier and lower effort.

The last one is more benign, but the rest are protective. Feedback eaters actually care a lot about how people perceive them despite presenting a thick skin, and are invested in manipulating those impressions. The root causes of this tend to run deep and are difficult to change without intensive therapy or emotional work. There is not much you can do to help if they’re not interested in investigating or changing it themselves.

The attitude of “if someone has a problem with me it’s on them to speak up, I’m all ears” is a viable, healthy stance to take until you weaponize it or lean on it as a crutch. Dodging accountability can cause pain to others and stunt emotional growth.

My general advice is if you suspect someone is even subtly trying to position themselves as better than you, or if conversation feels slippery and difficult with them for some reason, don’t take the bait when they ask for feedback. You’re opening up more surface area for personal attack. Or, you can try it, see what happens (how they react and if behavior changes), and go from there.

Instead of the usual essay, I wanted to try something new: a compilation of journal entries between the date of my last post and today, a period spanning three months. This wasn’t the first time the thought of curating my entries occurred to me. I initially thought about combing through all my journals—ten years’ worth—and making a book out of them, but this would be a huge undertaking, and the writing was terrible until at least the fifth year. So I settled on three months, which still gave me two hundred pages to work with.

Here are my favorite excerpts, lightly edited and arranged chronologically below.

MAY 13 2025

Under rage is grief and under grief is love.

MAY 15 2025

My spiritual practice nowadays does not look so much like sitting as it does doing the next hardest thing, that which does not come easily but must be done if I am to grow and continue to see the world anew.

MAY 18 2025

I am tired of forcing things. The next time I see ____ I’ll tell him I grew up, that you gotta have at least one long, solid relationship where you try too hard to make it work and get tired of doing that, of forcing things. When you’re young you’re attracted to shiny things. And then you get older and realize what really is worth something is presence and stability and consistency. You get really boring but you wouldn’t have it any other way.

MAY 19 2025

I am still in the insanity and eccentricity of San Francisco. There is no one coming to save me from my own burden of becoming, my process of rooting myself. There is no running.

MAY 21 2025

I do not wish to fix you because you are not broken. I just want you to see what is possible and dare to ask for it. I wish for you to be astonished.

MAY 30 2025

God, the universe … is winking at me. Everything is so beautiful. An everlasting dream and miracle. It is all so beautiful. All of this. I’m not even on any caffeine.

…

That has always been the nature of my pain: the accumulation of that which was so painful when I first encountered it I could not look directly at it, like a solar eclipse. Even if it’s dark it will damage your retinas. It had seemed as if a million of these eclipses had occurred, that such was simply the way it always was and what was required to make me. I am an empty vessel that used to hold pain but now only echoes joyfully. A quiet ecstasy bounces around and fills my lungs. I had believed, and it had worked.

JUNE 1 2025

I have no idea what is happening. For three months now life has been this unbroken stream of sensations. Just one thing after another in complete flow, no edges between them. I can’t pick them apart.

JUNE 2 2025

Weil debased herself until she saw the light. Maybe I admire her because I do the same.

JUNE 3 2025

Old enough to know my corner store guy’s advice is right. Young enough to still not take it.

JUNE 8 2025

It is all such a beautiful story. But once I tell it it seems to die. It becomes this solid thing subject to decay, to beginnings and ends. Understandably, people are curious. And I like sharing. But the more I retell the story of what happened the more it feels like it didn’t really happen, at least not in the paltry, simplified way condensed in words. It was so much more fluid and amorphous.

…

It’s past 1:30am but I don’t want to sleep. I want to stay up admiring the Great Beyond. Luckily I will, and luckily the Great Beyond will still be there when I wake tomorrow.

JUNE 10 2025

At one point talking to ____ I had the trippy visceral feeling that I was talking to myself.

JUNE 13 2025

In the car to Montague I realized I love these people.

JUNE 15 2025

I’m crying but I’m so happy. It’s such an exquisite type of happiness. I can’t express it very well but I will try: it feels like my whole life, I had been playing a silly game with myself of denying what was actually happening, right here and right now. And I don’t have to do that anymore. There is nothing to protect.

JUNE 16 2025

I am starting to think Buddhism was this cult that recruited people to experience stream entry and awakening just so they wouldn’t be alone. Because you could feel insane and lonely if you were the only one in the world who experienced this. With friends, with sangha it’s better.

JUNE 17 2025

Willpower is tentative when we are together.

JUNE 19 2025

Heartbreak is a door, a thin path situated between love and grief, a paradox you are forced to hold until it splits you right down the center.

JUNE 21 2025

Let’s assume it is all hormones, the suffering from this past week. What do you make of the fact that such small molecules can give rise to entire swaths of subjective experience we find beauty, meaning, pain, desire, and all sorts of emotions in? What do we make of the fragility of our hallucinations and the ease with which they are manufactured?

…

My life is full of foolishness. The foolishness gives rise to pain, always. That’s why I feel my life is so painful. I started off more foolish than those I view as living straightforward lives. I do not know if I have sinned or somehow brought this upon myself. But I know everything comes from somewhere; it doesn’t just appear.

…

You’ve got to find the ways in which you’re stupid. As in, what is required for you to really learn a lesson, when a pattern appears in your life what is its lifecycle like, how many times does it have to happen, what has to happen for you to be able to break it—does it require feedback from your friends, does it require prolonged periods of solo meditation and introspection, does it require hitting rock bottom so the consequences seep into your bones, does it require a logical argument with papers and facts, does it require the right poem or song?

My door has always been pain. For some reason I need to directly experience it, and enough of it, to change how I approach things. I’m like a fish you have to tire out in the water before you can catch it: I will not go down without a fight.

…

Exist from center and don’t lie to yourself. The rest will figure itself out. The world is not so small, the population so limited, that the need arises for you to smooth over the edges so perfectly to make nice with people who do not really understand you.

JUNE 25 2025

I turn away from tenderness when I cannot love you without betraying myself.

JUNE 28 2025

Observing, observing. Deciding, deciding—it seems that is all I do, other than write. But they are intimately connected processes. Paths I take towards clarity. There is no greater gift than realizing I don’t know something and putting in the work to discover the answer. The more challenging and interesting the question, the sweeter the fruit.

JULY 4 2025

Why can’t we all get along, naively I ask. I am well aware of the impossibility of it. And yet, I have to ask. My hopes have to take the form of questions to stay alive.

…

All this obsession about things becoming other things. I love writing but I wish I didn’t feel like I had to do it. I wish I knew what I thought or how I felt without using so many words to come to them.

JULY 7 2025

Moments of brilliance punctuated by trepidation. That is the way you live, bursting forth. No one can keep up because not even you know what is going on, you are always in the business of figuring it out.

…

No more being presentable. It doesn’t suit you. That’s for people with insurance policies and 401(k)s, maybe even Roth IRAs—you are a hot cycling mess, a circus of pain and involuntary expression; a beautiful, beautiful pinhole of hope and delusion.

…

Why do I seem so happy when I am deep in my grief? The ecstasy in grief, and the grief in ecstasy. Maybe because they are both a celebration in not hiding.

…

People are self-sustaining ecosystems, microcosms…what makes them awe-inspiring, what strikes me, is how admirable qualities in them seem to support themselves and come alive through presence, speech, action. They can interact with you, and you them. And even when you don’t see them for a while, they’re still like that. Holding their values, wearing their personality. There’s a sort of object permanence to their aliveness and radiance. Their goodness springs from an ever-renewing geyser, like solar flares do from that glowing orb we call the Sun.

…

Despite it all, I love my life. God, it’s such a mess. But so rich.

JULY 10 2025

I could die today, I swear I could. I need nothing more. I am complete. I am part of it all.

…

To write I need to enter a trance, I need to find a fragile perfect contraption suspended like aerogel and enter it—a portal to Other that disappears if you blow on it too hard. Find a tentative bridge and cross it. The context is everything, the context is necessary.

JULY 13 2025

You can let it in. Even if it hurts there can be love.

JULY 16 2025

My moods, my certainties, my visions, my speech. None of it stays intact, stays solid long enough for anyone to hold. I can’t pass it around like a Sunday quiche. Instead it is pathetic and crumbly like a day-old scone, or a cracked clay tablet, both of which yearn to be drowned.

…

I’m afraid. If I accept I am already the person I have aspired to become, I may stop changing. But isn’t this a typical abusive cycle? Oh, Carmen. I wish I could love you, the way you love other people and keep yourself up thinking about them. I wish I could love you the way you love a man. That is to say—religiously.

…

These hours in the middle of the night when I write and break. They are my most precious hours. I would give anything to write better, to keep improving. If I skip even a day I grow unsettled, itchy, uncomfortable. I need to confront myself daily to maintain civility and integrity. Or else I feel like a sleepwalking liar, I feel like everyone else—those who don’t write like an addict, at least.

…

Maybe loving others is a roundabout way of coming to love myself. If I can love ____, see him as a sweetheart who just says clumsy, hurtful things without thinking sometimes, whose imperfect actions don’t diminish in the slightest his lovability, his potential to be accepted and loved by me—then maybe I am okay, too. Maybe […] others can still love me, the way I love the people who have hurt me. And that is okay. It doesn’t have to be corrected, it doesn’t have to be changed. My laugh can be one of ____’s favorite sounds in the world. She’s telling the truth. She can tell the truth. Life is something we create together and share. You coward, look into your own light. You are blind and a tyrant of perception, in the wrong direction.

…

____ said today, ”One of your biggest strengths is how you hold attention on who’s in front of you […] You have so much interest and patience to truly connect that it feels like you are deeply fascinated by who is in front of you. Like you’re inviting them out of hiding […] it’s like admiration of the darkness.”

JULY 17 2025

Love is the destination of all emotions.

…

Every frame is made anew. Every moment fresh. Spring, spring, spring. All the seasons in every moment. How could I ever be bored? How could I tire of this?

JULY 18 2025

It is getting harder and harder to fool myself. A few journals ago I called it the “bitterness of taking shape.” Realizing all those possibilities that seemed open to you and eagerly awaiting your activation in youth have fallen away. That you are no longer a seed, or an unhatched egg able to entertain the fantasy of becoming anything because you are still nothing and getting away with it. I am becoming myself and for the first time I am not getting in my own way; I’m letting it happen.

JULY 20 2025

The jungle has not been kind to me. One thing it never does is hold back.

JULY 30 2025

I am so happy it feels like a mental illness.

JULY 31 2025

At times it feels as if my luck will never run out. I am getting away with something, something real good.

AUGUST 1 2025

Figs in August. What more could you want? It’s become the season all my fears can be viewed obliquely.

…

Frieren has great cogsec because she doesn’t even let the demons talk. She knows they only deceive. Good cogsec is being able to tell when the vibe’s off and reducing contactable surface area, not letting yourself be further entranced, hypnotized, or convinced. In this sense rationality is evil. They can convince you of anything with enough footnotes and papers.

…

If I love you, it’s because in some way we are the same type of bastard.

AUGUST 5 2025

Nothing in these journals is publishable right now.

…

There is no depth in endless novelty, but there is infinite novelty in depth.

…

When someone new enters my life I find myself asking if they are good for my writing, or bad for it. Not because I am to use them or commit some transaction; I simply cannot afford to lose focus. One slip of the pen and I lose days, with not a single salvageable line to show for it. When I love the wrong person I end up with material, but with the stipulation that I won’t be able to write about it until those days are far behind me, until the mortar has completely hardened in the crevices of my pain and it has become a long and calcified thing.

…

It takes a certain type of mind to extrude words, to enjoy sitting at a desk for hours a day barely moving, mostly zoning out to ever so often let an idea seize you into motion.

…

I am in a hole nine years deep with a view you would only be able to see if you also went that far for that long. What I touch isn’t mine but the passage to it is.

…

There’s an unserious attitude you can bring to life once you’ve glimpsed emptiness. Or the idea that all of this lies on a particular layer, a thin stratum that can be shut off at a moment’s notice. It all feels so light afterwards, like a feather on the back of a bird. Consciousness in the third inning.

In no particular order, here are some observations two months out:

• Some of my neuroses came back (maybe 20% strength instead of a full return) and I was really relieved. It was like seeing an old friend. I’ve never been so glad to be slightly neurotic. They felt different though: they occur more as habitual “suggestions” triggered by specific contexts/schemas for how I should behave, like gentle bids for my attention in the form of push notifications, instead of “DO THIS OR YOU ARE DOOMED” flashing panic bedazzled Vegas billboards, which is how they used to feel. They’re a lot more manageable in the moment (which looks like shrugging my shoulder and deciding—eh, it’s not a big deal) and in general when I want to uproot/work with them directly so they don’t keep arising. I expect them to keep declining in strength over time with more meditation and untangling.

• Spaciousness in all directions is still there. My surroundings feel airy like cotton candy or an impressionist painting. I no longer feel like I’m going to fall through the floor, probably because I have walked enough in the last two months to train my brain and body into believing the ground is, contrary to their suspicions, actually solid, but it does feel like I’m situated in some arbitrary point in space. Lightness by default is really enjoyable, especially when compared to the bodily heaviness of depression or rubber bouncy ball contractions of anxiety.

• Time is still strange. I will start an activity and often find that twice the amount of time I would have guessed has elapsed. I’m still late to everything. Got it down to ten minutes late instead of twenty, and luckily none of my friends have chewed me out for it yet, but I hope to one day train myself to be on time again.

• I am worse at certain specific cognitive tasks (such as those that require a laser beam of attention), multi-tasking, and rapid task-switching. I’m less eloquent and less sharp, but my attention is more relaxed, diffuse, and poised to handle surprises. Nowadays a friend will ask me to explain something and an unclear, unsatisfactory answer comes out of my mouth. I express what immediately comes to mind, but I haven’t run the search on my whole mental landscape to find what I would consider the most eloquent and optimal answer. This used to come to me easily in the moment, but now happens hours or days after when I reflect on how I could have handled the exchange better. I’ve learned to be okay with this and to save the eloquence for the writing.1 They’re not looking for the best answer I could have given, and a conversation is just volleying interests back and forth.

• I still experience little to no social anxiety. People feel viscerally “safe” to me in a way they never felt before at baseline. They drain my social energy less and I can socialize for 6-9 hours a day before feeling like I need alone time to recharge. Socializing has historically taken a lot of energy so this was really strange and novel to me. I had a “Wait, is this how extroverts feel?!” kind of revelation and tried to push it all the way to find the limits to my new capacity, the way waking up, say, to find my grip strength had tripled would tempt me to grab and squeeze random objects. This was one reason I was socializing so much, but another was—and I have nothing to back this up—I have a hunch that certain meditative shifts open up a new critical period for attachment and it felt important for me to surround myself with people in the weeks after to concretely and non-verbally demonstrate to my emotional system that people were safe to be around. I do think this worked. After about 2 weeks, I felt like I had socialized enough. I learned that I love hanging out with people, but in many cases I love getting lost in my thoughts, curiosities, and writing more, and all the socializing didn’t leave enough time for that. Hence, I’m still introverted and had to dial back—not due to strict energetic constraints like before, but prioritization of what I value. It’s nice to know I at least have the capacity.

• Emotions are weird and different. I feel them almost entirely in the body now, and to make sense of them I have to poke around and translate into words (“Is it this I’m feeling? No not quite…how about this?”). Before, I could tell you exactly what I was feeling at any given time and trace the source quickly. The amount of inner clarity I used to have is bewildering to me now. It was a byproduct of my compulsion to make sense of my experience, analyze it, put it in words. Since that has relaxed, I give myself more space to just feel and not need to make sense of things. I’ve been journaling less. It’s frustrating though, being bad at a thing you were really good at before even if it was for slightly unhealthy reasons. It doesn’t help that things like IFS now seem entirely nonsensical because, what self? What is there to defend? Why are you dividing yourself up into parts?

• I enjoy music less now. I’m a bit bummed by this, because I’ve been obsessed with listening to music my whole life, but I think this may be for the better. Before, it used to strongly emotionally hook me and my attention would contort around it, resulting in full body sensations, frisson, feelings of meaning and catharsis. To a large degree, I was using it to regulate my nervous system (e.g. if I was down, I’d either lean into sad music to process those emotions and resolve the discomfort, or put on upbeat music to give me more energy). Now…it’s hard to describe, but it’s like music is just…sound now? And I pick up on the sounds as “one among many things going on in the environment” the way I would pick up on honks or bird chirps, but they’ve lost much of their magnetic draw and command over my attention. I still really enjoy it, but I depend on it less and regard it more neutrally.

• Still stand by the 90% reduction in suffering claim. I’ve never been happier as a baseline. I’ve been hypomanic, but that felt brittle. This is more of a resilient peaceful contentedness, and my conscious experience rests on a feathery bed of that. Many days it is uneventful. It often looks like waking up feeling like it’s a wonderful day for no reason other than the fact that it feels so. I usually experience a mood dip before my period, and I had a bit of that, but I also had a moment where I had a headache and was grumpy from being tired, but I still felt really good. Like, I realized that being in pain or discomfort was just another experience I could have in the range of conscious experiences available to me in this life. So both of these things were true: I was in pain and discomfort, and I was happy as hell to be here to experience the pain and discomfort, and this was possible because I wasn’t resisting it. Sometimes it’s like: Oh, this is the good part, and it’s beautiful. And this is the bad part, the tense part, the nervous part, and it’s beautiful too.

This is the first piece in years that I’ve written on Substack, for Substack, instead of on Twitter to be cross-posted here after the fact. There are several reasons for this: one being that it is the most personal one I’ve written to date and the public town square of Twitter doesn’t feel like the right place to put it, two being that it is the longest one I’ve written and I’m really pushing the limits of the long tweet format and the endurance of my followers’ thumbs, and three being that I no longer need to trick my brain into thinking I am composing a casual tweet to a group of friends in order to write. I will just say what I mean to say, without hiding behind plausible deniability or the assurance that my internet friends will receive my writing kindly. That is, after all, how I am choosing to live from now on: completely bare.

This post was written while listening to champagne problems by Taylor Swift.

I went on a meditation retreat a bit shy of two weeks ago. I say “went on,” but I really meant I did a combination of spectating and helping out, and was much more a staff member than a participant, but the details aren’t important. What matters is that on the last morning, during the last sit, I experienced what felt like a shift into a permanently new state of experiencing the world.

I could say a lot about what’s different, especially the good things. I could tell you about how it feels like there are no boundaries to my awareness, which now stretches infinitely in all directions like I am in a vast open space instead of my own room, the way every particle of my surroundings feels airy and any solidity of objects I perceive is dubious at best, the way it feels like 90% of my suffering is gone, how I am in a state of flow constantly and there is no “me” doing things and instead things are just unfolding on their own and I happen to be a curious observer, and how socializing is now effortless and I have no semblance of a social battery despite being a lifelong introvert. How colors are more vibrant, the world feels softer, and my body is overwhelmed with sensations of love and beauty from the moment I wake up to the moment I close my eyes to sleep, even when I don’t meditate, even when I don’t do anything.

But the most notable difference is probably that I feel the absence of a central node in my experience, the thing I used to consider “me” which was actually a ball of tension located roughly at the back of my head. This corresponded to an entity that would see things happening in the world and take it personally in some way, and feel a sense of ownership of what was being experienced. This ranged from the conventional definition of taking things personally (like being sensitive to criticism because it felt like it suggested something inherent about me) to subtle nonverbal motions like flinching from an uncomfortable stare or grasping towards shiny goals. This had slipped away suddenly and quietly, leaving my head completely quiet.

All of this was fun, novel, and exciting for about exactly six days. What’s more peculiar is that on day seven, none of that stuff went away, but my body started freaking out, because even though every aspect of my life was changed for the better and I even got a graphics upgrade to boot, it dawned on me that I would never again be able to experience reality as the old version of myself. The full weight of the transaction became apparent: the price I paid for being in this wonderful state was giving up the experience of and belief in my existence as a separate self.

It feels like she literally died. Not like, I took some psychedelics and my sense of self went away and I feel one with the universe but it will wear off in six hours and even if I have an afterglow it will be gone in one week max and then I’ll have my old eyes back. No, this is more like if you took acid and it just never wore off. Eventually you have to wonder, “Holy shit, am I going to be like this forever?” The lack of control and inhibition, the vibrant colors, the overwhelming emotions, the fuzziness and uncertainty, the feeling of being completely naked before the world like a child that had just been born—it was all too much, especially when I remembered how life used to not feel like that. I was assured that it wouldn’t be this overwhelming forever, that I would adjust, and I believe it, I do, but I’m not quite there yet.

I had experienced many “ego deaths” from psychedelics and meditation before, even watched that ball of tension corresponding to the self relax itself in slow motion with stunning clarity on a previous retreat—enough to alter my worldview and convince me that something like “awakening” is real and worth pursuing, but not deeply and persistently enough to have to grapple with the irreversible loss of how I used to filter reality and move about the world. There is a big difference between knowing the state of living without a sense of self is possible, and having that become your stable reality.

It feels almost exactly like grieving the loss of a family member or close friend. I had always struggled to view myself the way my friends seemed to, found myself habitually perplexed by what seemed to draw them to me. But outside the confines of my self, I could suddenly see all the things that were lovable about me. I saw for the first time how I would be remembered if I had actually passed away on that last morning of the retreat, and how I had been loved all this time.

What was surprising was that I missed the bad parts just as much, that they did not diminish how lovable I was, in fact they were part of the package that was me. Like when your loved one passes away and suddenly that annoying habit that used to drive you up the wall is what you miss the most: oh, what I would do to hear you nag me one more time. The silly neuroses I held and used to navigate the world suddenly seemed endearing and uniquely me, but completely inaccessible.

Never to the same degree, for example, would I be able to fret that I was running late to a party, because my new state is devoid of urgency and I can set the intention to get ready which adds it to the queue of tasks in my unitary flow state, but it happens when it happens and I show up when I show up, which in actuality tends to look like rolling in twenty minutes late to the function. I would not be able to frantically clean before guests arrive because I’m afraid they’ll judge me for being messy like I used to, but I still do some tidying up because it makes the space nicer even if it takes me twice as long. I still have discernment and awareness of all the things that used to stress me out, but without the stress part. Losing the pinball machine contraptions of my suffering has been pleasant and freeing, but disorienting and anticlimactic because I used to do a lot internally to create the feeling of okayness, and I suddenly didn’t need to do them anymore. My neuroses were out of a job.

But at the same time, I had been in so much pain. My ego or “self” was never the enemy. She was more like a tired, languishing dog that needed to be put down, an old friend who was suffering immensely but would stay with me until the bitter end, but if you looked at her with compassion you’d discover a moral dilemma in letting her live. I miss her, but I’m glad she’s gone. I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind about this part. In the meantime, there is the grief and the sorrow. There is the remembering, and the impulses that no longer have their targets. I reach for the familiar guardrails and find none. I roll over in the middle of the night and do not find myself there. But in losing myself I gained the entire world and the deep knowing that I have never been separate from it, that any belief that I was, was simply a matter of having had my eyes closed to the luminous nature of reality in a silly game of peek-a-boo. There has only ever been this, and there has only ever been now.

I still have a personality. I still have preferences. From the outside, not much has changed: my friends note that I appear more relaxed and social, but nothing has emerged that wasn’t already in me in a nascent form. At first I was like, “What kind of friends are you if you can’t even tell I’m going through one of the biggest psychological and emotional refactorings of my life?” But I get it: similar to how it’s a bit hard to tell when someone’s high, some things just aren’t as apparent from the outside looking in. This is a show put on just for me. Only I see the loss, because only I directly felt my suffering, and the subsequent relief from it.

The title of this post is pointing to the fact that everything is better after permanently losing my sense of self, but I no longer have access to something specific that is dear and familiar like my old habits of mind. It is ultimately a trivial complaint, a champagne problem of sorts, but a problem nonetheless. Let me whine for just a bit longer—Heaven can wait until I am unburdened by what once was.

Stray thoughts:

• If you’re going through this, I’m sorry. But also congratulations. But also, sorry. It is a form of existential grief so deep you probably never even considered you’d experience it in your lifetime, because this phenomenon is specific, odd, and not something you can prepare for until it has already happened. Resisting it makes it harder, so I would focus on all the ways you’re bracing against experience and subtly relax into it. You don’t have to throw in the towel, but just notice the ways you’re putting up a fight and the unsatisfactoriness of it. And also focus on how okay things are even if you’re falling apart. Surround yourself with friends who still engage with you as if nothing had changed: they’re grounding even if they don’t understand what you’re going through. You’re not going crazy. You’re not going to fall through the floor. You are still you, just not the same one you’re used to. You will adjust, but it may take some time. And also, notice how it’s a little funny, although totally permissible, to be crying in paradise, and let yourself do it anyway.

• There is an alternative way I could have framed this piece: instead of focusing on the death part, I could have focused on the rebirth, or having been reborn. There’s a lot I could say about this because it’s one of very few opportunities to partially experience what it’s like to be a newborn but with the awareness of an adult, but I’m not in a state to talk about that right now. I’ll just say it’s peculiar, beautiful, and overwhelming, and I mean each of those three things deeply. It’s also a little embarrassing because I’m stumbling around in naïveté and incompetence, but I can let go of those with the help of patience and self-compassion.

• How do I know it won’t come back? It might, partially, I don’t know. But given that I’ve experienced this in the past and this time it feels different, my intuition tells me there’s a permanent element to it. Even if it does though, the grieving I have done won’t magically be retracted. The grief is there because of lingering attachment. After processing the grief, my relationship to my “self” even if it does return resembling the old one, will be cleaner and I will be able to welcome it without grasping or creating more suffering. So I’m not too worried either way.

• How did I trigger this state? I intentionally left out details of what practices I did and the retreat I went on because this was meant to be a report of my emotional state instead of a guide of how to get to this state yourself, but I understand it’s also helpful to know. I will probably write more about this separately, but in summary: I did 5 years of casual mindfulness meditation focusing on the breath, used psychedelics for emotional healing, then took up serious meditation (noting/dry insight then switched to concentration meditation/jhana practice) and that’s been going on for about 4 years. I’ve been on 4 retreats (two of which, including the latest one in question, were with Jhourney and the other two with Tucker Peck), each of them lasting 3-7 days, and was specifically in a two hour sit in 8th jhana when the shift occurred. My whole process has been slow and integration/therapy-heavy instead of grinding on the cushion so any meditative shifts I encountered tended to be pretty smooth (i.e. devoid of serious adverse effects). My daily journaling practice of 9+ years has been indispensable for emotional processing, and I also familiarized myself with a bunch of therapeutic modalities like Internal Family Systems, Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, Gendlin’s Focusing, Enneagram, imaginal work, knowledge about attachment styles/codependency/cPTSD/personality disorders/memory reconsolidation, and a million other things. I’ve never had a therapist or meditation teacher, though I feel well-supported by a community of practitioners and people who are teachers.

• Should everyone go through this? To be honest, I’m not sure. It is one of the most drastic system-wide updates to my consciousness I have ever experienced, maybe the single biggest one. The grief apparently doesn’t happen to everyone and even if it does it’s painful but temporary, and the benefits are impressive and permanent. It was worth it for me specifically because I grew up with extreme levels of psychological suffering and getting out of Hell has made life worth living. But most people I meet, although they still suffer nontrivial amounts, can live decent lives without ever getting curious about deep therapy/meditation/introspection stuff. I sometimes joke that I had to do a decade of emotional work to have a fraction of the well-adjustedness of my college roommate who grew up by the woods with Golden Retrievers and parents who loved her and each other. There’s also the matter of personal interest: if you think there’s potentially something there for you down this road, it might be worth checking out.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I’m going for a walk after this to admire the trees.

I was telling my friend Jack yesterday about how I didn’t know I was good at writing until last year when several pieces of mine went viral. He seemed really surprised by this and I, taken aback by his surprise, tried to figure out why I never think of myself as good at a thing even when people tell me so. Basically, what do I even think makes someone good at something? And I realized that I never view myself as being on a spectrum of competent to incompetent; instead I use a spectrum of how much clarity I have about something, how much I can understand it and explain it to others so they know what I mean. Once I adopted this new definition, I realized that maybe I am pretty decent at it after all. He joked that I have this ability in conversation to pinch zoom into anything and summon more details at will, just keep going in pixel perfect clarity and reproduce that in words. And I really liked that. Thanks Jack.

Real competence is having clarity around a subject, interest, or skill. Signs of having clarity include being able to express ideas in writing, teach how something works to others, or apply your understanding to execute a high quality project that adds value to people’s lives. I find looking for signs of clarity or understanding a lot more useful for assessing competency than looking for whoever is most hyped up or admired. Highly competent people tend to naturally be admired and sustain a reputation of being competent because they have the substance to back it up, but the people who invest heavily in impression management, capitalizing on hype, and making the right friends who will say good things about them to other people usually perform worse long-term (on their projects and in maintaining the reputation they engineered).

Competence is a socially desirable trait and there are incentives to game it, or create the impression that it exists even when it doesn’t or that there is more of it than there really is. Hence why adjectives like “cracked” quickly fade to mean nothing about the person’s actual competence to be basically a “thumbs up I like this person” indicator, and people like to engage in personal branding and LinkedIn theater in online spaces where audiences are mostly strangers or people on the edges of your social graph and real competency can be harder to verify.

Clarity on the other hand is very hard to fake. If I ask you questions about something you claim to be an expert in, you should be able to break it down for me even if I’m starting at zero knowledge. I’m talking basic questions (I’m not trying to pull any gotcha’s by asking questions I secretly already know the answers to and holding them over your head). If you say you’re a tennis coach I may ask about what type of people tend to hire you for help, any patterns you’ve noticed among them, your guesses for why you think those patterns exist, how you discern which strategy to use and when to help them learn tennis better, or any other question that asks you to recall incidents that required a mix of strategic discernment and intuition. If you can answer such questions well and your explanation matches or can clearly refine my understanding of how that thing works in my head, that’s a good sign.

I also notice that their demeanor reveals a lot: a highly competent person receives these questions and shares thoughts in a calm and matter-of-fact way, as if they were checking their notes to find an answer for you, and they get excited or engaged when you ask a question they don’t have an answer to because they’re curious too. There’s a feeling of being grounded by genuine interest in what they’re working on or learning about, and a lot of humility in how they approach it. They don’t care if you view them as an expert or not, because they’re not trying to manipulate your impression of them. They just want to work on the things that make them feel alive and find others to do it with them.

In contrast to that, someone who flounders when they don’t know the answer to a question you’re asking or defensively switches the topic of conversation probably isn’t that genuinely interested in what they’re doing or is deathly afraid of being “found out” (assuming of course you’re not questioning them adversarially to make them feel threatened). When I notice this I don’t call it out because it’s kind of cruel and impolite to poke someone who’s already wincing from themselves, but I do notice it as strange and remember them as being not that authentically aligned or good at the thing.

I want to mention it’s okay to not be “good” at something. You should find the things you enjoy and do them and not pay too much mind to people who are trying to recruit you to do things you don’t authentically support. If you discover for example that what you really want to do is make music and you’re willing to take an unrelated job that pays enough to support your lifestyle but takes very little time so you can devote yourself to music outside of it, and the whole configuration of your life gets you the things you value in the order you value them, then who cares if you’re bad at it? You’re living the life you want. And even if you haven’t figured it out, it’s okay to be anxious or not sure of yourself or need time to figure out what you really care about.

But at the same time, competence is real and beautiful. It’s powerful and worth aiming for. It can push the edges of what we know, it can pull new things out of nothing by being extremely intentional or strategic or fluent in a domain. It’s a very sharp but fluid and intuitive knife that not everyone can wield, and at times can even be employed in harmful ways, but we cannot deny that its existence makes the world better for everyone. I admire the efficiency of Tokyo’s metro system and how it can accommodate six million people a day. I love eating bread that has been baked well. I love watching movies that make me question how I view reality through masterful cinematography and storytelling. I love working with people who know, with stark clarity, what they’re doing and why. Clarity, to me, is a sign that you cared enough to navigate through the haze of a chaotic world that came with no built-in instructions and decided to make this life your very own, and I deeply respect that.

I'm getting better at putting my stuff on Substack now, so I want to make sure it’s here as well for people who recently started following. As of the time of this repost, I’ve passed over 9 years of daily journaling and am even working on scanning them all. I’m doing this for digital back-up reasons and also because I want to feed all the entries into AI and see how good it is at therapy when given almost a decade of unfiltered personal context and thoughts. I don’t think anyone has done this yet, and I’m excited to see what happens.

There aren't that many things I've done that consistently for that long. It's probably tied with brushing my teeth or something else equally mundane, but unlike a hygienic chore that doesn't compound, writing has changed my life in major ways. Journaling has occasionally led to tweeting and tweeting has led to meeting all of you, making some wonderful friends, and even meeting my current partner. And those are just the easily observable changes. Just as precious is what writing has done for me internally—given me the space and tools to regulate my emotions, nurtured ideas in their earliest stages when they are most in need of care, and taught me how to make sense of the world (which always felt dizzying and overwhelming) on my own terms, at a pace and in a way that preserved my dignity and left me lighter at the end of the day. You know that quote, "the only way out is through"? Well it doesn't tell you *how* to go through, so you have to figure out the means yourself. One of the things that really worked for me was writing.

When I first started journaling, I was a depressed student having panic attacks and constant suicidal thoughts. My mind was a terrible place, and I was fully trapped in it, because I sure as hell wasn't in my body. I was sleeping 4 hours a night, overcommitted to academics and extracurriculars, and suffocating under the weight of others' (and my own) expectations.

I learned what a "bullet journal" was from Tumblr where girls would share photos of meticulously designed spreads decorated with gel pens, stickers, and washi tape. I thought it was a good way to stay organized, since my workload was so high at the time I could barely function from keeping track of all the things I needed to do. So I started writing to-do lists and daily schedules. I found this super practical and helpful, but over time I also added my inner thoughts, what I did that day, and quotes from books that inspired me.

I started writing down every thought and feeling that occurred to me, and it turns out my subconscious really needed that. It needed a place where it could run wild without any filter, so I would let it. I'd be having a mental breakdown, tears streaming down my face, pain bursting out the seams, scribbling crazed chicken scratch in my journal, because it kept me here. When I was wildly dissociating, the act of writing gave me an anchor. I could still be a part of "this" world, because whatever overwhelming emotion I was experiencing inside, whatever I wanted to repress or irresponsibly let loose, was acceptable outside of me, on these pages. It proved to be a healthy outlet for unhealthy impulses.

After a couple years of this, it was easy to pick up patterns in my mood, relationships, and thoughts. It's harder to deny you're deeply sad when you have years of journal entries saying so. Having a verifiable record of how you really felt at any given moment in time is great for reflection. I don't re-read my old entries as much as I used to, since there are more to go through now, but I do go back to reference specific events or periods if there's something I want to confirm.

Writing also taught me to sink deeper into the present moment. To write about something, you need to pay close attention to it. Because you're capturing a snapshot of a fleeting moment or feeling in the world, storing it, and reproducing it in words with a pen. If you don't pay very close attention to how the imprint rests crisply in your awareness, even more gets lost in translation across mediums. So you need to be present. To the wind on your cheeks, the chimes two houses down, the hunger that cuts a little. Say someone looked at you. How did they look at you? Was one eyebrow lifted? How big were their pupils? Did they blink? How long did they look at you before blinking? Hey, are you really here? Journaling is all a game of telephone. Are you listening to the message?

I became just a vessel. When I am faithfully reproducing an external event, even though it was perceived through my eyes uniquely, with yes, my own biases coloring the whole thing—I do not feel the weight of my own presence in transmitting it. There is just the perception. "This is what I saw" meets "This is what I want to live on from what I saw: what I found precious, or curious, or annoying. This is what moved me." Like netting a cluster of fish from a larger school that keeps swimming and swimming.

Another thing writing has taught me is how to think clearly, and for myself. I did not realize I had no original thoughts of my own until I started writing everything that came into my mind and realized that most of them were anxious ruminations or recycled arguments from ideologies that capitalized on my emotional vulnerabilities. If you do not know the source of your ideas, they are likely being twisted in translation and you are doing someone else's bidding. Writing taught me to trust my direct experience. I can read ideas, but I will not let them influence me before squaring up with my direct experience. If my experience is limited, I will get as close as I can to the experience of people who know more than I do, or try to see it for myself. Otherwise, you can end up 800 levels deep in a thought dungeon fighting a holy war against abstractions. You will feel alive this way, but burn up in the process. The fire has to be lit from within, shielded and whispering like a candle, to keep going.

I've arrived at a content relationship with journaling. I used to try to record every detail of my day. The conversations I had, the places I went, the weather. I was really afraid that if I didn't, the life I lived would just disappear without a trace. I was obsessed with leaving a legacy. The thought of that is silly now. I think it's great to make things that outlive you, especially if they are for the benefit of others. But the way you do it isn't through being neurotic about your own existence! I have fewer anxious thoughts than ever now. I write because I want to, because it's a joy. I use it as a tool to remind myself of intentions, write poetic one-liners, doodle. My journal feels like an old friend of mine. Doesn't matter what I say or do, it's just nice to be together.

Looking at the dedicated shelf I have for my journals, I'm at about 30 full ones. Graphic designer Michael Beirut filled 85 notebooks over 26 years, and he's still going. I'm sure I will get to those numbers someday, too. What's funny is we've settled on a similar rate of filling them: a little over 3 notebooks a year. I'd be curious if others have found the same.

Notes on writing setup and tools:

• As I switched from dysfunctional levels of mental rumination to more spontaneous expression via words and drawings, I switched from lined to unlined to give myself more freedom (tried grid briefly, did not work)

• I prefer hardback 5" x 8.25" with the elastic band that goes around, back pocket, and bookmark ribbon (Moleskine style), since I throw them into bags and don't like pages getting bent. I feel like Moleskine perfected the notebook size and design, but their paper quality is terrible nowadays (a lot of ghosting, or ink bleeding through to the backside of a page) despite being expensive, so I don't buy them. There's pretty much always a knockoff for half the price on Amazon that's somehow better quality. I used Huhuhero for years (they are like $7 but lined). Looking for my go-to unlined alternative. (At the time of this repost: I’ve been using PAPERAGE Blank Journal Notebooks and I’m quite happy with them. They come in a variety of colors and offer Moleskine features but with better paper quality, and at half the price.)

• Tactile sensation matters a lot, because when the writing experience is enjoyable I want to write more. For pens, I enjoy Zebra Sarasa Clip Gel Pen 0.5mm or 0.4mm. For a while I was really into the LAMY Safari, but the tip is a bit scratchy and it's harder to refill if traveling. For paper, I don't like too glossy (especially with gel pens, because it feels like it'll smear right off). I pay a lot of attention to the feeling of the pen meeting the paper. Ideally it's not too scratchy or too smooth so I get good traction.

• Journaling digitally has never worked for me. I think being on the computer is distracting, and it's also hard to easily jot down thoughts or draw diagrams if I'm sitting in a coffee shop. I hope to preserve the "sketch on a napkin" low level of friction. I tweet, but journaling and tweeting have very little overlap for me. I might take an interesting thought from my journal and expand into a thread, or paraphrase a post I write online back in my journal so I have a record of it, but they feel distinct for me (private vs. public). Keeping this distinction is important, because I need a space without filters.

• Any stickers I accumulate while using a journal get stuck on the front cover! Makes it easy to tell them apart, and it's a fun snapshot of what I was up to at the time.

• For archival purposes I measure and cut out my own spine labels from sheets of blank label stickers, stick them on completed journals, and date them. Makes it easy to read on the shelf. The reason why I have to do it manually is because I failed to find spine labels for the size I needed! LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks come with a few spine labels, but since they are meant for their own notebooks, which are larger than the ones I like to use, they don't fit well.

I may have more thoughts later, but that's all for now.

My charisma essay has been going around again, and a lot of new people have subscribed. If you’re new: Hello! Thanks for following along. To be honest, the reception made me nervous. I wondered if I’d set an expectation to keep talking about the same topics like relationships or social dynamics. There are plenty of Substacks talking about those already, and I don’t want to stick to a single theme since I have various interests.

This essay is in part a response to that: it’s a weed out mechanism for people who may be mistaken about what they signed up for. If you came because of my charisma essay *and* you like this, you will probably enjoy sticking around.

This post was written while listening to the Caroline Polachek Tiny Desk Concert.

Photo I took at the bookstore this week

(Trigger warning: mentions of horror imagery, abuse, suicide)

I'm pretty sure mind viruses are real. I've been doing a lot of reading recently, specifically poetry, and wanted to check out Anne Sexton. Her 1966 poetry collection called Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, so clearly very famous and critically acclaimed. Before reading, I looked into her bio and found out she lived a pretty sad life and died by suicide, but thought hey, that's not too uncommon for creatives and sad people can make good art too, let's read it anyway and see what happens.

The writing was good but I found the book disturbing. The way she writes is haunting. It disturbed me so deeply that night I had nightmares (I usually never have nightmares, the worst I get is stress dreams of mundane scenarios like standing in line at the store and a clerk is mad at me, or waking up late for a test because I still think I'm in school). I spent the whole next day aimless and depressed, unable to deeply read anything. I suspect the book installed some kind of mind virus that infected me. That same day I had a headache with light sensitivity (not related to the book) so I lied in the dark, and when I closed my eyes I saw horror images, like clowns and jumpscare faces you'd find on 4chan—decaying faces, staring at me, smiling, apathetic. I don't consume any horror content and I don't even have a fear of clowns, but they popped up anyway.

So I'm like, oh, I see now, demons are definitely real, and they very much exist in the mind, and I've got a case of them here. I tried a variety of tricks to get rid of them. Clearing the images away, replacing them with positive images like angels, and praying to God, but they wouldn't leave, and the fear only intensified as none of the tricks were working...so I had the idea to conjure the feeling of love, metta. And the images started melting away, because demons feed on fear, but they don't know what to do if I love them. It really is a powerful force.

Poetry can be a direct transmission of what's in one's mind, heart, and soul. And I glimpsed into something I should not have. After I warded off the demons, I read some Mary Oliver, which soothed me a bit, because her poems feel like praying; she talks about nature and delightful things. But I wasn't able to read easily for the rest of the day, all day actually, because my body was afraid—it was rejecting it for fear of contracting another virus. This would fortunately fade by the next day and I would be able to read again.

So now I think demons are real, and Anne Sexton was probably one, or possessed in some way, and she suffered from this most of all, which is probably why she killed herself. I don't make this claim lightly, and I am certainly not saying it's her "fault" she had or experienced a dark nature. Reading more into her biography, I learned she suffered incestuous abuse as a child and went on to molest her own daughter. She had bipolar and started writing at the recommendation of her doctor, who thought a creative outlet would help her cope. She was friends with Sylvia Plath, who famously killed herself, after which Sexton wrote a poem called "Sylvia's Death" which was mostly sweet but also full of jealousy that Plath managed to kill herself before she could. Sexton's daughter, the one she abused, would also go on to attempt suicide as an adult but fortunately survive. Even after being fully aware of how her mother had harmed her, and making promises to her own children that she wouldn't kill herself and leave them the way her mother did, she still succumbed to the impulse. Because demons and mind viruses are transmissible—across time, space, and generations. Their impact can be felt even after their hosts/sources are gone because they live in our minds, and if you have a mind you're susceptible, the way anyone with a body and immune system can encounter a virus.

To be honest, I'm not sure if we should be widely celebrating and promoting the works of people who killed themselves. Obviously, not all suicidal people produce dark or disturbing work, and even if they do, there are people who feel cathartically seen and helped by such things. The work can also, by all critical standards, be *good*. People are unevenly affected by stimuli. I saw and contracted something from her work that her huge literary fanbase simply didn't seem to. If they reacted to her work the way I did, it would not be shared. They would feel an almost moral imperative not to share it, like one does with an infohazard, but instead she's attained a legendary status in American poetry. I walked into a bookstore yesterday, and there it was: a collection of her poems, its cover turned to face me, on the shelf right below Mary Oliver's Devotions. I swear, the universe mocks me sometimes.

I want to note that not all mind viruses are bad—only that you are more susceptible than you think, and you should be very careful what media you consume because it could be influencing you in ways that are not obviously apparent. "Mind virus" is the larger category referring to transmissible entities that enter us and seem to have lives and agendas of their own. They transform us to do their bidding because they want to survive and spread. In Sexton's case, it looks like a chain of abuse and suicides. But there are good ones too, like dharma and metta and forgiveness, and there are packaged versions in Buddhism or Christianity which have survived thousands of years and harbor wisdom and reliable defenses against the dark arts. These can, when practiced in earnest, melt away trauma and trigger genuine personal transformation, *and spread to transform others as well for the better*. I think that's incredible.

If we are more porous and programmable than we think, this is actually news for celebration. Because it means you can change your life trajectory, personality, imagination, relationships, and pretty much anything with the right inputs and feedback loops. For example, if you listened to dharma talks every day for the next year I bet your baseline nervous system activation would be much lower, and you'd probably be more loving, open, and peaceful by the end of it.

You can do anything with the help of the right kind of mind viruses. Just be careful out there, because the world is teeming with them, and you can't always tell which ones are friendly.

Side note: I didn't want to include this in the main body of the essay, but the story of how Sexton got the Pulitzer in 1967 is amusing. The three judges that year were all previous Pulitzer winners themselves, and during deliberation they each ranked the six candidates. Sexton was dead last on two of the three lists, but because they wildly disagreed on who should actually get the Prize, she won by default. This made her career and is the reason why she's widely celebrated, and why I was curious about her work in the first place. Learning this made me trust the Pulitzer less, but those particular judges a bit more. Otherwise, I'd just be depressed thinking they were regularly pushing demons onto the bestseller lists.

This post was written while listening to Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed.

Photo: Valeria Lukyanova (@21valerialukyanova)

I love finding things I don't understand: music genres, philosophies, subcultures, or anything that I'm not fond of but others seem to love, even if the fanbase is small and strange. The more others seem to love it but I don't know why, the more curious I become. I think there's beauty in anything; you have to turn it around in your hands enough to catch the light just right, you need to find the angle that makes it effortlessly compelling.

When I stumble upon one of these self-contained worlds, I get this clear image in my mind: I see the outside of a rounded metal structure, maybe a spaceship, maybe a car. It's plastered in metal sheets all around, seamless and cold, and my job is to find the fulcrum—the weak point, the crack, the leverage point, the place where I can stick a crowbar into, give a light tug, and watch the whole thing come apart.

Once it's open, I crawl into that hole and sit inside. I appreciate all the inside jokes I didn't get before. I get to know my new companions and exchange knowing glances with them. A liminal space forms, not unlike the bar in Billy Joel's song Piano Man—nine o'clock on a Saturday, lights are low, strangers are spilling secrets, listen to the music, stay as long as you'd like. We are brought together by pretense, of course, that painting we like or birdwatching hobby we share, but are kept together by witnessing each other. People have cracks and fulcrums too, and we find a way in, a way to understand: why are you here, of all places? How did you end up here, what are you looking for? Am I like you?

When I dip back out of these little worlds, my surroundings are familiar but different—it's like a dial has been turned somewhere far in a back room by a sneaky production assistant, and the room takes on a subtle sepia tint. Or maybe voices now have a bit of reverb, or the objects seem so light they could float away. It's subtle and you can't put a finger on it exactly, but you know you carry it everywhere with you now, you can't turn it off, you can't see the world the same anymore. You "get" something you didn't used to get, and the knowledge sits deep in you, a felt kind, even if you never bring it out. You feel a sense of appreciation and camaraderie for this new thing, for showing you a different way to exist in the world.

The joy in being open to experiences lies in allowing yourself to be changed by something unexpected.

A lot of people have had the experience of not "getting" a music artist until they were older, or they fell in love with someone who listened to them, or some pivotal life event gave them the experience to relate to the music. These shifts from ignorance to understanding can happen naturally as life goes by. But you can make it happen deliberately. You can seek understanding, you can walk towards your disgust, you can find gold in the mud if you're willing to sift about.

But how do you find the fulcrum? How do you go from being an unaware outsider to a co-conspirator? My best answer for this is to find the smallest thing you can relate to. Even if you're overcome with disgust, even if it looks like you don't have a single thing in common with the members of a group. If you spend enough time searching, you'll find it. That tender, human part that would have made you just as susceptible to turning out like them. The same part that maybe makes you already one of them, even if you aren't aware of it yet. Underneath it all, we want similar things. To feel like we belong, to have a purpose, to feel safe. Their involvement is probably fulfilling a need for them that is hard to get elsewhere.

Mukbang streamers eat copious amounts of food alone but find company in their online audience. VTubers find that having a digital avatar allows them to be their authentic self without revealing their real faces. Many ASMR fans struggle with anxiety or insomnia and find the videos calming. Gaming addicts crave a world with clearly defined objectives, a unique purpose, and immediate feedback. It’s not always that deep though. Catchy jingles and cat pictures are just nice, it doesn’t have to be serious! You don't have to participate in any of these to understand what would compel someone to care about them. And once you understand, it's hard not to find the same things endearing.

If you find it hard to relate, then borrow someone else's loving gaze. Listen to what music critics say about an artist, about what separates them from other artists. Find what fans say in the YouTube comments, what emotions are evoked, what the music means to them. If something is popular, don't immediately dismiss it—if anything, you should trust it more, believe you're in for a treat, because if it's enjoyed by that many people, chances are that includes you. I am always suspicious of people who wholeheartedly dismiss pop music because it's for the "masses". It's actually really hard to gain a big audience. You have to resonate with people, not just one or two, but millions around the world, many of whom you will never meet, who stumble upon you independently and decide they care about what you're making.

I don't remember when it was, but at a certain point, I decided to just trust other people. For the most part, they're not faking their interests. They're not faking their feelings. They're not hiding what makes them alive and excited, what gives them the will to go on. Their authenticity may be covered up by fear or social norms, hidden, but never gone, and if you get quiet enough, you can actually hear that they're screaming. They are telling you exactly how they wish to be seen and understood. But you have to be willing to listen, and you have to find the fulcrum.