Briana Wall

Leo leaned back in his stool, swishing melted ice around his glass, detective-style. “My ex-girlfriends are girlfriends to someone very different to me,” he said. “The versions of us that dated are a memory-version of me and her.”

“That’s exactly it! Your exes are these sort of time-capsules.”

that an instinct can trump your intellectual interpretation of it. Or that your interiority doesn’t have to feel like a calculus proof if you’d occasionally rather it resemble my cat’s fur blowing gently in front of a heater. A little unpredictable and disorderly, but ultimately much more enjoyable to be around. I think you can just trust yourself ... See more

It’s hard to let go of my instinct to fix myself when the opposite has so often shown me a path forward, or been celebrated. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that taking care of myself means knowing when to push versus trust, fight versus surrender. So many modern schools of thought seem to want to nudge us toward one or the other—perhaps... See more

The inexplicability of the gut is probably why some people talk about it as if it’s mystical. But I think what we experience as a “gut feeling” is simply us at our most honest—proof that some tucked-away part of our brain remembers everything, not just what we want to remember, knows what’s true instead of what we want to be true, and understands w... See more

I’ve been thinking a lot about these “gut feelings,” or the intelligence buried under our moods. They’re the instincts that don’t necessarily line up with our more intellectual frameworks, which is why following them can feel risky or chaotic (backing away from that piece, in the moment, would have felt like giving up). But when I think back to tim... See more

How could the same person take 15 hours to complete a shitty piece of writing that almost kills them and then one third of that time to complete a better version with almost no turmoil a week later? I could call this inconsistency an occupational hazard, but I think it’s much broader than that. Because I experience the same variation in my ability ... See more

Hyde might call a Maiden Funeral a form of “active forgetting”—an intentional and respectful loosening of one’s grip on the past in favor of embracing the present. In this light, I wonder if the anxiety I experienced on my final day in London was my subconscious reckoning with the fact that I was trying to move forward by going back, by refusing to... See more