Agalia Tan

By drawing lines in the sand around your values, your expectations, your emotional well-being, and your belief systems, you’re not just protecting yourself—you’re defining yourself. You’re signalling both who you are and who you want your tribe to be.

Like girls, boys openly express their desire for genuine connections with others, including with boys. They reveal the human capacity for mutual understanding, care, and empathy and demonstrate remarkably astute abilities to read the human world. Yet as they reach middle to late adolescence and as expectations of manhood intensify, they begin to... See more

our sense of self is a collaborative fiction, drafted in the space between your gaze and my interpretation of it, and love has a way of making that fiction more generous, more daring, more alive. Each act of seeing draws up another hidden self from the depths

It’s the rent you pay to occupy space in my brain until this problem is nailed to your satisfaction. Sometimes I’ll do focused, dedicated work on the task. At other times I’ll let my brain do its subconscious thing, a looser more associative form of thinking. I’ll be thinking about it at some level on every dog walk and every bus journey.... See more

a daisy chain

Communication failures like these make for good storytelling where we, the audience, get to watch the characters stumble towards understanding. But you shouldn’t live like someone waiting for the screenwriter of your life to arrange a convenient resolution. Functional people don’t let things linger unspoken — they name what’s facing them out loud.

With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to... See more

the circulation of snackable, ‘life-altering’ content is way more than a quirky trend. It’s an embodiment of a much larger, manifesto-fication of personal beliefs in the digital era, where advice becomes typed and simplified for mass consumption.