Victoria Erickson has a good line on this: “When you’re deeply sensitive, love is ecstasy. Music is godlike. Heartache is a wide, somatic wound. Visual natural beauty is jewel-drenched, wild bliss. Tension and conflict are muscle tightening and toxic, straight down to the cells.” While I know that the sensitivity she describes is actually just an... See more

On one hand, I know the self is a made-up concept of the mind, that identity should be kept small, and that trying to pin myself down usually does more harm than good. On the other hand, when I sit down to write, I feel like every sentence disproves this

I like sprinting through the city streets at midnight while listening to sad music because it makes my heart feel like it’s being put through the washing machine.

Being surrounded by reminders of your patterns and past means you never have to define it

“Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”

I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and purposeful in the case that it helps someone else understand the mess of the human condition.

Zadie Smith: “He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”

I think the point of life is to feel deeply — mostly good stuff like love and pride, but also some bad stuff that broadens your spectrum of experience and allows you to better appreciate the good. For instance, I like sprinting through the city streets at midnight while listening to sad music because it makes my heart feel like it’s being put

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asking identity-related questions such as “who am I?” creates a layer of abstraction between emotion and perception that is largely just a distraction from action. Instead, it works better to just do. As Giannis Antetokounmpo once said, “When I focus on the past, that's my ego. When I focus on the future, it's my pride. I try to focus on the

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