loving the process

Writer Hanif Abdurraqib has said: “Find a living, breathing lineage to make yourself responsible to.” I love this encouragement to locate ourselves within an artistic, spiritual or cultural tradition and build loving, accountable connections with our compatriots.

I feel my life has unfolded in a way that prepared me to do this work and along the way, especially so in the last decade, so many doors have opened that shouldn’t have and I feel the weight of the hands of all of my ancestors on my back urging me through them. So the essential part of this work is to show up. Show up when asked to represent my... See more

Having 'potential' in your mind, feels better than failure in reality. This ego-cushion prevents millions from creating their life's work. Once you feel it- physically- that cushion becomes painful, like a tumor you have to remove. And you only get it out one way. By identifying not with goals, but with output. You should feel dead inside if you... See more

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace,

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Back when I was feeling a imless and lost I used to read and reread something Cheryl Strayed wrote about writing: The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering... See more

The reality is that you will build many worlds throughout your lifetime. Look how many you have built already, only to walk away from them, or have them dismantled, or watch them collapse without your permission. You will play many roles, you will be many people, you will try on a lot of costumes, you will exert an enormous amount of energy to put

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