loving the process

Only that nothing works out the way you plan, which is a blessing every hour. Life always takes a different form, if only because life will always be more imaginative — deeper, wiser, more surprising — than you are.

So I got my ass back into therapy. It was a slow, humiliating, expensive process, as the acquisition of self-awareness tends to be. All these heartbroken fascist wannabes are running around, yelling about how being “woke” is like some form of chemical castration. All it means is that you are becoming less of an asshole. That’s what therapy did for... See more

We all love the training montage in movies—those brisk two-minute sequences where the protagonist transforms from novice to expert while upbeat music plays. One minute they're struggling to do a single push-up; the next, they're ready for the championship fight.

Real life doesn't work like that. The actual training—the part where you build the... See more

the metrics, outward success, markers of “making it”, numbers, likes, popularity, visibility, praise or criticism or being ignored, awards, highlights, or trajectory that might come from what we make don’t matter much if we aren’t enjoying the process of making what we make.

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.

As the years unfold, you’ll see that all your questions aren’t so urgent. The only ones to care about are the ones you’ll never answer. And you don’t have to get caught up in your plans as you did when you were in your twenties.

When I was younger, I was skateboarding a lot. I was listening to music and skateboarding. There were two songs, that are widely different: DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt,” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.” And I remember skateboarding to them and they made me just stop. And the world felt so cool. I would look... See more

The project I'm doing is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have these thoughts. The essays are kind of just exhaust from the project. The work is growing emotionally and intellectually in such a way, and just going out into the world, talking to people, reading, looking at things, and becoming the kind of mind

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