Kayoung Heo

To research is to follow a scent. Sometimes you know what you’re looking for. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it starts with a single word you can’t shake, a quote you read in passing, or a flicker of an idea that has no shape yet, just feeling.

We collect articles about our field, buy the right equipment, make elaborate plans. We get lost in the mental masturbation of feeling productive without producing anything.

Perfectionism often wears the mask of high standards , ambition , discipline. It parades itself as virtue, a propriety. In reality, it is rarely about the pursuit of excellence but the terror of being perceived as inadequate. For so long, I wore my perfectionism like a badge of honor.

But here's what troubles me about this whole arrangement: we know belief isn't built on truth. It's built on repetition . The thoughts we return to, consciously or not, become something much more powerful than fleeting mental events. They become the raw material from which we construct our mental models —those invisible lenses through which we... See more

The world, I've discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air (petrichor, they call it, though no word could fully capture that particular alchemy of water and dust that smells like pure possibility), the particular green of new... See more

“By the time you finally act, you’re not just dealing with the original task anymore. You’re dealing with the accumulated weight of all the stories you’ve told yourself about it, all the shame of having waited, all the anxiety about whether it’s too late, all the self-recrimination about why you let it get this bad. The task itself hasn’t... See more

I am a thousand almosts, held together by hesitation; a gallery of repainted selves.