juliana ong

I once spent an unpleasant year studying torture in various countries where it is endemic and I was quickly shocked to learn that torture is not about pain. Pain is merely one tool used by torturers. It’s not even the most effective tool. Torture is about the psychological breakdown caused by the loss of control and understanding.

What I'm learning is that it is important to be decisive and go after what you want, but at the same time let go of wanting things to work out a certain way.

Some might describe this as not being attached to outcomes. I call this the willingness to let life surprise me, or the willingness to live in a world of 'maybe'.

I think about the relationships I’ve outgrown—because of my personal or political evolution—and how living in cities has meant I could let go of those relationships and form new ones. Whitney makes me wonder if that was the easy way out. I don’t think relationships need to be held on to forever just because they exist. Plenty of us have rightly... See more

And so the trick is, can you force yourself to be absolutely unsparingly realistic about what’s actually best for you?

I’ve come to believe the greater danger is sometimes tolerable and lukewarm mediocrity. This is because catastrophe forces a change, but mediocrity can keep you still. You don’t quit because things are “fine”, but that haze of “fine” can subtly eat away a decade, or even a whole life.

The problem was never that women found sex too casual; it was that they found it too unkind. Courtesy, attentiveness, respect for refusal, an investment in someone else’s good time—these are what I hear women looking for in their sexual utopias, and none of them require a diamond ring. The problem expressed in much of Me Too was not that committed... See more

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... See more

There isn‘t a clean way to get around the idea that personal expression is always at least in part performative. Expression is partly fun because it’s performative.

It’s also not like this type of behavior is a new thing. There has always been the type of person who is performative of their own interests or pursues their work because of the kind of... See more