yes person for all things community, connection, & storytelling
It was not fun to walk around with my ghosts, despite what my positive memories wanted me to believe. I think this is because inherent in “revisiting” is the palpable reality that everything ends, the reminder that soon the way you are experiencing your present moment will be the past; it too will end.
That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — ... See more
A website is a container that shapes our work; a space where we can cultivate our own garden, planting seeds of ideas and watching unexpected connections bloom. This approach introduces friction – a quality Brown sees as necessary for meaningful creation: “More often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work... See more
I would tell myself to not believe the dramatic stories I've been told and sold (which were mostly white, cishet stories that never quite applied to me). I would tell myself to look closer to home, to see the smaller, constant stories of love. I spent yesterday building my father's altar o... See more
As a privileged white woman with progressive politics, I understand the frustration: we are generally good at seeing injustice, and we are generally bad at giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice. What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to “move on” fr... See more
No matter how much wisdom you gain from the pages of your favorite author, if you haven’t experienced the visceral events that led to that wisdom yourself, then it’s just knowledge. Sure, you can leverage the hard-earned wisdom of others to help you, but understanding only happens when you earn that wisdom in the tumultuous arena of real life.
A number of psychological theories have been advanced to explain chronic worry. One of the most prominent is called the avoidance model, which explains how worry can become obsessive and intrusive in our lives. This model argues that inveterate worriers replace thoughts of clear outcomes of problems, especially potentially catastrophic ones, with a... See more
What would group living, based on that definition, look like as a guiding principle in our lives—however we structure our homes? I think the first step toward that is building routines with others—like the ritual of a shared meal, as you mention—things you can do inside of a home and outside of one. I wanted to encourage readers to look for ways to... See more