Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
A good summary of the positives from leaving Substack
“Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
—Ibn Battuta
I love the thoughtfulness and transparency here with iA’s icon design. You learn as much from their process as their product.
One consequence of everything feeling thin & flimsy, is that it's really hard for complex emotions to form. They feel like sand slipping through my fingers, and won't manifest or grow roots.
For an emotion to successfully manifest in my mind, it has to be either super simple or super strong. This goes for both happy & sad emotions.
I still feel a lot of joy, love, and gratitude, because those emotions are really simple. They don't require a lot of intricate structure.
I have a harder time feeling anticipation, romantic love, a crush that gives me butterflies, "fun", anger, irritation, sadness, grief, loneliness, surprise, melancholy, and most other emotions.
This was crazy to see live. I’ve never seen such a frank discussion live on the air with someone so closely connected to a fallen regime, while govt buildings are still being burned, in all the chaos. Regardless of the political situation itself, this interview feels like it will be a historical artifact.
But please, let us not turn this heartbreak into something useful just yet. If we do, we will be tempted to walk in old ways. We will rely on tired words. We will make memes of ourselves. Easy, digestible phrases that fill a short term longing for solutions.
Instead let us truly bear witness.
Let the fog of confusion obscure our clarity for a time. To not know how – or where – we’ll live. To be fumbling and full of grief, because what we always counted on has been struck from our horizon. And we may never be as magnificent again.
“I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way? No, no, and no. I am not. If I did that, and then did it for 15 years before getting published, like he did, then maybe I would find out how close to David Sedaris (or my own equivalent) that I could get.”