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.

“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.”

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. 

This cartoon depicts ants hard at work storing supplies for the winter, while a grasshopper only sings, which gets him into trouble in the winter

But come the cold, his singing lifts their spirits. Many variants of this tale

Art is never valued, until it is invaluable

“The fairy tale acknowledges that parents do not always love and care for their children as they ought, that loved ones die and leave us alone and grieving, that evil is real and often powerful, and that violence and sin are present in our world. All these truths make grownups uncomfortable; we are eager to smooth over a child’s fears with comforting falsehoods.”