Vicki T

While complicating the color palette she was using, Riley simultaneously simplified her language of forms. She all but eliminated squares, triangles and circles, and focused largely on stripes throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Stripes lend themselves easily to a study of repetition, which Riley perceived as essential to getting people to really look... See more

And you need to say to yourself, over and over: Do I like this?

When the answer is No, I really don’t like this , you get to act. You can pause. You can stop speaking. You can remove yourself. You can reflect. You have options.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I

... See more

But when you dismiss shame every day, every hour, you do end up feeling lighter and more carefree. You know you will expose who you are but you don’t care. You coax yourself out of tight spots now. You weather nerves with gentleness. You tell bright and loving stories about your foibles and mistakes.

Instead of moving from one plot point to the next like a doomed antihero, you notice that your shame is shoving you into bad situations you don’t want. You don’t have to choose those paths. There is no moral valence to your actions. Your desires aren’t embarrassing. As long as you’re not harming anyone else, you have full freedom to shape your life... See more

In other words, you no longer devote so many of your hours to being legible to others.

Life without shame — mostly without shame! — doesn’t make you perfect. It definitely doesn’t make you more attractive. (I’ve been swimming this summer and my hair, Jesus. Yes I wear a cap. I don’t want to talk about it, man.) But life without shame makes you so much happier, so much less anxious no matter what’s happening around you, so much less... See more

I spend almost no time with people I intuitively don’t like or am bored by, where I used to assume I should ignore those impulses.