Julia Pawelec

The most successful cultural critics of our digital age are simply a different kind of influencer, one who may sell a worldview rather than a skincare routine, but are selling something nonetheless.

Well, you need dirt to grow plants. A farmer I admire once wrote that 90% of his job was dirt management. Manage the dirt well and the plants grow themselves. Writing grows, too: Create a fertile field of exploration, fun, and inanity, and the rest will follow. Wuthering Heights , one of the greatest novels ever written in English, grew out of the ... See more

I don’t often carry my notebook, so if I feel the itch creeping up my sweater, I would write on a napkin, a receipt, a newspaper. Even a book. Sometimes deciphering a poem is journaling. Sometimes writing two lines is enough. Sometimes you need half a book to speak.

I wonder if we’d know what we do about who Sylvia Plath was, or Franz Kafka or Orwell, or even Emerson if it weren’t for their extensive journals and diaries. Recorded like memory capsules, in their voices with their own eyes. You may not be Kafka, but you possess the magic to write if you are lucky, so how can you do nothing about it? I’ve recorde... See more

The more specific we are, the more visible we become. This is the literal definition of attractive - you’re attracting. You’re sending out a signal strong enough for the right people to notice and move toward.

Projection thrives in the absence of detail, but connection does not. Sometimes, this desire isn’t even about the other person, but a defence mechanism. When someone is afraid of being seen as they truly are, they may seek out someone who can’t really look, or doesn’t require require truly seen themselves.

You date someone and notice how they treat strangers with curiosity, or how they read poetry out loud, or how they respond to uncertainty with steadiness instead of fear. Through witnessing someone up close, you realise: I value that. I want to be like that.