always appreciate a body double / accountability partner / experience share-r but learning to be "on" for myself and when someone else isn't there to do [x] with me is so liberating. i've started / finished so many more projects, it's incredible "shower thoughts" time to grab a coffee solo, and being with other people is more enjoyable because doesn't have to be our "us-time" and my "me-time"
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Yep!! Something finally snapped last few years and I decided to stop screwing myself out of opportunities because I had nobody to do them with. One of the most difficult but positive changes anyone can make in their life
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i see solitude as metamorphosis. you need that time in the cocoon to really check in with yourself and the joy of that comes from how you'll gain a deeper understanding of yourself.
sometimes i spend SO much time with myself that i get SO BORED that I HAVE to venture outside of myself. when i say venture, i mean challenging myself in how i self- express which will in turn, nourish my interactions with others when i choose to seek company.
proceeding to create art, but trying new methods. going down youtube rabbit holes of things i am interested in so i can discover new references. cooking a meal without following a recipe and surprising myself. making the space i am in super cosy (candles, snacks on deck, music, blankets) going on long walks and picking up conversations with strangers through shared observations of life around us. watching music festivals/boiler rooms and dancing around my room like a mad man.
once you feel comfortable in being by yourself, you'll be more aware of what you need from your company and when you seek it, you'll be a lot more intentional about it and cherish it even more.
Oct 7, 2024
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i love being alone. i know who i am when i'm alone and i love myself when i'm alone. when i'm around people it's easy to forget and i get lost and aimless.
how do you share parts of yourself without feeling overexposed? even just sharing creative work makes me feel like it's not mine any more and makes me doubt the part of myself that went into making it. but i also feel so stagnant when i'm not putting anything out into the world. where is the balance? how do you deal with this?
Feb 24, 2025
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After sustained isolation and loneliness, spending time with other people can be a much-needed grounding, humbling experience
Invite people over! Hop on the train / in the car to visit a friend! Go to new places and meet new people. Start a movie club, meet up at a café, embark on an open-ended collaborative creative endeavor. Give yourself many excuses to get out of your apartment, and do whatever you've gotta do to put yourself in the presence of other human beings. It's good for regulating your emotional state and ego. It fills a certain part of you that may be empty without you even knowing it
This is especially true for spending time with people who are *different* from you: people who have different talents, people who do crazy drugs you'd never do, people who spend their time in different places than you, even people you might kind of hate! The contrast can be stressful but that's just because you're using more brain power to place yourself in relation to these other people in the moment. But the long-term payoff will make you feel whole, and the world will start making a bit more sense. And once all is said and done, the feeling of returning to your apartment, or of cleaning up and lighting a candle after you've had visitors of your own, will have made it worth all the while
Feb 2, 2025
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024