But blogging was the condition for doing Inkhaven, which I wanted to do because I was horribly lonely. So I made a Substack.

Nine months later, here we are with 100 posts and 100 subscribers.1

Feelings

How do I feel about this blog, and all 100 posts therein?

Well, I’m glad for the emotional processing I’ve done via my writing; it has been deeply and materially life-changing. But I think it’s a bit weird that I did it in public like this. But maybe I had to do it in public to do it at all.

It’s also made it easier to become close with people, because people know a lot of things about my psyche (both my personal experiences and my opinions on many topics) without me having to tell them, so we can just jump right into the deep stuff. I really like that. Blogging is a surprisingly good way to communicate with friends.

So overall I don’t know. Mixed feelings on the ‘emotional processing in public’ part.

Writing

Has blogging this much made me a better writer? Probably. I was already good at writing, but my sister says I’ve found my voice, which seems kind of true. And it’s definitely made me faster at finishing, if not at the writing itself.

If it weren’t for this blog, I wouldn’t be working on a book. I probably wouldn’t have just written 31 songs in 31 days. So those are both good.

Blog-post-shaped thoughts

Inkhaven forced me to start seeing every thought as a potential blog post. By the end, all I had were blog-post-shaped thoughts, and I just couldn’t stop writing and publishing posts. Blog posts were simply what happened in my life, like water flowing downhill.

I’ve hardly posted for the past month because every thought I’m feeling I’ve had has been massaged into song form. I’ve been trying to have song-shaped thoughts and the crowd out the blog-post-shaped ones. I did not previously know nor expect that the type of writing I did would so strongly influence the way I thought. Good to know.

Writing quickly

I guess I like a lot of the things I’ve written, for various merits they may have, but there’s no single post I’m particularly proud of. That’s probably because almost none of them took any significant effort, because I got so used to the fast turnaround – having an idea, writing, and posting all in one day.

I created this blog on November 1st, which makes it 280 days old, so I have posted more than once every three days, on average, for the past nine months. As of this post I will have a 41-week streak of posting at least weekly, and some weeks, like this one, I post just to keep it.

I think it’s valuable to be able to write and publish quickly, but after churning out a song every day the past month, I’m sick of going fast. I’ve learned the skill I was going to learn from that. I want to rediscover a slower way of creating.

Why am I even blogging?

One hundred posts and I am still not entirely convinced about this blogging thing.

My blog seems like a lost purpose. It was confused right from the start – I didn’t have a strong reason I wanted to do it, but I just kept going because I got momentum.

Maybe I hold onto this blog because I care about Inkhaven, about the community. But I’ll still have those things even if I don’t force myself to post every week, even if I never post on this blog again.

And maybe I want to be doing something else with my time – working on longer-term things, investing. Editing the dozens of songs and essays I already have.

I want the time and space to think more deeply about things before I publish. I want to write a book that’s actually good – while it’s useful to have the draft I churned out in a five-day sprint, it is also a pile of words that’s nowhere near being a book.

I don’t want to force myself to just write even if I have nothing to say. I want to write for reasons other than the external push to keep blogging – because I have something to say, or because I want to experiment with some kind of writing, or just because I want to.2

So, will I post next week? Will I ever post again? I don’t know.

Probably I’ll ever post again. But maybe I need to let go of the streak.

This is actually the third time I’ve tried to do a month of songwriting – in January of 2024, I managed to write 15 songs in 30 days, half of which were decent. In October of 2025, I wrote mostly little fragments, got one usable song, and then devolved into writing poetry for the last two weeks.

But those were both before I did Inkhaven, which taught me that you well can pull a piece of art out of yourself every fucking day no matter how sick you are, no matter how late at night it is, no matter how insipid what you’re putting down on the page feels to you. So this month I’ve written and recorded a song every day. Each one has words, an original melody, and instrumental backing, and is at least thirty seconds long.

Before this month, the process of songwriting felt like a black box to me. I had no insight into how I did it, why it worked when it worked. But if you do anything every day for thirty days, you (hopefully) eventually figure out how to do it.

Now instead of waiting a year for inspiration to strike, I can sit down with my notebook while way too tired, and within an hour I will have recorded a song with two verses, two choruses, a passable melody, and guitar or piano accompaniment.

How do I do it?!

Approaches

I have three basic approaches to writing songs: lyrics first, melody first, and hook first.

Lyrics first results in the worst songs (not catchy, musically confused, often trite or too on the nose), but it’s still my most common approach because I’ve been writing poetry regularly for twenty years, and so sitting down and writing a poem (to a middling standard) comes extremely easily. Then I just kind of vaguely sing the poem to myself until something close enough to a melody forms, add some chords, and call it done. But the melody is usually pretty nothing, and is often accidentally derivative of my own past songs.

Melody first is something I’ve only tried for the first time this month. I’ll write a riff (usually on piano) and then vaguely sing some words over it. I usually end up liking the riff but feeling meh about the lyrics. Still, this means I have an element that’s usable for the future, even if I scrap the lyrics!

Hook first results in the best songs by far, but it requires a bolt of inspiration that can’t be relied upon to come. I expect I’ll get better at coming up with hooks on demand (and probably already have) over time. By ‘hook’ here, I mean at least one line or phrase with lyrics and melody together, that’s good enough to get stuck in your head.

Topics

I just write about whatever is emotionally salient in the moment. A park, a piece of art, looking out my window. And then of course, people – I’ve written a few songs about my boyfriend, one about my sister, but also some about friends I don’t know that well who just grabbed me in some way. And… one about my neighbor across the street, who I’ve never spoken to, but see every day. I have a parasocial relationship with her, it’s fine.

In the third week, I didn’t have to work, so I decided I was going to write a 25,000 word draft of my book (previously mentioned on the blog) in five days. So I wrote 5,000 words a day while also writing a song every day. Two of the songs from that week are about how I was burned out and sitting at a computer all day was torture. Perhaps not my best work, but I’m getting the practice in!

Style imitation

I’ve had a lot of fun trying to imitate other styles. Two of my favorite songs came about this way, one inspired by Phoebe Bridgers, one by Mumford and Sons. I also did some melody layering directly inspired by Sufjan Stevens’ The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us! I wrote a cringe white person rap in the style of Macklemore’s Same Love. I wrote a parody of my friend’s very good band that got me to experiment with dissonance and nontraditional song structure. I did a little fragment in a classical East Asian style.

The problem is, my ability to pull off different styles is limited by my musical ability. As the old saying goes, when all you have is an acoustic guitar, everything sounds like a folk song. I can imagine a sick electric guitar riff, or an erhu, or a full band coming in on the chorus, til the cows come home, and still all I’ll have is my voice and guitar or piano. Frustrating!

There are so many music skills it would be useful to have and not enough time in a human life to master them. I guess the skill I really want is writing / arranging for a bunch of different instruments; I don’t need to be able to play them all myself. I am very far from having that skill, but not impossibly far.

Editing songs

Between my last songwriting month in October and this month, I wrote three songs. All of them are good, but also I worked on each of them for several consecutive days before the final version emerged – they weren’t perfect the first time. Knowing that I’m capable of editing songs has helped me feel okay writing imperfect or even bad drafts, which is super important when I have to do it so fast.

The song editing process (which I haven’t yet had a chance to do for any of my Songhaven songs) is roughly:

1. Identify parts of the song that aren’t working well (whether in lyrics, melody, or structure)

2. (Ask for suggestions from my loved ones and then summarily dismiss everything they suggest because it’s not My Vision)

3. Mess around with the problem areas until they feel right

There’s also the step of adding instrumentation. My first drafts generally just have a single plonk/strum of chords. But in the editing process I’ve written piano parts for some of my old songs, and my boyfriend turned my chords for a song from this May into a gorgeous guitar part I could never have pulled off myself. These really help my songs feel like songs and not just little poems I’m humming to myself.

Can I hear your songs?

Not yet! But the goal is to release an EP by the end of the year. Pending the editing and arranging steps, which will commence after I’ve finished out this month. (And then the studio time, and like, possibly finding people to play the instruments my boyfriend and I can’t do ourselves. Luckily we know lots of good musicians, and also we can always just scrap the arrangements and go voice-guitar only.)

Also pending naming the fucking band, which my boyfriend still wants to call Tomato Tomato. This may prove the biggest obstacle of all.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, why I haven’t been blogging, why I haven’t replied to basically any messages for several weeks (sorry to all my friends and family). Also because I fucked up my hands by writing 25,000 words in a week, when I’m totally unused to using a computer, and now I’ve been avoiding typing.

But, you know, book and album both forthcoming, so, get your hopes up! If we haven’t released an album by December 31st you are legally allowed to kill me.

In 2022, as an adult, I stood up on a stage in front of a crowd of hundreds, about to perform a dance that I loved, and it felt… empty. There was no camera set up to film the dance. I felt almost cheated. What was the point in doing the dance here, now, if I couldn’t show it to my partner back home? No matter how well I did it, it would immediately disappear forever.

A year and a half later, I read a quote by Laurence Scott, who says that in our modern world where we share everything online, “a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.”

I took care of a baby for the first two years of her life, and I have 2,400 photos and videos of her. I’m never going to look at all of them. People have so many more photos now than they used to, and they spend a lot less time looking at them.

I did take the pictures of my baby friend in part because I like to look at them, and share them. Baby pictures are great. But more than that, I was driven by a need to capture the moments that I knew were slipping away before my eyes. The “Oh my god, you’re so cute” is accompanied by “and I know you won’t be this way forever”. Babies change so quickly. I wanted to hold onto the adorable smiles, the way she loved me.

But you can never be fully engaged in a moment when you are simultaneously trying to record it. Your attention is split, even if you are not holding the camera – trying to make sure the shot is framed right, trying to make the content good, make the kid say the cute thing they just said. And even if you aren’t obviously trying for any particular outcome, your actions will always be a little unnatural, just from the consciousness that you are being recorded.

The best moments with my baby friend are not captured on camera. They exist only in my memory – not in hers, because she was too young; not in anyone else’s, because often there was no one else around. When we would play little games together, poking each other’s belly buttons or hiding under a blanket. When I was carrying her in my arms, and she would lean away from me so she could look right in my face and smile with the unbridled joy of a baby seeing someone she loves. It is not coincidence that the best moments are ones I didn’t capture on camera. Because the best moments were ones where I was able to be fully present with her, fully engaged, and she could feel it.

I think we are driven by the terror of ephemerality. The knowledge that whatever experience we are having, whatever we are seeing, whatever exists in the world, will be gone in the next moment. We want to cling to it. We are Gilgamesh, we are Qin Shi Huang Di, seeking immortality, and if we cannot find a way to make our bodies live forever, than we want our legacies to live forever in our stead.

For us it is not stories or monumental tombs, but a record of every mundane, quotidian thing we did, every passing thought, every funny or pretty thing we saw.

Suggested (strongly recommended) background reading:

• Thesis: T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• Antithesis: Mary Oliver, Wild Geese and The Summer Day

let us go then, you and i,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like a house cat stretching in a sunbeam;
let us go through wildflowers, flocks of wild geese,
the wandering retreats
of people who do not walk on their knees.

let us go
when the evening is spread out before us
luxurious and infinite;
when the light slants copper on the glass-shine towers,
falls lilac on the softening waves;
when the days are as long as the shadows at sunset—
can i believe there will be time?
time to murder and create,
time for all the works and days of hands
that lift and drop a question on your plate.
time to prepare a face
to meet your face.

we stop silent on a bridge and breathe, easy synchrony;
a bird preens in the trembling reeds beneath.
i do not know its name.
i do not think that it will sing to me.

we sit — sudden, planned, locked in;
the rocks provide some shelter from the wind,
but... how should i begin?

shall i say, i have gone at dusk through too-wide streets
and watched warm lamplight filling strangers' homes
and wondered what it was to not be lonely?
and shall i say that now i know?

shall i say, you do not have to be good,
but you are good?
you are.

shall i ask of you—

but how should i presume?
i have measured out my life with coffee spoons,
drip-feed existence, safely stayed;
i have hidden myself behind a counter,
behind the cakes and coffees that i made.
in short, i was afraid.

there will be time—

some little rodent scurries between stones;
the silence slides along the street.

—there will be time.

in this moment, there is time
to wonder, do i dare?
the sun is setting, cold air
licking into the corners of the evening.
reeds rustle in the wind
and—

you begin.
you presume.

it is impossible to say just what i mean, but
i do know how to pay attention.
“tell me about despair, yours,
and i will tell you mine.”
yes, i say, and
tell me about beauty, too,
when you can,
tell me ideas and afternoons,
tell me heartsick and joyous,
tell me music from a little room.

let us go, then,
for i am absolved,
i am idle and blessed
as the sun finally sets.
we run past flocks of wild geese
and i am not afraid;
i am letting myself love what i love.

we find a maple tree, and sit
beneath it, earth and nightfall.
i don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but
we kneel in the grass, holding this precious thing,
gazing with enormous and complicated eyes
till human voices wake us,
till the sky opens and we drown
in the clear pebbles of the rain.

and indeed there will be time—
time for you and time for me,
but never time for any indecision.
(time for us? well, we shall see.)

there will be time, i pray, there will be time.

meanwhile the world goes on.
everything dies at last, and too soon
i am high in the clean blue air,
heading home again.

meanwhile you are far away
across the mountains and the rivers,
living your wild and precious life.

the world calls to us, harsh and exciting.

let us go.

If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work. But when they seldom come, they wished-for come.

- Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 1

I recently watched a show that presents a vision of utopia where everyone can have whatever they want at any time. Anything you ask for will immediately appear in front of you, and you can step through a door and instantly be anywhere, anytime in the world.

Everyone in this utopia is miserable.1

Of course they’re miserable. Their lives are devoid of meaning, because there is no reason for them to do anything.

The complete absence of scarcity in their world leads to an absence of striving. They don’t need to work to earn money, they don’t need to cook or go grocery shopping to be able to eat, they don’t need to eat at all. Time stretches out infinite in front of them, and the only things to do are those they choose to do. At every moment, they must decide what they want. They must want things for no reason other than that they want them.

Every minute of every day, they must invent meaning, for none will be handed to them. It is an exhausting, existentially terrifying, depression-inducing way to live. Of course they are miserable.

For many people I know, life is already like this.

There is no reason to go outside, when anything you need can be delivered, contactless, to your doorstep. Buying things at physical stores is seen as mostly a way to pass the time, or to signal your politics (if you boycott Amazon).2

There is no reason to cook, when you can have a meal delivered from a restaurant, or microwave something you bought frozen. There is not necessarily even a reason to eat, when you can drink Soylent.

The majority of people I know do not need to continue working to have enough money to live — certainly not as much as they currently work, not every day. They don’t need the money and they may even hate their jobs, but they keep working anyway. It is something to do, and we all need that.

When my mom retired, after working as a teacher for forty years, she told me and my sister how difficult and destabilizing it was to have so much choice over how she used her time. She felt adrift, confused, like she must be doing something wrong. My sister (a self-published novelist) and I (unemployed) said, no mom, this is normal. Welcome to the modern human condition.

If you are unemployed, underemployed, or retired, or if you are self-employed, or maybe even if you just work from home, then you are likely familiar with the feeling of waking up, seeing the day stretch out before you, and knowing you are responsible for deciding how to fill every moment of it. It’s not like summer vacation when you were a child. It’s the unending state of your life, and soon to sport becomes as tedious as to work.

So, what do you do with all that time, all those empty days where no one is telling you what to do?

Many people I know are possessed of a quasi-religious zeal that tells them the world is going to end in a matter of years, and they, as part of the select few who know about it, must work themselves to the bone to stop it. This is extremely useful as a source of meaning. They become millionaires and keep working anyway, because it feels so important to them.

What of the rest of us? Some write novels. Some choose to do a second undergraduate degree. Some take on projects: making a documentary, renovating a home, organizing a huge event. Some get into hobbies that give them a feeling of accomplishment: mountain climbing, competitive dancing, creating art. Some become politically active. Most travel fairly often.

And of course, many people have children. I used to think this was a copout, that you were transparently just creating a thing to care about — until I realized that that’s what we’re all doing, all the time.

Reading John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, I learned about the world’s largest ball of paint. Decades ago, a boy dropped a baseball in a can of paint. Then he added another coat of paint, and another, and the ball began to grow. Now it’s the size of a car, or something.

There was no reason to do this, other than that he wanted to. And that painting the ball, over and over again, was something to do.

Startups, novels, children, they are all just forms of that ball of paint.

Raised so atheist that I was unable to believe in Santa Claus even at the age of two, I have never thought that there was intrinsic meaning in the universe. I reject the forms of philosophy that tell me there is something that exists in the world to be discovered, some correct moral theory, or some concept of Truth or Justice.

I suppose at heart, I am a nihilist, and always have been. But I don’t usually say that, because it makes me sound like I think I’m edgy. Or maybe it just makes me sound depressed.

Anyway I’m a nihilist. Life was an accident, there is no God and no destiny, things just happen and ascribing meaning to them is just a misfire of the human tendency to pattern match, blah blah, you get it.

Believing that there is no intrinsic meaning to be discovered in the universe does not mean I believe that life is meaningless.

There is meaning in life, because humans find meaning in things.

In the show, in the miserable vision of utopia, where you can go anywhere you want and have anything you want at any time, there is only one thing that is real: other people.

In our world, other people are real, and so are animals, nature, the whole physical world external to our selves.

Sitting at home all day and looking for meaning within yourself is a trap. It’s not in there. It’s in the world around you, and your interactions with it. It’s in helping your friends when they need you, in conversations that change your perspective, in walking alone and silent, surrounded by trees. It’s in a solar eclipse and a baby’s smile and raindrops on roses and falling in love and every other cliché.

And if you have nothing in your life that is feeding you meaning every day — no job to work, no child to raise — well, you just have to go out and find it.

I work as a nanny now. I don’t do it for the money — if I wanted money, there are many other jobs I could do, and have done, that would pay better.

I work as a nanny because it gets me out of the house, makes me interact with the physical world. I work as a nanny because it’s a way to see people, and cute babies. And above all, I work as a nanny because it makes me feel needed.

One day last year, at work, I spent half an hour in a tree, climbing the far branches to pick mulberries for the two toddlers looking up at me from below and begging me for more. This was of course an extremely inefficient way to feed them — I could only get a handful of berries at a time, and it’s not like they’re calorically dense — but it felt so much better than strapping them into their plastic highchairs and doling out pre-sliced cheese or microwave lentils from Amazon Fresh.

It felt real, my hands on the bark of the tree, using my body to lean out precariously. Every time I climbed down with a handful of berries, and the kids smiled and ate them out of my hand, it felt like I was providing for them. Like I had a purpose.

You might say that sense of purpose was obviously fabricated.

I say, yes, and also who cares? All senses of purpose are fabricated. We are all creating our own meaning in the universe, all the time.

And if you can’t find joy in climbing a tree to pick fruit to feed children who love you, I don’t know where you can find it.

Last night, walking alone in the dark up to the Rose Garden, I realized that I already know what the book needs to say.

Perhaps I have known this whole time, or perhaps it has slowly taken shape over the past month of diffuse thought. Either way, much of what I’ve been agonizing over has been how to present the information — to make sure it hits right, actually works to change people’s minds, doesn’t sound too preachy — but that is a problem that lends itself to iteration. I can try different styles and test them on people and see what works.

The style is an open question, but the content is already known.

So, here is what the book needs to say:

The goal is to build an actually sustainable, healthy relationship with your devices. Building this sustainable relationship will take real and ongoing work. It will not be a matter of small adjustments. It will be hard, and likely, at times, painful.

In order to end up in this desired sustainable state, you have to intervene in (at least) four places:

1. Your own desires

2. Your devices

3. The expectations of those around you

4. Your behavior patterns

This forms the basic structure of the book.

1

Changing your own desires is at the root of the whole thing. A lot of people I talk to say that they are perfectly happy with their twelve hours a day of screen time. They tell me their brain is soup and they can’t read, and they’re constantly checking out of conversations while I stare right at them, but they continue to wear AirPods every waking moment and they tell me they’d die without their phones. These are the people who need me the most, and I’m not sure if I can reach them, but I want to try.

Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking is a book that can instantly make a permanent nonsmoker out of a person who’s been chainsmoking for decades. I read it, and what Carr does is simply lay out all the reasons people give for why they need to smoke, then knock them all down one by one. Smokers already know that smoking is bad for them, but they keep doing it because they believe it is also good for them in some way, social or emotional. Once that illusion is removed, they no longer want to smoke.

This is more difficult in my case because it would be dogmatic insanity to try to convince people that their phones and computers give them zero benefit, and that the only reason they use them is addiction. Still, I want to at least try a similar approach.

This will be the part of the book that will require the most skill at writing. I am not going to use statistics or rhetoric to scare people, or try to guilt them. I am going to follow a friend’s advice that “The pain is the pitch”, and just illustrate, over and over again, through beautiful, poignant narrative, the loneliness, disconnection, scattered distraction, unfulfillment, and lack of control we all feel with our device use.

2

Now that the reader is convinced, they can start to take action! I use approximately a hundred tools and strategies to make my devices less addictive. They are extremely powerful, and even after changing your mind and your life, you will still need all the help you can get to resist them.

This is all technological implementation. It’s a good place to start because if you have a fire lit under you to make changes in your life, it feels good to take concrete actions. It’s also good to lead with this because even if readers just stop after this step, they will likely still see real improvement.1 This step also has to come before the full declutter, because it would be crazy to go back to heavy device use immediately after that, just to do all the necessary blocking.

3

Others’ expectations is a tricky one. When I did my declutter, I told the very few people who regularly contacted me that I wouldn’t be texting very often, just so they wouldn’t worry when I didn’t respond. For most people, it will not be this easy. Several of my younger friends report that deleting social media resulted in them losing important friendships.

If your friends expect you to always be available over text, maybe try to have a conversation with them about how that expectation is hurting all of you. Try to shift your communication towards higher bandwidth, trading the always-on of texting for richer but less frequent voice calls or face-to-face conversations. Tell your friends that you may not be checking your texts, but they can call you if something is important.

But what about the workplace? What about the people who tell me that if they don’t constantly keep their Slack status ‘Active’, they’ll be seen as not working hard enough? What about urgent work emails at 11 PM? I don’t know. I hear that norms are shifting on this, but slowly and unevenly. Some people will have enough power in their workplace to influence the norms, but the average person will not.

This whole section is fraught, and I haven’t seen it explored in other books on the subject. It will need a lot of workshopping, I expect.

4

Finally, it comes time for the thirty-day declutter, something I so far still intend to basically lift wholesale from Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. In order to actually change your behavior, you have to break your old patterns and form new ones. Explore non-screen activities and ways of being. Rearrange your life and your physical surroundings to promote these new activities, so you stop defaulting to screens. Carry out your everyday screen-related tasks with intentionality.

Habit formation takes about two weeks. Thirty days gives you lots of extra space.

The first time you try going on a walk without your phone, you might feel great, free, powerful — but maybe the third time you’ll have had a bad day and be desperate for distraction. You’ll have to relearn how to sit with your feelings. There’s a lot you’ll have to relearn. The first time you try reading a book, if it’s been a long time, you probably won’t be able to concentrate for very long. It gets easier, as you acclimate.

What Cal Newport didn’t understand about the digital declutter is that we all use our devices as coping mechanisms, and that when you take that coping mechanism away, you will have to stare into the abyss, and it is terrifying. I’ll have to address that, somehow without being too off-putting.

And then a conclusion, I suppose. A dénouement. I find a lot of these books either peter out into lame unrelated content or end abruptly (or both). Everyone is terrible at writing endings and I am no exception. Hopefully I’ll figure it out when I get there.

I would search for symbolism in this complete breakdown of the aviation system, except that this is how the majority of journeys go these days. I’ve been stranded overnight four times in the past two years.

The lightning storm is a cool touch, though. Very dramatic.

Eh, I’ll search for symbolism anyway. Since that’s all my blogging is, really. Drawing connections — some conceptually meaningful, others merely literary.

I wanted my time in Toronto to never end. Every time I leave Berkeley, part of me wishes to stay away forever. Now the world has granted me a stay. And in reality, not going home doesn’t mean living idyllic summer with my friends forever. In reality, it means being stuck in this liminal space. Sleeping on hard, cramped seats in a too-bright airport, instead of in my dark, quiet bedroom at home.

Things never go how you expect. Life just happens — sometimes you make it home, and sometimes there’s a lightning storm and you sleep in the airport. Sometimes your life plans stay on track, and sometimes you get laid off and then there’s a pandemic.

So I try not to get attached to plans. I usually buy flights two weeks before I travel. At the end of Inkhaven 2, people kept asking me what my plans were. In truth, I had zero plans for the rest of my life after that weekend. I had no flights booked, no events coming up; I was supposed to go to a wedding the next day and I didn’t even have a plan for how to get there.

Earlier this week, my mom took me to a furniture store, an endless labyrinth of handcrafted solid wood. The beds we looked at all cost $1000 or more, “But,” the saleswoman said matter-of-factly, “of course, a good bedroom set will last you at least twenty years. If you treat it right, it can stay in the family for generations.”

I stood in that furniture store facing down the heavy, solid bedframes.

I do not live in a world of twenty-year furniture. I am used to planned obsolescence. I am used to things breaking, wearing out — beds, leases, clothes, relationships. I am used to lights burning out and people moving away. I am used to at-will employment, to holding things lightly, because nothing stays.

My first summer in California, I got attached to the people I met, and then they all moved away, all of them, and I fell into a depression. So I don’t get so attached, anymore. I even worry now that I’m too good at letting go.

The flight has boarded, suddenly. It seems we are leaving. I guess the story ends with me getting home after all.

I have hardly eaten in a week. I am almost as much myself as always, only it is effort to stay standing, even to stay sitting upright. In seeking the most natural state, I end up on the floor, flat on my back. My lips tingle, occasionally; my hands tremble ever so slightly. My limbs, when I attend to them, feel heavy and cold.

I am not so concerned. This has happened before; worse and more mysterious things have happened before, and they always pass. I always survive.

I only want to be myself. That is what always nags at me, at times like these. Not that my body might die — for I am not so paranoid anymore that I think this is killing me — but that a subtler death will take me, where I become unable to be the person I want to be.

I am almost as much myself as always, but I know that doesn’t last forever.

2023. I am watching myself lie on the daybed in my old apartment, doing nothing but listen to audiobooks for days on end. I kept embroidery on the bed to my left, a jigsaw puzzle on the table to my right, but I often couldn’t hold my head and arms up long enough to work on them. The weeks, months, on that daybed, I would look out the French doors into the garden, like a Victorian invalid. The garden was beautiful, green and lush, and the sun would shine down on me through the skylights, but it was static. The world was silent, unless the cat came to scratch at the door.

2019. I am watching myself tucked into bed in my old house, my laptop open on my lap, writing for a job I didn’t even realize I was too mentally fatigued to do properly. I watch myself try to walk to the station to catch the train to the office, because I desperately wanted to go, to be normal again. I watch myself sit down on the sidewalk a block away from home, defeated.

No art came from those times, no beauty. I hardly remember them, months of my life at a time just washed away into nothing. Same walls, same ceiling; same position, same silent, empty life.

I watch myself being pushed in a wheelchair and hating it. Trying not to cry only because it would make me look more pathetic.

I do not want pity because I do not want to be a person who needs pity. I want to be strong and self-sufficient, whole and hale. I want to be upright and kind. I want to have bounty to give, because the person I want to be is one who makes the lives of others better. She helps her friends raise their children and organize their homes, she listens carefully and thinks deeply and says what they need to hear. All of those things require energy.

The me who cannot lift her arms, who cannot write, who slurs her words for lack of energy, she is in some important sense not me. She terrifies me. I do not want to be her.

I am not her right now. I can still stand, still move, still laugh — I have not yet so depleted my reserves that I cannot reach for those things. I know this will pass, and in the meantime I am keeping myself upright.

I am not her right now. Right now, I am almost as much myself as always. But I am closer to her than I want to be.

I sit with you at dinner the first night, happy to see you again. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen you; I’ve forgotten what the first time was like. You are simply, somehow, a fixture in my life.

I become ill in the second week, weak and unable to move. You let me lean against your chest, tucked under your arm. Surrounded by other friends, we stay up past midnight, the kind of late night conversation that fuzzes the world around the edges.

You look up at the wall beside us and see potential there, and what you create on it the next day brings everyone together. You are always seeing potential in empty spaces that no one else sees. You are always bringing people together, in ways we didn’t know we needed.

“What is bitterness?” my friend asks me. I talk at him for two hours, a tangled mass of black thread. Bitterness, I decide, is when you give something, and you reasonably expect something in return, and then you don’t get it. The thing you expect might be resources, money, but I am mostly talking about love, about care.

That night, I am on a couch in building A, alone but not wanting to go home, while you and my friend talk just behind me. What is bitterness?, he has asked you. You have been talking for a while.

“Imagine,” he says now, “that all your friends suddenly turn on you. What would you do?”

He’s drawn the example from his conversation with me, though you don’t know it. It is the biggest knot in my thread, the blackness in me.

“Well,” you say, in a tone that borders on derision, “it would be pretty fucking surprising if all those people had just been pretending to be friends with me for all these years, for some weird reason. But I guess I’d just say fuck them, and move on.”

Your conversation moves on, but I stay on those words, on your confidence, on how ridiculous you found the entire question. Could I be like you? Is it that simple, to not be like this?

I float in that uncertainty, until twenty-four hours later I am laid out on my back. Someone has reached into the space opened by that uncertainty, and she has unceremoniously ripped away a part of me I was clinging to because I thought I still needed it.

Sound is unbearable, voices, lights — until there is a guitar in my hands and I pluck out a song for you. Gentle and cradling.

I spend all of November being friends with everyone, happy to pass my time with more or less anyone. But on the last night, after I have sung my song, everything narrows. We have only hours left, and I want to spend them with the people who matter, who will keep mattering.

I find you and our other friend, and the three of us talk until midnight. Just us, really, though others come and go at the periphery. You are what matters, and I’m glad I remembered before it was too late.

A few days later, you come to my door in the winter dark to say goodbye, white boots with black laces. I hug you, but I know I will see you again. I always see you again. Maybe that makes me take you for granted.

February

You are in town for less than a day, barely any time. You tell almost no one you are there, but you ask to see me.

I almost say no — I am having a terrible day, a terrible week, stressed to physical illness, and I almost say no because I don’t know if I can face speaking to someone. On the walk to the Rose Garden I feel like crying, like a person already dead. This must be a mistake.

I am tangled at first, tense, but you get me to talk about it. You say everything I’ve needed to hear, supporting me not with platitudes, but with the conviction of experience. I realize that whatever happens, I will be alright.

Then you tell me about your city, the one you’re moving back to, and it sounds somehow right. Like a thing I want to move towards. With you among the tiers of rose bushes, I spin a little dream of a life there: you and me, my family, everyone else I love.

By the time we part, I am unburdened. I have seen a future open up before me, where I had for some reason believed that none was possible. We talked for hardly more than two hours, and yet I am transformed.

That night, you fly away.

June

I am in your home, surrounded by people I love and people I might learn to love. We have been laughing all night, between the songs we’ve sung, often even during them.

Now it is midnight, and you come sit next to me on the couch again. I stroke my friend’s hair and look across her, at you.

“Surely life can’t be like this,” I say. What I mean is that a day like this can’t be a normal part of a person’s life. Today is everything I want.

“Well, it’s Friday,” you say. “Five days of the week can’t be like this, but I think every weekend can.”

It’s like our two conversations about bitterness, again: you hearing something different than I meant, because my sad, helpless perspective is so foreign to you.

Today is everything I want. To you, perhaps, today is nothing special. What a life.

At your office, a man sits down beside me. He tells me he knows almost nothing about me, but he’s heard I deserve no small amount of credit for what you’re currently doing with your life.

How laughable, I think. You are so self-assured. You take what you want. All I did was accept your application to an event, four years ago. You would have found your way, with or without me.

Without you, though? I’m not sure where I’d be.

I certainly wouldn’t be here.

These books are being published faster than I can read them, and at this point, I have surfeited with honey and begun to loathe the taste of sweetness. I pick them up and toss them down nearly as quickly. I already know there is nothing for me there. If these books are preaching to me, I am not just the choir, I am the priest himself.1

Every time I open one of these books, I feel bad. Not just because there’s nothing for me there, not just because I feel overwhelmed with the sheer number of them that I know I’ll never get through, not even because the average book is such crap that it depresses me.

I feel bad because all of the books are saying, There Is A Problem. Things Are Bad. The World Is Bad, And You Feel Bad.

I don’t want to write another book that says that.

It can be useful to move away from things that are bad for you. Necessary, even. It has often been good for me. But moving away from misery is uncertain; it is stumbling blind into the mist and hoping there is something better on the other side. I don’t want to lead my readers into uncertain mists.

I want people, when they read my book, to feel the way I feel when I read Mary Oliver. Not Things are unrelentingly terrible, but there may be a glimmer of hope, but simply, I have seen something beautiful.

I want my book to be beautiful. There is a tension, there, because I also want to guide people, concretely, through the steps they need to take to change their life. That’s the dry meat of any self-help book. I want it to actually work.

But perhaps in order to work, it needs to be beautiful. It needs to work on people emotionally, not just mechanically.

I spent two years writing a romance novel about digital minimalism. A person lonely and adrift after the pandemic meets another person, lonely and stuck. The main character is addicted to their phone, has little else in their life, but through digital minimalism, they rediscover the world around them, and human connection.

It is unfinished and I will never publish it, at least not where any of you can see it. It was something I mostly wrote for my own emotional needs, not because I thought it would change anything. But I think there’s something important in the idea.

Perhaps my book should be a narrative. I don’t know what the narrative is of. I fear that my own story would be too intense: such abject misery to start with, and such monumental, destabilizing change as a result.2 I also think it’s importantly not relatable: the privilege of having nothing but unstructured time to fill, and essentially zero computer-based obligations.

So, I am still mulling.

I don’t think writing a book is about putting words to the page. When I write a story, I don’t decide how the story goes. I think about the characters, turning them over in my head for months or years, until I understand what they want, what they will do. Then I write it down.

I don’t think I have years, this time. But it has only been 18 days. I have written thousands of words of notes, but mostly I have been thinking about Mary Oliver and about how to find meaning in a post-scarcity world.

I think it is getting me somewhere. We’ll see where that is.

I woke the next morning and looked out our little bedroom window at the tidal beach below, the mountains rising shallowly in the distance. I drank it in in disbelief, like slaking thirst.

We stayed a week. Every sight stayed as beautiful as the last: the rocky beach at Ashaig, the waterfall at the bend in the road, the golden haze of ice sublimating in the morning sun. The mountains stayed immense and unmoved.

The world stayed unbelievably beautiful, but I could not sustain the feeling of disbelief.

By the final day, as we drove up to Staffin, I found myself accustomed to the sights. I tried to reach for that awe that had felt boundless, only to find it quieted. I was not unmoved — I still saw the beauty, still loved it — but it had become a part of the world I expected.

Only on the ride home from the airport, with the sky closed in on all sides by glass towers and concrete overpasses, did Skye’s beauty become real to me again. Once I had left it behind.

A year ago, some hours of conversation with an old friend, a chance meeting, were enough to tilt my world on its axis. I was so unused to being known, to being spoken to as a whole person who meant something to someone, that it broke me open.

Last November, I spent a month being known, bombarded by it on all sides. At least a dozen different people who looked at me, and then looked into me, and said something simple that changed me. The first time felt impossible, world-altering, like the mountains rising around me on all sides, when I’d only ever lived in flat farmland. But I kept waking up every morning, and it kept being there. I kept discovering new beauty around each corner, in each person. She cares for me. He sees me. He’s choosing to spend time with me. She wants a better life for me. It stayed hard to believe, but it got a little easier each time.

April dealt my disbelief its final blow. Friendship came fast and easy, yet deep and real. By the time my old friend came back to town a few weeks ago, an afternoon with him was nothing special. Conversations with people who knew me had become a part of the world I expected.

At the end of November, one of my friends texted me that the month felt “more like a North Star of what I want than like a loss”. This week, I followed that North Star. It took me north, and east.

Two days ago, standing beside a fire we’d built, looking out across the water at the sun setting on the longest day of the year, my friend laughed, shaking her head, and said, “This moment is so perfect it’s unbelievable.”

I knew she was right: I could see the clouds and buildings glowing bright pink in the sunset, hear the rush of the waves and the roar of a crowd on the mainland; I was surrounded by friends, warmed by laughter and by the fire we all made together.

But I couldn’t find the bottomless well of awe inside me, the ‘unbelievable’ part of what my friend said.

I was only happy, not disbelieving.

Only happy is a wonderful thing to be.

In my first job, I had one coworker I really liked. We had both just moved to the city and we worked the same job; she was older and much more self-possessed than I. She would invite me over to her house and let me stay up late talking in her bedroom. She’d take me on walks and guide my hand to touch the fuzzy leaves of plants I’d never seen. She hugged me, gave me little gifts, helped me without a second thought.

When we’d known each other for about four months, I was sitting on her lap at an event and she was hugging me, and she pressed her smile against my shoulder and said, “I love you.” Then she let go and took it back: “No, wait, it’s too soon. But I really like you!”

I respect that and still love her today. But also, screw that.

Let yourself love your friends. Let yourself tell them that you love them, if it won’t send them running for the hills, and/or incorrectly make them think that you’re romantically interested in them. If we’re always pushing the message that you should love everyone, even strangers, even people who are awful to you, then why hold back, why keep it inside, when you find someone who treats you well, who gets you, who likes spending time with you? Why stamp down the excitement of connection with another person?

Modern friendship is a constant uphill battle. Almost everyone by default retreats to their own place, living in the comfort of their own cocoon. A lot of advice I hear on friendship is like “have people you do activities with and you’ll be socially fulfilled” or “you can’t expect that much from a friendship”. Fuck that. My bible on friendship is The Other Significant Others, a beautiful book on the value of non-romantic partnerships, by a woman who had a platonic best friend who was so important to her that it reshaped her entire life. She would go on walks holding hands with her husband on one side and her best friend on the other. She writes about friends who raise children together, who live together platonically til they die of old age.

She says that if you don’t have any friends who can come over when your house is messy, you probably don’t have any real friends. In 2022 someone came over to my house and said it looked more like a museum than a home. I was offended. He was right.

At the end of Inkhaven 2 I hadn’t cleaned my house in about a month, and two of my friends came over with no notice. My floor was covered in halfway-folded laundry that they had to step over, and my kitchen was a horror of coffee shop prep: towers of dirty dishes, batter spilled on the chair seats, and the air purifier, somehow, full of cooked beans. My friends didn’t mind, and I didn’t mind them seeing it.

Everyone has to do their laundry. If you can’t let your friends see that, there’s probably a lot else you’re not willing to let them see.

Not every friendship will work out. Not every friendship that works out will be a major part of your life forever. But things don’t have to be perfect, or last forever, to be worth investing in wholeheartedly.

Modern life is so lonely. When you find someone who makes sense to you, who makes you happy, lean into it. Let yourself be enthusiastic about them, even irrationally so. Let them see your whole self, laundry and all. Let yourself fall in love.

I learn the names of the white terns flying frantic overhead, and of the black cormorants, solid and silent upon the water’s surface. The cumulus clouds lie in strata above the horizon, soft and welcoming. The horizon ripples in the distance.

My grandmother asked me to read a Mary Oliver poem at her funeral. We were not close; poetry was the only thing we shared. I gave her a creaking spiral-bound notebook for Christmas one year, full of poems I had copied out by hand. She gave it back to me the summer before she died, Mary Oliver handwritten in the back: When death comes. She was ready.

I am reading Mary Oliver now, my feet bare in the grass. In the beginning, she writes, I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

We sit with our backs against a tree, books on our knees. We look up at the treetops, the shapes in the clouds, the birds whose names we are learning.

Sometimes I think the worst thing about going barefoot is how much I look down. I miss the clouds, the birds, the water. Today I walk a dirt path with my sandals dangling from my fingers. Ants crawl over an empty snail shell. The cottonwoods gather in corners, catch in spider webs. A snake darts across the path. I am looking down.

I walked on sand earlier, soft and fine, swallowing my toes. A pleasure that made me hum, sweet even as it began to burn.

Now, as tree swallows wheel above the lake, the sound of the water lapping at the shore changes. I peer over the low wall to see a rock jutting above the surface, the water parting around it.

I keep expecting happiness to feel like a tidal wave, like overwhelm, crushing my lungs. These days, perhaps these years, it is only the gentle waves against the shore, easy and right, changing but constant. It is not a sunburst of incandescent joy; it is the sun rising every day, casting its predictable shadows, waking the world.

I used to grasp so tightly at moments, when I knew they would end. I still know they will end. I am no longer grasping.

Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. It’s there, and you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.

And then it crashes on the shore, and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while.

I am on a train out of Chicago at the end of the workday, seated on the upper level, where I can see all the passengers below. The city goes by outside the windows of the train, brick buildings giving way to warehouse parking lots, which give way to the sprawling Chicago suburbs, an alternation between sparse woodlands and rows of identical manicured lawns. Below me, no one is looking at anything but their screens. Mostly phones — I can see them playing Candy Crush, scrolling Instagram, swiping on TikTok. One man has his laptop on his knees, his phone in his hand, and a can of alcohol in his lap. Anything to numb the experience. Anything to not be here.

I am on an airplane, taxiing on the tarmac, a middle seat in economy class. The woman to my left, a kindly abuela, is swiping on her shortform videos, and they are all of Hispanic women baking pan dulces. It feels a little wholesome, but she keeps swiping and swiping, until I feel glutted with more pan dulces than anyone could ever make or eat. To my right, a white woman in her forties is doing the same, only her videos are all of car crashes. I hate it, but it's hard to look away. They lose signal when the plane takes off, so the abuela on my left watches a movie, and the woman on my right pays for internet and works on emails. Below us, the Rocky Mountains spread out, breathtaking, endless and snow-capped, but no one is looking.

I am at my window, and all the young people on the sidewalk have their phones in their hands, AirPods in their ears. They look down at their screens as they walk and as they cross the street and as they bike and as they drive their cars. The only person without a phone is an old man, walking through a cloud of his own smoke. He drops his cigarette on the ground, walks twenty paces, then stops to light another.

Fifty years ago, you could smoke anywhere: indoors, around children. It was just the way things were. I've been to places in Europe where you can still just smoke at cafés or in your apartment building, and it seems so strange to me, such a norm violation, rude and disgusting. It used to be much worse than that here, much more ubiquitous, but now it's nearly disappeared. The old man chain smoking is an aberration, a relic.

Maybe there's hope.

You have a job that you don’t really like, but you’re not unhappy enough to quit, to face the uncertainty of finding something new that you might like even less. Jobs are how people make money, and everyone needs money to live, so everyone works jobs they don’t really like. Sure it takes up half the waking hours of your life. Sure you have dreams of leaving this all behind and working on a farm, but you know that’s unrealistic. This is just what it is to live in the modern world.

You sit all day at work, so a couple times a week you drive to a place where you can work out, yoga or climbing or lifting weights at the gym. You put in the hour of exercise that the scientific studies say you need, and then you’re free to go home and sit more. At the gym, you’re surrounded by other people doing the same thing as you, but you don’t feel the desire to talk to them. Sometimes you think of something you might say, but it would be too much effort, too scary, to actually go through with it.

You have some friends, in the sense of people you see sometimes who like you well enough, but you can’t just dump your feelings on people who didn’t sign up for that, so you pay a therapist to talk through your problems. They listen to you, but it is not reciprocal; you know nothing about them and owe them nothing except your money. You might know them for ten, twenty years, but you would never invite them to your home, to your wedding. The relationship is circumscribed, and you know that would be outside its bounds.

Your body hurts from stress and from sitting hunched over your laptop all day, so you pay a massage therapist, and during the hour you’re on the table, silent, your nervous system calms just from the feeling of another human’s skin touching yours. You exchange a couple short words with the massage therapist, thanking them as you pay, and then it’s back to your car.

You sit in the parking lot, swiping on the apps, because a hookup might be an even better way to get that feeling of skin on skin, and it wouldn’t even cost you money. You find someone nearby and willing, and you chase endorphins together. It’s fine, you get the endorphins, but you part ways immediately after it ends, and you never learn the person’s real name. Oh well.

At a party that weekend, you drink alcohol to make you less afraid, and then you join a cuddle pile, some people whose names you sort of know and some you’ve never met. You’d certainly never touch your normal friends, not beyond a perfunctory hug hello or goodbye. That would be weird. But here, the alcohol and the hand stroking your hair and the press of an anonymous body all up against your left side make you feel warm, accepted. It’s almost close enough to feeling loved. You go home and your cat sleeps on your chest while you scroll messages on your phone and familiar voices play from your TV, and it feels almost like that, too.

You still don’t feel quite right, so you get a prescription for antidepressants. There’s no shame in it, you know. Lots of people are on antidepressants. It’s good to take care of your mental health.

Your therapist tells you that group singing helps humans feel connected to each other, so you pay to join a choir. Your therapist tells you that meditation helps with stress, so you start doing that too, sitting alone and silent in an empty room trying to become a person who can cope with your perfectly fine life without drowning.

Your therapist tells you it’s good to go for walks, so you put in your AirPods to listen to a podcast and set off down the street.

When you were a kid, your parents told you that it’s healthier for the feet to go barefoot, that all the support and structure in modern shoes makes your muscles weak so that you can’t support yourself without the shoes, that being shoved into unnatural confinement for decades fucks up the shape of your feet permanently.

But now, as you walk, there’s a solid inch of foam cushion between you and the ground. Maybe going barefoot is healthier if you’re walking on soft earth, grass, a blanket of moss on the forest floor. But you’ve tried going barefoot on the sidewalk a couple times, and you know how hard and unforgiving it is.

Look around, mom and dad, you think, would you really want me to go barefoot here? There is no soft earth to walk on, not anymore. As far as the eye can see in any direction, there’s only concrete.

If I want a book that’s right, I need to write it myself.

All the existing books are inadequate

Most people are wrong and dumb

I have read like 17 books about this, many of which claim to have actionable tips for cultivating healthier device use. Barely any of this advice has even the slightest chance of actually working; it seems to be written by people who understand nothing at all about how behavior change works.

Everyone wants to sell you easy fixes, but the truth of the situation is that the pull of modern devices is extremely powerful, and only drastic action will get you out of your current equilibrium. Only Cal Newport gets this right, but no one wants to admit it,1 because his thirty-day declutter strategy requires a lot of actual effort.

The pandemic matters, and so does AI

While the rate of books on this topic has been increasing, most were still written before 2020. That includes Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019), Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), and the much-touted How to Break Up With Your Phone (2018). Two of those are great books, but seven years is a long time in this fast-changing landscape, and things have only gotten much, much worse since they were writing.

It’s time for a book that both reckons with the pandemic, LLMs, and the accompanying breakdown of the social fabric, and can still give people hope even in our new, much more adverse environment.

Why you?

Other books are like “Oh, I’m a therapist or addiction counselor and I’ve watched things get out of hand” or “I’ve been studying digital tool use or how people communicate for twenty years”. “That’s why you can trust me, because of credentials and studies and stuff!” Fuck that. You know why you can trust me? Because:

I’m a real live young person

I made a spreadsheet of 22 books on this topic2 and confirmed my hunch that the authors are old as shit. The average age of the author at the time of publication is 45. The youngest person who has ever authored one of these books, as far as I can tell, is fully a decade older than me.

The book market doesn’t need another Gen Xer citing a bunch of studies about how device use stresses people out, or (god forbid) another Boomer lamenting how things used to be better back in their day. What the book market needs is a Zillennial like me to talk about what it’s actually like to grow up / live in this world, instead of just doing academic studies on it.

Would it be better if I was even younger? Sure. But then I would have had less time to flesh out my ideology, plus I probably wouldn’t be able to focus long enough to write a book because my brain would be soup.

I’m as much of an expert as we’re going to get

I’ve read a ton of books about device use, I think and talk to people about it constantly, and most importantly, I used to be addicted to my devices and then I put in a ton of effort and now I’m not. I got my life back. But I’m still fighting the fight every day.

Oh right and I have a blog that’s halfway about digital intentionality, and I’ve done a little bit of coaching (with uncertain results). I even made up the term ‘digital intentionality’! Who else is better positioned than I?!

I’m a good writer

The authors of the other device use books were professional mental health people or academics or art historians or whatever. But I’m a professional writer! So surely writing a book will go well for me. I mean, I’ve never written a book but how hard can it be? (………..)

What’s your angle?

I’m not sure. I’m not a person who sees device use through the lens of mental health or workplace fatigue or communication or productivity. I’m a person who sees the world through the lens of device use. I have probably quite a lot too much to say, and it’s not yet clear to me how to organize it or tie it all together.

There’s also the issue that I think Digital Minimalism is basically just correct. He has the right prescription for what to do, and if you pick up the book and read it, it’s not uncommon to be moved to immediately adopt it yourself. When it comes to his recommendations, all I have to add are a few nitpicks.

The place where Digital Minimalism falls short, I think, is that prior to writing the book. Cal Newport never had a problem with device addiction himself. That ground has been covered in newer books — the best example is probably Please Unsubscribe, Thanks (2022) — but those books have their own flaws.

Given my current strengths as a writer, and my position as maybe the only ‘digital native’ to write this book, I’m thinking that maybe the move is to go Feelings on it. I already said I don’t want to do the whole data-driven thing that everyone else has done to death. People don’t need studies to tell them about how their screens make them feel. We are all living it, every single day.

So the angle is…basically Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, but with 1000% more feelings? Maybe it’s part-memoir, somehow? I only decided two days ago that I needed to write this book, so forgive me for not having it fully formed in my mind yet.

But today it has been six months since my Inkhaven ended, so I am now allowed to write about how Inkhaven changed my life.

On October 30th, two days before Inkhaven started, I ran into a woman I knew but had hardly ever spoken to. I approached tentatively.

“Hi. You’re doing Inkhaven, right?”

“I am,” she said. “But like, what even is it, really? Is it even going to be good?”

“I have no idea.”

I’d been flip-flopping between apprehension and excitement. When I asked one of the organizers if I should do Inkhaven, I was specifically worried that I’d “hate the people and the vibes”. But I also applied, explicitly, because I was lonely.

Excerpt from my Inkhaven application:

My biggest problem (in writing and in life) is a lack of direction. […] I don’t know if Inkhaven will help with my lack of direction or not, but at least I’ll be forced to do something, rather than sitting at home looking at the seven instruments I might play and playing none of them (it’s a metaphor but also true).

I also think just being around other people who share a common project would be huge for me. I have not had a single coworker since 2021, and haven’t worked in person with a team since 2019. It’s lonely.

I started the month off weak, so sick by the time opening session started that I lay in the back, far away from everyone else, dozing on and off. I spent the first three days holed up in one of the art cabins, working lying down because I was too sick to sit up, torturing myself for ten hours to get each post perfect, writing and scrapping thousands of words every day.

And then I emerged. And I learned that Inkhaven was not about writing. And my life changed.

The first Inkhaven was, in an important way, the first time I tried living in the world again after the pandemic. Every previous foray had been tentative, limited, a time-boxed few hours at a party or meetup or conference before I could retreat back to my safely silent apartment. Beyond my boyfriend, I did not have any meaningful ongoing relationships.

I showed up to the first Inkhaven as the person I'd believed myself to be for my entire adult life: defined by EA, though I wasn't working in it anymore; defined by my relationships to the people in the community, though I'd tried to move on. It felt like dishonesty to not disclose those relationships, my history, upfront. It felt like that was all I was, that I was still only valuable for guanxi I wasn’t even sure I still had.

As soon as I started actually meeting people at Inkhaven, that began to change. We talked about what I was writing, digital intentionality, and people wanted to hear more. We talked about old interests I'd forgotten I had, things I used to love, that made me feel like I could be a person I liked again, a person who cared about things. I played people my songs and they loved them. I made female friends with whom I could discourse about gender and male friends who treated me like one of the bros. I got to be a bunch of mes I hadn't been in years, and some I'd never been before.

The people at Inkhaven showed me new and better ways to be who I was, both by example and by directly telling me. When on day nine I became too ill to move, the people at Inkhaven took care of me, bringing me food and blankets, letting me sleep on them while they wrote.

I changed a lot, processed a lot. I ended up flat on my back on the deck one night, wrapped in my friend’s cloak and so overstimulated I couldn’t stand the sound of voices I loved, trying to reorient, after a conversation caused me to shift the whole way I looked at everything.

It shifted. It is still shifting.

Excerpt from my journal in November:

People here decide how they feel about me based on, like, who I am, how I interact, and what and how I write on my blog. It’s not relevant what orgs I used to work for or who I used to live with or be married to. I am not here to be evaluated on my Impact. Some people here don’t even care about that at all.

It’s a very new experience. To imagine that someone could like me just as a person.

I was apprehensive about Inkhaven 2, especially coming so soon on the heels of the first. It felt like we had created something special and sacred the first time, and now, what, it was going to be franchised?

More than that, could I really do it again? Open myself to dozens of new people. What were the odds that these people would be as good as the people from November, that they would see me and change me and become an important part of my life? Did I even want that? The first time was so intense.

But I knew I couldn’t stay away, with it only two miles from my house. So I went.

It was a difficult adjustment at first. It was an entirely different experience. I’m glad I did it.

At the second Inkhaven, I no longer needed to define myself by who I used to be. I had a new, more obvious role, not just as the barista, but as the alumna, the person who had done Inkhaven before. Several people knew me from my blog, the person I’d discovered in myself over the past five months. I may not have been entirely unencumbered by my past, but it was not the main thing about me. I got to just be me, whoever that was, and people liked her.

Inkhaven 1 showed me how I might be a new person. Inkhaven 2 gave me a chance to actually be her.

I'm not the only person who was at both Inkhavens for the whole month, but I think I'm the only person who was fully emotionally invested in both cohorts.

I don't know if I could do it again. I don't know what would happen to me.

Inkhaven is exhausting. Physically and emotionally obliterating. You mine your life for blog posts and exhume things that perhaps should have stayed buried. You have conversations that change the way you look at the world. You work pretty much nonstop for a month. And then you wander around in a fugue state after, trying to readjust to normal life, and the fact that everyone you just became close to is now thousands of miles away from you.

It’s not a sustainable way to live.

Besides, I think I’ve gotten what I needed. I can't keep hitting myself over the head with intense months of massive emotional growth. At some point I have to just go out and live in the world. I think that point is now.

Inkhaven taught me that I could open myself up and not get hurt, so I finally played some of the songs I’d written for an audience other than my boyfriend and mom.

Inkhaven taught me that people like my songs, so I started writing more of them.

Inkhaven taught me to be okay just sharing things I’d created, even if I hadn’t nitpicked them to perfection for a year, so yesterday I went to a recording studio and finally actually recorded two of those songs.

Inkhaven taught me that I can rely on other people, so I did not go to the studio alone.

When I say “Inkhaven taught me”, Inkhaven is nothing if not the people who were there. It was all of you, your actions, the words you wrote and the words you said to me. If my soul was healed, it was not because of some abstract concept of Inkhaven, but because of you.

I love you.

Excerpt from my Inkhaven application:

My ideal outcomes for Inkhaven, in descending order of likelihood:

1. when I have a blog post idea in the future, I just write it and post it, rather than drafting it and then agonizing about it for years and never posting it

2. I write enough about digital minimalism that people come to me for coaching

3. I discover that there’s something in the world I care about and then I pursue it

4. I find some enduring sense of community

“Babe,” he said, “what are you doing? Why are you so obsessed with the past?”

So much of my writing on this blog has been about trying to process one particular thing in my past, over and over, like Lady Macbeth scrubbing again and again at a stain that isn’t even really there. I’ve attacked it from so many different angles: frameworks for approaching conflict, musings on the societal impact of the pandemic, light-hearted interludes, and plenty of straight-up trauma dumping. I’ve kept scrubbing at that stain, picking at that scab, for the past six months.

My life since I moved here nine years ago only has one narrative. It has only been about that one thing, everything defined as before or during or after it. Which is so dumb, because I don’t even care about that thing anymore. I’ve realized I want a new narrative, one that’s about literally anything else. Preferably something positive, but more than anything, just Not That.

There’s this bit in The Time Traveler’s Wife — the main character time travels involuntarily, can’t control where he goes or when, and he is continually drawn, throughout his life, to the scene of his mother’s death. He finds himself there again and again, watching it unfold from all angles, powerless to change what he knows is going to happen.

He can, at least, wrap a blanket around his younger self, who is watching it happen for the first time. I can’t even do that.

Some of my Inkhaven friends have been trying to help me escape my focus on the past. When I was in France, one of my friends was constantly exhorting me to talk of only the present and future, and another made me switch back to French when I got too worked up about conflicts in my life, because I am not good enough at French to rant nonstop about complex emotional issues in it. Another friend expressly doesn’t want to know anything about any community gossip, and it’s shockingly refreshing to not talk about who has dated who or how any given person may have minorly slighted me five years ago. Who fucking cares! How freeing.

And then there are all the people encouraging me to get the hell out of here, where all my context has collapsed on top of me and is massively weighing me down at all times. Thanks, friends.

I’ve done a lot of emotional processing on this blog, and much of it has been helpful to me. But where’s the line between helpful emotional processing and just wallowing in the past? Wherever it is, I think I’ve crossed it.

I’ve posted a lot of what I did because I wanted someone specific to read it and to respond in a certain way. Sometimes it’s been good; it’s helped me communicate with people and feel closer to them. But I think I write so much about the thing that hurt me because I feel that the people who were there never understood, and I wanted to just hit them over the head with it until they couldn’t possibly deny it anymore. This is a stupid reason to write. Not just because it hasn’t worked, at all, even though I know they read this blog, but because it’s just ill-conceived from the start. I cannot make other people feel anything, and I just need to accept that and move on.

So! I am hereby placing a two-month ban on myself writing about the pandemic, community conflict, or anything related to that whole thing. That means no blog posts, but also no poems or songs.

Nothing has been resolved, but it’s probably never going to be. Just drop it, just make art about something else. I’m sure there are other things a person could think about. Honeybees. Pianos. Bureaucracy. Death. Whatever.

It’s time to move on.

My immediate reaction was “What? Does it really come across that way? I don’t think I think the world is fundamentally bad!” I thought he was wrong, that he had done his best but just hadn’t seen me clearly.

Today, I think he was right.

Of course it comes across that way. Everything I write about digital intentionality feels like a reaction against the world being bad. I'm constantly bringing up how I've been hurt and failed and let down, and my experiences have led me to believe that that's the rule in human interactions. I quite like myself, in many ways, but I still haven’t managed to fully shake the fear that anyone who I let get close to me will eventually find something in me that they hate, and will abandon me.

I’ve been depressed more or less without respite since 2013. That’s a weird way of putting it, when it’s not like I’ve been in one continuous major depressive episode that whole time, but I think there’s an important truth in it.

It's easy to assume that I’m not depressed, when I don't have the acute depression feeling of utter hopelessness, when I am basically functional and not on the floor unable to move. When I am often, from day to day, happy or content or both.

But that feeling of happiness, such as I’ve been able to find it for the past few years, has been one of having carved out a little refuge from a world that hated me. Living a slow life of simple joys in defiance of what I knew I was supposed to be doing, of pressures I still felt but was ignoring. I rarely left my house, and I felt sad about that, but my house was also where I felt safe. Leave my house and go interact with people, and something could go wrong. Often did go wrong. And even if I had good interactions, it all felt fleeting; I had little sense of building lasting connections with anyone.

Still, it made sense to think I wasn’t depressed anymore, because I’d been on an upward trajectory for so long.

2020 blacking out of my life, losing everything, being psychologically tortured with no escape in sight. 2021 still feeling like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, hideous and hated and hiding under the bed til I could do everyone a mercy and just die out of sight. 2022 throwing myself at things, making memories and self-destructive decisions, traveling the world alone, exhausted, and miserable, but at least relieved to be far away from the life I hated.

2023 burned out and disillusioned, but stabilizing, falling in love, digital minimalism, moving towards something for the first time in years. 2024 moving in with my boyfriend, spending more and more time with children I loved until it was my job, starting to climb, maybe having one friend. 2025 settled but still spinning my wheels, still hiding from the world, still essentially friendless.

But god, things were so much better than they used to be! Was I really still depressed?

Well, you can look at my poetry from as recently as October 2025, which contains such lines as “god what’s the point of it all?” and “how do you cope with having no goals?” and “has our entire society entirely gone to shit?”. I have several finished songs that are completely unusable — they felt like deep truths at the time but looking at them now, they’re just embarrassing depression drivel.

My utter and intractable lack of purpose in life should also have been a pretty obvious sign. I had so many people try to debug that for me so many times, and I tried many times myself, but I was immovable. I just could not want anything.

Inkhaven 1 started to nudge me out of my old ruts, but I was so stuck, hard to budge. Inkhaven 2 kept nudging me, all the people who didn’t know who I was supposed to be and only saw who I was.

And suddenly, like a boulder blocking a stream, I tumbled, and the water started to flow again.

Suddenly I want things, and it feels normal. There are things I want to write that feel important to me. I acutely, constantly want to leave my life here behind, and I have somewhere specific that my heart quite desperately wants to go. I started working out again, suddenly, without even planning to. I've crossed the Bay to see friends twice this month, when I usually only care enough to do that once or twice a year. I started actually working on recording an album, years after writing many of the songs, and I’ve involved other people in the project, something I could never have done when I was stuck convinced that everyone will always let you down.

The past couple weeks I've felt like I was constantly on the edge of hypomania. I would wake up wanting to do things. I couldn't stop creating. I seemed to have an excess of executive function and social energy. But as it kept lasting I started to wonder... is this just what it's like to not be depressed? And I just didn't know because I have never experienced that state in all my years since high school? High school where I was kind, and open, and loved, where I believed the world could be good, where I believed in a future for myself and the world. It was easy to be that person in high school because I didn't know anything; I hadn't yet been disillusioned. But I'm starting to realize that "Over-updating on unusually bad situations" might apply to my entire adult life, not just the very worst of it.

People talk about depression as a cognitive distortion: You perceive things as worse than they actually are. From the inside it feels completely rational, like you are perceiving the world correctly and it’s everyone else who is delusional. Really, who is even dictating what the objectively correct way to perceive things is? Who’s to say that I’m incorrect to believe that people will abandon me when I’m in need, when it has in fact happened before, many times?

Still, perhaps there are more and less helpful ways to orient to the world. And maybe the distortion is when you get stuck after updating on the negatives, and can never find your way back to believing that things might be okay, no matter how much evidence you’re presented with.

For instance: I am still surprised every time someone does something nice for me. On the morning after Inkhaven 2, when I’d only slept three hours, I said it would be nice to have a banana, and a friend immediately handed me a banana he’d just gotten for himself. I was disbelieving at first, and then so touched I cried a little. It was just a fucking banana. He didn’t even have to pay for it or anything.

It’s only just occurring to me how fucked up some of my experiences have been. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, to not let yourself see how bad things are when you can’t escape them. Now that escape finally feels (maybe, just a little bit) possible, memories are surfacing like spring water.

People keep telling me that the whole world isn’t like the little bubble in which I’ve lived for the past nine years. That there are parts of the world, real, findable parts, that they’ve seen, where people treat each other with basic decency.

It’s hard to believe them.