Welcome back to the third edition of our book club!🥰

Time is passing by and so is my Goodreads reading challenge. As usual I want to give a massive thank you to those of you who have taken the time to support this community and, in doing so, have truly changed my life for the better. I’m so grateful to have you all tagging along on this journey.💌

Before we begin, I just wanted to remind you again that from now on we’ll be focusing on one book a month instead of two. I hope this allows for a more in depth discussion and the opportunity to combine the book club with LIVING DEARLY as well, to which all of you have access so I hope to see you there.🪷

Now without taking up any more of your time, let’s get into The Safekeep.💞

Introduction to the book💌

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is a roman historical fiction novel that explores themes of memory, belonging, desire, and the consequences of keeping the past buried. The story is set in the Netherlands in the aftermath of the Second World War. It follows Isabel, a young woman living an undisturbed and neat life in her old family home. Her carefully constructed routine is disrupted when Eva, her brother’s girlfriend, arrives to stay for the summer.

It soon becomes clear that Eva’s presence unsettles Isabel in ways she herself cannot quite understand. Told mainly through Isabel’s perspective, the novel takes us into her increasingly obsessive thoughts as her control over life begins to fall apart. Rather than being solely plot oriented, the story builds through small observations, details, and the tension between what Isabel remembers and what she chose to ignore.

The Safekeep is an introspective novel about the ways we navigate the present using the past, and how desire can force us to confront the parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden.

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Welcome (back) to the third edition of Books & Overthoughts!🥰

As always, before we get started the biggest thank you to all those of you who upgraded your subscription to support this community. It’s become such a big lifeline for me and has opened so many doors I never could have even dreamed of so truly, deeply THANK YOU💌

As I already mentioned in the announcement of LIVING DEARLY, to which you peeps all have access on top of our book club, from now on we will be focusing on one book a month to allow for more in depth discussion (and because unfortunately I still am a student with limited time and budget, so I can only spread so thin).

Anywho, without getting too excited for the next edition yet, let’s get into this one.🤭

Introduction to the book 💌

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston is a romance with a slightly surreal twist that mainly explores topics of grief, love, and becoming. The story is set in New York and follows the main character Clementine, a book publicist who is still trying to navigate life after the death of her aunt.

When she moves into her deceased aunt’s apartment, she discovers that, just like her aunt had always told her, it’s a magical space (literally). Every now and then, it slips seven years into the past. This is how she ends up meeting Iwan, a young chef who is living seven years before her and who, unbeknownst to him, will eventually become someone Clementine encounters in her own present.

What follows is a story about falling in love with someone at the “wrong” time, and the strange ways people can remain connected even as they change. At its core, The Seven Year Slip asks how can you continue to love someone when they are inevitably changed by time.

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Welcome to the very first Living Dearly experiment, pinch me!!💌

So many of you have already taken the time to share your own experiences and help others, and honestly that’s confirmed something for me: the main thing modern day society misses is community. Somewhere between all your messages I kept noticing the same thread. We seem to hold back a lot in life out of fear for what could go wrong if we didn’t. We hide so much of ourselves fort he sake of maintaining the imagine of being our own ideal self.

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I used the colour pink for the accents in my bachelor’s thesis. At the time, I wasn’t consciously making any sort of statement. I just like the colour and I was so sick of everything academic being a similar shade of blue. Every faculty logo, every slide deck template. Blue, blue, blue, blue. As if academic success could only ever come in one color. As if the second you want to be taken seriously you have to masculinize your choices or, alternatively, lean so hard into the femininity of it all that it becomes a brand instead of just, you know, aligned with half the world’s population

Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to relate this to the arts. More specifically pop culture, in this case.

Same rules, bigger stage

I came to the conclusion that it’s pretty much the same thing, just on a bigger stage. Musicians don’t just produce art, they are the art. You can’t separate art from the artist in the same way you can separate my thesis from me. Surely, men have struggles too, in theory, but that’s besides the point right now. A guy is allowed to be an unpredictable mystery. He can decide to not be on social media, be absent in interviews, and still he will be considered a great artist, “he’s just introverted and socially awkward.” A woman gets picked apart regardless of what choices she makes.

So my actual question is, and I mean this: why is femininity on its own not enough? Why does it need to be either disguised or the main topic of conversation?

Why can’t femininity just be ?

Which brings me to Olivia Rodrigo and her new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The whole image screams girlhood: the transition from purple to pink, feminine rage, romance, and (infamously) the babydoll dresses. Surprise surprise, cue the discourse: it’s infantilizing, it’s a step back, how did she go from leather outfits to baby doll dresses now.

I do understand the concern and worries for what this would mean for women in the performance industry. Quite the opposite is true, though. Considering her style as infantilizing is blaming the dress for a problem it didn’t create. A babydoll dress’ only function isn’t some sort of male fetish. That’s not why we all filled our wardrobes with those Hollister tops at the end of last year either. It only becomes that the second we decide softness equals weakness, that anything revealing a girl’s body in a playful manner must be an invitation and catering to male gaze rather than just something she thought looked flattering on her.

The babydoll dresses didn't do this to you

Then there’s the song serena joy, which she dropped unannounced and completely unrelated to her love life or the rest of the album in this way. For those of you who are equally unaware as me before my bestfriend took the time to explain (bless her), the song title is named after the Handmaid’s Tale woman who helped build the exact system that eventually cages her too. Not very subtle (thank god, because media literacy leaves room for interpretation, which Olivia makes clear is out of the question here). Proceeds go to charities, similar to the proceeds of the Daisy Chain Fields, the all-women festival she’s literally funding into existence. Put those two things side by side, a song about a woman who enforced her own erasure, and a festival built so women don’t have to beg to headline, and you don’t even need me to connect the dots. Femininity was never just a commercial stunt here. Going along with whatever diminishes or ridicules it is.

There’s more than one way to be too much

And this is happening everywhere right now. Chappell Roan is femininity through being unapologetically herself, made to confront you, not comfort you.

Sabrina Carpenter went the other way and turned hyper-femininity itself into the whole brand. With her bent-over album cover and the on stage sex positions she is basically daring you to say she’s too much.

Taylor Swift solved it a third way by making femininity so profitable that critiquing it stopped making a difference. Stadiums, friendship bracelets, an entire economy running on sequins. Call it shallow if you want, it’s also the highest-grossing tour of all time and it’s achieved by a woman, sooo…

I didn’t put pink in my thesis to prove anything. I put it there because I liked it and I was bored of blue pretending to be the only color that radiates competence. But maybe that is the essay. The fact that I have to explain myself at all.

At this point, it should come as no surprise that this community has been a space where we have focused on the uncertainties of life and how to create one that feels like you actually belong. We seem to spend an absurd amount of time preparing to live, as if we’re on some sort of free trial. Unfortunately, we’re not…

We save the dress for somewhere special, we wait until we feel experienced enough to apply for certain jobs, we think about texting someone (but don’t), we put the trip off until we have more money, more time. We admire people from a distance thinking I wish I could be more like her, we find a hobby we love the idea of having rather than actually doing it, we imagine ourselves as adventurous people but yet hold off the adventures for so long that the moment passes. Over and over and over again.

I am no stranger to this because, well, let’s just say the inspiration for the name Notes of an Overthinking Girl didn’t exactly appear out of thin air.

I love thinking, imaging, and romanticizing life but find myself petrified at the thought of it at the same time.

A thought I feared was my own, however, turned out to be shared by 140k+ of you. Insane.

“Sometimes, overthinking can become a very comfortable way of standing slightly outside of your own life, watching it pass by from the sidelines.”

You can think about doing something instead of doing it, you can imagine what it would feel like before you allow yourself to find out, and you can think there is a “life” waiting to be found instead of realizing that life is the process of finding itself.

“We seem to spend so much of our lives inside our own heads, that we forget to actually have one.”

By reading your works and chatting with you all, I’ve come to realize that there is so much power in our number. You peeps have proven time in time again that we relate to the same big feelings and help each other navigate the lives we feel stuck in.

It is truly the most powerful thing I have witnessed in my life, which is exactly how I came up with this…

Welcome to Living Dearly 💌

Living Dearly is a monthly invitation to get out of your own way. Every month, we’ll choose one small experiment and tackle in together.

It is not a productivity challenge, a self-improvement programme, or some sort of guide to become an improved version of yourself. Quite the opposite actually.

The point is to become more willing to participate in our own lives. We’ll try things that we would otherwise avoid at all cost, we’ll explore aspects of life we’d normally let us pass us by.

And we’ll talk about it. We’ll do it together. Because if you peeps proved one thing it is that life is not a solo-race. In fact, it is not a race at all.

Graspable baby steps towards a more lived life. Think about going somewhere you’ve never actually been, trying something even though you might be terrible at it, saying yes where your auto pilot would have said no, actually making the plan instead of talking about making the plan.

As overthinkers, we can become very good at thinking about living instead of actually living.

We plan and imagine things just to tell ourselves we’ll do them eventually.

And sometimes, without really noticing, we spend more time imagining our lives than actually participating in them.

I want to change that. Importantly, we’re going to change that together.

Living Dearly isn’t supposed to be something you read, nod along to, and forget about five minutes later.

I want it to feel like a group of people trying things alongside each other.

We’ll tell each other what you’re doing, we can share what went completely wrong, we’ll celebrate tiny victories.

You can read what everyone else is doing and realise that maybe you’re not the only person who has been standing in their own way.

There is no competition, or race, or anyway to perfect this process of participation. Just one little experiment at a time to help you regain control of your life.

How Living Dearly will work 💌

I want to keep the structure simple and predictable, so you always know what’s happening.

⭐️ THE 1^ST - A NEW EXPERIMENT

On the 1st of every month, I’ll introduce that month’s Living Dearly experiment. Members will get the full explanation, why we’re doing it, and some ideas for how you can translate it into your own life.

The first experiment will begin on September 1st.

In the hopes that before 2027, we’ll feel more alive already.

💬 THROUGHOUT THE MONTH — WE DO IT TOGETHER

The experiment doesn’t end when you finish reading the post.

Throughout the month, we’ll use Substack threads to check in, share what we’re doing, encourage each other, and talk about how it’s actually going. It will be a safe space where we can grow together.

I’ll be there too.

I want you to be able to come back and say:

“I finally did it.” or

“I was going to do it but got scared.” or

“This went completely differently than I expected.” or simply:

“Okay, I will be doing it today, wish me luck.”

Those conversations are the community, they are how we have proven we can help each other.

📚 ONCE A MONTH — BOOK CLUB

Living Dearly isn’t replacing Books & Overthoughts, but the Book Club is changing slightly too.

Instead of reading two books a month, we’ll now read one book a month.

We’ll have one dedicated book club discussion each month, giving us more time to actually read, discuss and enjoy the book together rather than rushing through two.

I mainly decided to keep the book club because whilst we’re trying to become more of ourselves, I believe it is important that we remain able to transport ourselves into different lives through words.

So your upgraded membership will now have two seperate things to look forward to, which will enrich your life:

💌 Living Dearly
One experiment every month to win back your life + an ongoing community around it.

📚 Book Club
One book every month to temporary wear someone else’s shoes + our monthly discussion.

📝 Articles

I hope to be able to continue publishing one free article a week for the unpaid tier of Notes of an Overthinking Girl.

These will remain separate from Living Dearly. So, my usual thoughts on film, music, books, culture, the internet and whatever else has managed to occupy my brain that week.

There will always be something new to read, while Living Dearly gives us something new to do.

Why are you doing all this girl…

I’ve always said: uni is to grow, side job is for money, and writing is my hobby.

However, I would never want for my writing to simply be another corner of the internet telling you that you aren’t doing enough or that you should be looking at life differently.

There is already plenty of that to go around…

I want to make a change and, hopefully, make my words be much more meaningful. I want us to get better at participating in our own lives. Even if it is as simple as noticing when we’re making excuses, being okay with doing things badly as long as it means we’re doing things, and to be okay with saying yes as well as saying no. At making memories instead of just thinking about making them. For all that you peeps have done for me (truly, you have no idea) I figured this is what I can provide for you.

I want for you to feel like a more personal, unique, flawed yet ideal versions of yourself, and I want you to know you’re not doing it alone.

Come live dearly with me 💌

If you’re someone who spends a little too much time in your own head, I made this for you. Let’s stop thinking about living and start doing a little more of it.

As a thank you for being by my side through this entire journey, I secured a 20% discount for those who join before September 1st.

join us

As always, thank you, I love you & I really hope to see you there⭐️

More than ever, I notice we tend to talk about life as if it’s a solo sport. Be the smartest, be the richest, be the most successful. Especially in the bigger cities, I notice people learned to just tune each other out and live their lives in a bubble. But nobody can do it alone, not really. Even the most independent people might be able to do it by themselves, but not alone. We are wired for each other in a way that go beyond language and every other system we’ve built to convince ourselves we don’t need anybody. A baby left alone doesn’t just feel sad. It dies. An elderly person who loses their spouse is statistically more likely to die within the year, the same way swans die in pairs too. And truth be told, you wouldn’t have even been able to get your degree without the bus driver dropping you off at school every morning. Human connection is not the icing or the cherry on top. It’s the flour, the butter, the eggs. It’s what the foundation of the cake is even made of.

And I think that’s why we make art the way we do. Every story that’s ever made me emotional is either a story about two or more people, figuring out life together, or the downfall of a person who is figuring out life alone. That’s it. That’s the whole engine room of every book and movie I’ve ever loved. Not plot. Not stakes. Bonds, or lack thereof.

Before Sunset is maybe the purest version of this I know, which came to my attention by the people editing Olivia Rodrigo’s lyric to the script. Celine and Jesse met on a train nine years earlier, spend one night together, and then didn’t see each other again until this movie. An hour and a half in real time, walking around Paris, running out of daylight. Nothing spectacular happens in the way we expect things to happen in movies, as it is very script based. There’s no explosion, no twist, no villain. The entire tension of the film is just: what are they going to say. Are they going to admit that the last nine years of their separate lives have been shaped, quietly, permanently, by one night they spent as basically strangers? And when the film ends (no spoilers in case anyone hasn’t seen it, though at this point you’ve had twenty years ;) it ends on the exact edge of a decision. The movie never fully revolved around this decision. It merely showed us that meeting someone can split your life into a before and an after (literally, in the case of this movie title).

That’s the part I think we undersell. Once you take a second to sit with it, you’ll realize that much of our internal calendar is measured in people, not in events. As a matter of fact, I rarely think of my life in years. I think of it in eras, and more specifically who I knew during them. There’s a four year long version of me from before my best friend. There were three middle/highschool versions of me, as each school was defined by different friends. Needless to say the same applies to uni at the moment. That’s an almost structural way of looking at human connections. It’s kind of like how geologists read rock strata, you can tell what era you’re looking at by what’s pressed into the layer. My layers are made of people.

Little Women does this too, just louder and messier, with four sisters crammed into one house. Every March sister is trying to become someone, and every single one of their becomings is influenced by the others in the room. Amy can’t grow up without spending her whole childhood in Jo’s shadow and clawing her way into her own light. Meg gives up the fantasy of ease because she’d rather have love in a small house than loneliness in a big one. None of them made their choice in isolation. Their whole arc is dependent on each other, which is the least American thing a story can say and maybe why it still stings us so specifically. We’re taught to worship the self-made woman, and then Louisa May Alcott hands us (well, our ancestors) four girls who are made almost entirely by their sisters.

And then there’s Past Lives, which might be the one that says the quiet part loudest. Nora and Hae Sung know each other as kids in Korea, get separated when her family emigrates, and spend the rest of the film almost-meeting across decades and oceans and, eventually, a marriage that isn’t either of theirs. The film borrows this Korean concept, in-yun, the idea that any encounter between two people (even if it’s brushing sleeves on the street) is the result of thousands of years of accumulated closeness in past lives. It’s a beautifully tender way of saying: nothing between people is coincidental. Every interaction, no matter how brief, is just the tip of the iceberg of their bond. And the movie doesn’t even give them a happy ending in the traditional sense. Nothing is “solved.” She stays married. He goes home. But the ache doesn't need to go away for the movie to meet something, the ache itself is the god the title of this essay is talking about. The feeling caused by others If there’s something bigger than us out there, I don’t think it can be found in a building or a book. I think it can be found in the specific unbearable tenderness of two people hugging goodbye, knowing this is the last time, but leaving without verbalizing that anyway.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three of these stories lack a neat, happy ending.

Because isn’t that the most realistic thing? Not fireworks, not a tidy little bow on top. Just people changed by each other, walking back into their separate lives, holding the shape of another person like a handprint on their heart.

I fleetingly think about this every time I meet someone I feel will matter. It happens almost chemically in a way that my body and mannerisms act before my brain does. You don’t always know what a person will become to you. A friend, a lover, a person you’ll lose touch with and think about at 30 for no reason. But deep down you know, somehow, that a door has opened, and that whatever’s on the other side will change you for good.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about fate, or god, or whatever word they’re comfortable using. That the people who find their way into your life are fulfilling an insanely unique purpose. Something no job, place, or achievement could ever replicate. Not any change you could’ve created by yourself, in a vacuum. Only another person could ever impact you like that.

When I say I believe that if there’s a god, it’s in the bond between us two, I mean that quite literally. I’ve entered churches but within this building I only ever found myself looking around for my mum or dad and lighting candles for the loved ones that are no longer here with us. No feeling in the world compares to the way it feels to be really seen by somebody and see them in return. Even if their presence cannot be constant or forever.

💌: anywho, while we’re on the topic of pursuit for human connection…

I’ve been working on something. Something meant for us to step out of our heads and back into our lives. Tell a friend to tell a friend, because if there is one thing you peeps have proven over and over again it is the strength of community. 🤭

I’ll be sharing more very soon, so stay tuned !!

There is a deer, breathing, in the middle of a field. This image does not merely exist as a figment of your imagination. It is not just some utopian place your mind wonders off to at any given moment. There are actual deer living in sunny fields the moment I am writing this, as well as the moment you are reading this. See, there is a difference between thinking about life and actually living.

The creature has a pulse. It is letting its four legs carry it through the field covered in wildflowers, while the sun warms up it’s fur. It exists entirely independent of you.

And I can’t help but wonder how much of our lives we spend imagining a world for the sake of feeling part of it, rather than being part of the one we do have.

On having a powerful imagination

Having a strong imagination, unfortunately, also means your mind has the power to take you to negative spaces. It is precisely because of this that I cannot stress the importance of actively existing in a world outside of the one only you know enough. When things seem dark, there is still something alive and beautiful existing entirely independent of you.

Something that doesn’t know it is supposed to be symbolic of a utopian world or represent some kind of unachievable reality which we can only visit in our minds.

Your mind has self-destructing tendencies

It is no surprise that humans are inherently selfish creatures.

I believe we have a habit to skim over how important the world outside of ourselves is.

Overthinking has a peculiar way of taking us somewhere only we know. We spend our time replaying conversations that are already over as well as predicting conversations that haven’t taken place at all. We reconstruct the past until it barely resembles what actually happened, then invent some future and worry about that too. We spend hours inside rooms that don’t exist, having conversations with people who aren’t there, solving problems that haven’t happened yet.

Imagination can be a beautiful thing

But while we spend our time worrying about a road kill fawn, there is a deer in the field. The sun is shining through your window. You can hear the laughter of a loved one pouring out of the room next to you. Your cup of tea is hot now but will get cold if you leave it untouched.

But your mind has taken you somewhere else. That’s the real downside of overthinking, isn’t it? Not that we are imaginative but that we miss what is actually happening while we’re busy thinking about what might be happening. We’re letting life pass us by and we’re too distracted to even notice.

We are so willing to overthink the painful things …

Why did they say that?

What if I made the wrong decision?

Am I sick?

Will someone die?

What if it all goes wrong?

What did they mean?

What should I have done differently?

Will I be able to buy a house? Land a job?

… that we forget we are able to give the beauty of life the same attention.

We don’t lie awake analysing the exact shade of pink the sky was that evening or replay the laughter a group of friends can only make when in each other’s company. We overthink the bad while we underthink the good. I very strongly believe we should try reversing that.

We should obsess over the sunset.

Revisit the good conversations.

Notice the warmth of someone’s hand when we shake it.

The tight grip of someone’s arms when we hug them.

We should let ourselves wonder why those seemingly small, unimportant moments make us feel infinite.

I don’t think hope is some delusional belief that everything will work out in the end. I believe hope is simply the willingness to notice what still is.

To look at the deer instead of imagining one.

To be in the field you’re actually standing in.

To stop spending your entire life going somewhere only you know, and spend it exactly where your feet are planted and where you want them to take you next instead.

I believe we should strive to become someone who lives more of the world worth thinking about.

Someone who can catch herself disappearing into her own head and gently pull back to the actual life happening before it becomes a memory. Who can turn thoughts and dreams into real life.

And I think a lot of us need that. Not another productivity hack or some five-step system for fixing ourselves, but something much more human and experimental. A little rebellion against the endless internal monologue if you will. 💌

💌: which brings me to the next thing..

I’ve been working on something. Something meant for us to step out of our heads and back into our lives. A little less living somewhere only we know.

Tell a friend to tell a friend, because if there is one thing you peeps have proven over and over again it is the strength of community.

I’ll be sharing more very soon, so stay tuned !!

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Taylor Swift chose to make a song disappear without uttering as much as a word. For those of you who have missed it: the White House posted a video with “I Bet You Think About Me” playing underneath it. Within days the audio was gone. No lawsuit, press conference, or dramatic text you could screenshot and use to demonize Taylor in this scenario. Just silence where art used to be.

This article has been brewing for weeks now. See, since I noticed the first time I cannot unsee it. Obama dropped his summer playlist and next thing we know Noah Kahan is pretending to call him up on stage, thrilled. Zohran Mamdani gets put on the big screen mid-Djo-concert to have a little cameo in the song Charlie’s Garden and the crowd went wild. But when Trump uses a song by Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, or Noah Kahan, it feels like watching your annoying uncle grab the best slice of the pizza, knowing very well he didn’t pay a dime.

All three of these scenarios are politicians reaching for music, so how come two of them feel fine and the other one feels like theft?

Say it with me: context matters !!

Where a playlist is a compliment, a campaign video is more like a hostage situation. When Obama says he’s been listening to Noah Kahan, he’s not claiming Noah agrees with his tax policy. He’s just telling you something about himself and gives credit to an artist where he believes credit is due. Noah gets to decide how he feels about that. He made clear he thought it was amazing by jokingly calling Obama back on stage. Regardless though, the meaning of the song stayed untouched. It just got a little shout out. Mamdani showing up on screen during a Djo performance is basically a copy paste of this. He didn’t hijack Charlie’s Garden, he got invited into it. This just highlights an artist willingness to let someone borrow their stage.

Trump’s situation with Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Olivia Rodrigo works nothing like this. He took the song and attached it to a political message the artist would never sign off on. Luckily, the both Olivia and Sabrina used their voices to call Trump out for using their art over immigration enforcement footage. That’s the main difference from where I’m standing. Where Mandani is being asked, Trump isn’t asking at all.

Music has never just been background noise

What people don’t realize is that ownership within the arts is not just about who legally owns the recording. It’s about who gets to decide what the recording means once it’s being played.

See, music tells your soul how to feel before your brain has caught up. Put a triumphant sound under a rally clip and it will fee like a win. And trust me, this is not accidental. It’s the entire point of picking the song in the first place. The music is doing work the speech can’t do on its own and drawing in a new target demographic in the progress.

Which means when Taylor’s team pulls the audio, they’re not just being precious about their beloved royalties. As a matter of fact, I believe she didn’t speak out because her words would have been demonized, and Trump would gain a whole new group of voters just for the sake of pissing off Taylor Swift. Instead, she (gracefully) pulled the emotional engine out of the video and leaving him standing there with just his own words, which (surprise lol) don’t hit the same without the musical aspect.

Then they came for Spider-Man…

Just when I thought I wrapped my head around the music thing, the White House posted Spider-Man webbing up “criminal illegal aliens” with the caption “your friendly neighbourhood ICE agents,” and I genuinely had to read it twice. I’m sorry but what the actual-

Is America even real at this point?

The image of Spider-Man was never supposed to be used for this message. He’s the hero who gets teased, who struggles to pay rent, who loses the girl because he was busy saving a stranger. Peter Parker is a broke kid from Queens who helps people because nobody else is. Turning him into ICE propaganda a week after the latest movie hit like a billion dollars at the box office isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s a complete hijack of what the character has stood for all this time. Ownership for artistic products is tricky enough as it is, but emotional value cuts even deeper. You can’t just decide Spider-Man is suddenly pro-deportation and expect everybody to just be okay with this. And, luckily, people weren’t. They noticed, fast.

Anywho, let me explain why this is a different kind of theft than the whole music thing. Taylor Swift now owns her masters, so when her song gets pulled from a Trump video, that’s an artist exercising actual control over actual property. Spider-Man, on the other hand, isn’t anybody’s published diary entry, He is owned by Disney or Sony (I lost track at this point, oops). So when Marvel fans flooded the comments demanding a lawsuit and for the post to be taken down, they weren’t defending an artist’s feelings. They were defending a character’s meaning. They were defending the art instead of the artist.

Letterboxd has a mayor now, apparently

Meanwhile, over in a completely different corner of the internet, people are in Letterboxd comment sections (specifically those of Spider-Man: Brand New Day) are looking a little something like this:

And true, Letterboxd is not just a cross section of America. It’s mostly young, online, film-literate people who already agree with each other about most things, cracking the same joke in slightly different words until it becomes a bit. So, I fear this is not as simple as just saying “people who love movies are progressive.”

However, I do think it says something. I think it shows that politics are slowly gaining the trust of younger generations again. I mean, no wonder crime rates are dropping drastically. New York has both Mandani and Spider-Man coming up for its civilians, on-screen as well as off-screen ;)

So, is liking art nowadays just a left thing then?

I’m going to just come out and say what I actually believe (considering it is my article after all): yes, I think so.

Granted, not every genre, not every fan, but the centre of gravity in mainstream art right now leans left, and I honestly believe that’s good news for what happens next.

Take The Hunger Games, for example. Trump announced something called the “Patriot Games” for the country’s 250th birthday (again, is America even real), and within hours Democrats aren’t writing press releases, they’re posting pictures of President Snow. And it wasn’t some coordinated messaging strategy cooked up in a fancy office room with fancy politicians wearing fancy suits. It was instant. See, an entire generation had already spent a decade absorbing Katniss Everdeen as the blueprint for what standing up to corrupt power looks like. Nobody had to explain the metaphor to the general public. We’d already done the reading.

@democratsTrump 🤝 Snow

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That’s the beautiful thing about growing up on stories like that. You don’t walk away from The Hunger Games thinking the Capitol had a point. You don’t finish it rooting for the districts to stay quiet and grateful. The story only works one way, and an entire generation absorbed that lesson before we were old enough to vote. Same with Spider-Man, honestly. A broke kid from Queens who helps people because the system doesn’t is not exactly Republican propaganda, which is exactly why watching the White House slap “friendly neighborhood ICE agent” on him felt like such a betrayal of the arts rather than just an example of poor media literacy.

If we burn, you burn with us

Sure, there’s country music, there’s the whole conservative Nashville machine, there’s an entire universe of art that skews right and always has. I’m not pretending that doesn’t exist or those artists aren’t just as capable of making it big time. But when you zoom out to what’s actually dominating the culture right now (the franchises everyone’s kid has read, the songs everyone’s algorithm keeps pushing, and the shows critics are obsessing over) it’s leaning one direction, and I think it has been for a while. An entire generation raised on stories where the rebellion is always the good guy for no reason other than common sense. Love is love, love your neighbor, and equality is good level of common sense.

Maybe that’s why I’m not solely worried about the future, even if the news provides very little positivity at times. If the art shapes how twenty-something year olds understand power, corruption, and who deserves protection all points the same direction, that’s not just coincidental or engineering for anyone’s own propaganda. It’s simply what happens when you raise a generation on stories that precisely reflect that the guy in charge is always hiding something and that the underdog can win.

So, who is art actually made for?

Nobody one person, but everybody. Not just the label or the artist. Not just the listener crying to it in their car or the politician who thinks it makes them look cool and more likable.

But there’s a real gap between an artist letting the culture do whatever it wants with their work and a politician grabbing that work and forcing it to say something the artist actively disagrees with. Obama gets to like Noah Kahan out loud. Mamdani gets invited to be part of a performance. That’s culture being shared.

Trump takes a song, points it at a message the artist despises, and waits to see if anyone notices before the internet does it for him. Same goes for Spider-Man, nobody willingly gave him that character, he just took it and hoped to benefit off the current hype. That’s not sharing anything, that’s just plain taking it and trying to privatize the way it can be interpreted.

I choose to believe this lack of support from the arts reflects broader societal indifference rather than causing it.

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💌: I realize this article is slightly more opinionated. Feel free to express your thoughts in the comments, just make sure it remains a safe space. Hateful comments and interactions will be deleted and users will be blocked <3

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For the few of you who haven’t caught on yet, let me be the one to break it to you: this year has been exceptionally great for cinema.

I’ve had the joy of sitting through rolling credits, while staring at the screen in absolute awe of what I just watched. Specifically, I kept circling back to the same two stories, thousands of years apart, both about someone trying to find his way home. Granted, one of them has a cunty bow and the other swings between buildings in red spandex, but both of these movies caused me to seriously overthink the concept of belonging.

Here’s what I ended up with: the thing nobody tells you about coming home is that it’s never the place that changes. It’s you.

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We treat “finding yourself” like it’s a straight line

As if you leave as one person, go do the hard yet beautifully confusing work of becoming, and arrive somewhere new. Fully formed, unrecognizable. An overall improved version of yourself.

I don’t think that’s how it actually works though, I think you grow and stretch and shed and grieve and become a thousand different versions of yourself, until one day you turn a corner and something pulls you right back to who you were before any of the ‘change’ happened.

Allow me to further clarify in the context of cinema (my specialty at this point)

The Odyssey was not simply about Odysseus wanting to go home. He spend years fighting a war and getting shipwrecked, seduced, cursed, and nearly drowned trying to get back to Ithaca. Truly, I cannot think of one side quest he hasn’t gone on… It’s safe to say that when the waves finally carry him back home, he’s not the man who left. He’s an older and more closed off version of himself. You can’t exactly blame the man. He has watched his men die one by one and he’s lied his way across the entire known world just to survive, all while Penelope, who has spent twenty years fending off suitors with nothing but hope that one day her husband will return to her, is still waiting for the version of him that sailed away.

So when he finally stands in front of her, disguised as a beggar, she doesn’t recognize him. It takes her so long to see what is right in front of her. Seriously, we were almost screaming at her through the screen.

After overthinking this interaction some more though, it dawned on me. I had interpreted this as suspicion, as her being careful yet caring (insert Zeus’ Law). However, I think it’s something else too. I think she wasn’t just curious about this stranger. There is a part of her, no matter how small, that was checking if this vaguely familiar presence was still someone she can come home to. If two decades, a war and a god-cursed journey have left enough of him behind for her to still recognize.

Home was never a place that stayed frozen in time

Instead, home proved to be a person who had to get to know him all over again. Belonging was never about Ithaca not being touched by time. It was about finding the one thing, the one person, who could look at who he’d become and still say: yes, I still recognize you.

Maybe that’s what belonging actually is. Instead of it being a place that freezes in time, waiting for your return, it is someone who is capable of recognizing you after you’ve changed.

Someone who can hold both the person who left and the person who came back, and not ask you to choose between them.

Which brings me to Peter Parker, who asked himself the exact same question.

Every Spider-Man story eventually corners him into the same impossible choice. Be Peter or be Spider-Man, put your own life first or save the city, love her or protect her, do the easy thing or do the hard thing. The world keeps trying to split him cleanly down the middle, like a person is only allowed to be one true thing at a time. Some deep, innate part of him knows that if he ever fully becomes just Spider-Man, or just Peter, he loses himself completely either way. He can’t be either without the other.

“Brand New Day”

I think about the title a lot. It could just be my understanding of it, but on paper it sounds almost hopeful? A fresh start and the chance to leave the wreckage behind and become someone lighter. We all seem to be trying it by moving abroad, or choosing new studies, or starting a new job. But can you really start over?

We have this tendency to talk about reinvention like it’s a door you walk through and shut behind you, but I don’t think a “self” works like that. I like to think of it more as if you’re more like a flower blooming out of soil some earlier version of you planted, whether you intended it like that or not. You can move cities, cut your hair, change your number, fall in and out of who you thought you were, and still the roots are still yours. All these aspects of who you once were grew you into whoever’s standing here now.

Adulthood has a sneaky way of convincing us that we are supposed to outgrow our younger selves. Like maturity means leaving them behind in some drawer you lock and never open again. But maybe growing up was never about outgrowing who you used to be. Maybe it’s about learning to carry them better. The kid who believed things too easily, the version of you that loved someone who didn’t deserve it, or the person you were before the thing that chipped off a little piece of your heart happened. You don’t get rid of them, you just learn how to be them without being only them.

We spend so much of our lives overthinking and obsessing over the next step

The next version, the next chapter, the next reinvention. As if there’s a finish line called “progress” that we’re all racing toward. But Odysseus wasn’t trying to become someone new when he sailed for ten years. Peter isn’t trying to become someone new every time he pulls the mask back on. They’re both just trying to get back to something they were in danger of losing. A sort of recognizability. The parts of themselves that made them feel like they belonged somewhere or to someone in the first place.

I believe going home was never about returning to where you geographically started. Maybe it’s about returning to the parts of yourself you thought you’d left behind for good, and finding out they were only ever waiting.

Underneath both of these beautiful cinematic stories is the same terrifying question: who am I, if the thing that defined me gets taken away?

After having watched both films, I can honestly say I don’t think either of our protagonists really found the answer to this question. I am starting to think that maybe you’re not supposed to. You just keep becoming, and unbecoming, and becoming again. New job, new heartbreak, new haircut, new city, new versions of yourself you didn’t know you had in you. Rinse and repeat until one ordinary day you turn around and realize that wherever you go, there you are. Still you. Just carrying a little more and a little differently.

💌: if you haven’t yet & are able, please do head to your local movie theatre. Trust me you won’t regret it!!

It were the thoughts you could not seem to stop from spiraling that got you to pick up a pen for the first time, believing they were something bigger than yourself.

Proof that your inner-world was substantial enough to create life of its own.

To eternalize yourself. That your thoughts are the evidence you needed to proof you hadn’t simply appeared on this Earth for a few meaningless decades and then quietly evaporated.

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When I was seven, I thought meaning looked like publishing a book. Believe it or not, immortality in my eyes took the shape of my book sharing a shelf with Daisy Meadows’ fairy books (we all got to start somewhere, right?). At fourteen, it took the shape of moving to London. My biggest goal in life was to become the kind of woman who wore funky scarves and carried annotated books around. At twenty, though, I started to believe meaning and leaving my mark on earth would be defined by people knowing my name in rooms I would never even enter.

I reckon it is precisely this thinking pattern that has led to Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) being one of the movies I hold closest to my heart.

“I want to be great or nothing.”

“No one will forget Jo March!”

Wow. What an extraordinary thing to be confident enough in that statement to speak it into reality. To feel greatness so deeply in your bones that you refuse to shy away from sharing your ambition with the rest of the world. As if there is absolute, guaranteed certainty that one day everyone will suddenly realize you mattered.

On that note, I find it remarkable how often ambition gets mistaken for bravery. I would even argue that, more often than we’d care to admit, ambition is more comparable to fear. The fear isn’t that you’ll fail, it’s that you’ll disappear. That you’ll die with a hundred half-finished notes app entries and an infinite amount of thoughts you never expressed to anybody. Dreams in mind, but nothing to show for it.

Constantly being confronted with the paralyzing fear that you will end up spending your entire life trying to become unforgettable without ever even stopping to ask why.

I have this tendency to believe that history is happening somewhere else, independent of my own existence.

In government buildings, on bestseller lists, or at award ceremonies. I imagine meaning to be media trained, dressed in designer clothes, and higher educated than I am. That legacy is solely destined for the select few of us who fill the cover of magazines and newsletter headlines. Meanwhile, my actual life seems to keep unfolding in comparably small ways.

I adopt and influence the sentences my friends and I made a habit of using. I keep ordering my iced latte, but without saying the word iced out loud, causing me to get a regular one instead. My grandma made a habit of remembering to put out strawberries for me, solely because she remembers me mentioning I liked them once when I was little. I make sure all the handwritten cards I receive end up in my memory box without needing to think twice about it.

None of these moments would make it to my gravestone. None of them would earn me a memoir, an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, or a museum exhibit.

If I vanished tomorrow, however, those seemingly tiny things would not.

Nothing will change in the way my friends talk, the way the barista completes the coffee orders, the way my grandma would think of me when she sees strawberries, or the way my memory box sits quietly under my desk. Maybe this is what real meaning in legacy looked like before someone invented awards and galleries to honour it. I believe we have a habit of underestimating how much of ourselves leaks into other people. My mum lives in the way I fold towels, my English teachers live in the way I know when to use ‘a’ or ‘an’, and a friend I haven’t spoken to in years still lives in certain songs.

People don’t disappear as cleanly as we imagine, so why would we?

Spending the better part of your lifetime aiming to become unforgettable is kind of sad if you truly think about it. It assumes the entire point of life is to leave overwhelming evidence that you were living it. As if joy doesn’t exist unless somebody writes it down or as if love only matters when history remembers who loved whom.

I surely would not want to spend my whole life watching it pass me by from the sidelines.

I want to notice the sky turning pink while I walk my dog, I want to look at the moon long enough to know what phase it is in, I want to bake cakes, I want to write words that have the power to make a stranger feel less lonely, and I want my future children to roll their eyes because I keep telling the same stories over and over and over again.

I want to become the kind of person whose fingerprints are everywhere, even if her name isn’t.

Maybe no one will forget Jo March. Maybe no one will forget Virginia Woolf. Maybe no one will forget Taylor Swift.

But my future kids will remember the way I braided their hair and I’m hopeful that maybe one day someone will underline a sentence in something I’ve written for the sake of carrying it with them, slowly remembering where they got it from in the first place.

Please, don’t get it twisted though. I am not of the opinion that ambition is the enemy. I simply don’t want to spend a lifetime chasing one so extraordinary that I forget to cherish the fact I even woke up in the morning. The fear of having life quietly pass me by is greater than the fear of being forgotten could ever be.

Because meaning has never had the habit of hiding in the unforgettably loud moments. Instead, it is found in the process of quietly becoming yourself so fully that little pieces of you continue living inside other people.

“No one will forget !”

Not because the whole world will remember your name or because your work will be eternalized on a museum wall.

It will be because your life left fingerprints on others. And maybe that was the only inspiration we ever needed to come up with the concept of immortality.

Exhibit A:

Though I have yet to develop the pictures, the magic mirror that holds all of the world’s information and every version of myself, did manage to capture some bits and bops of my every day existence.

This very kind and (noteworthy distinction from the rest of its kind) talking tree had some wisdom to share, which we decided to take to heart.

The rest of the day disappeared into mushroom cupcakes, unlimited rides on courtesy of our overpriced tickets, and wondering whether my real-life black cat would recognize the electronic Hansel and Gretel one exactly that or as distant family that defected to the dark side.

More Harry Styles (naturally).

The main thing fueling my artistic expression is other artistic expressions, so I’ll let that justify the endlessly long pondering of my friends and I regarding going or not going to this exhibition (right in front of the reception of said exhibition) worth it.

The kind lady let us know that students could enter for free, which basically settled the debate. In we went.

This spiral staircase is one of the many sights that sparked news ideas in my already overworking mind this summer.

writing, writing, writing, writing, writing.

reading, reading, reading, reading, reading.

Despite the many times I exclaimed my discomfort, going to the thrift store wearing my brand new wellies (ironically bought in our driest summer yet) became this summer’s defining scene.

Whenever your problems seem big, go to a place that makes you feel small.

The moon makes the trees look small, even though she appears as smaller to us. I suppose it truly is all about perspective.

The salad I made, which took almost as long to photograph as it did to finely chop. I meant to share the recipe with the world (free will and all that), but never did. I'm not sure why.

This summer, I left the big city I study in for my parents’ house in the countryside. I suppose dreaming big starts some place small.

To my surprise, I get quite some messages from people asking me how I got this community to grow and if I have any advice. How did I gain so many subscribers in such a short amount of time?

Every time, I stare at the message for a second and think: why did you download this app in the first place?

So, I’ll take one for the team and give the wake-up call everyone seems a little hesitant to give.

If you want to sell a course and gain financial stability, LinkedIn will do that for you. If you’re a celebrity looking for a platform to boost your clout, Instagram is your platform. Substack was not built for either of those things. Substack, in my experience, was built for the vulnerability of exposing yourself and taking the initiative to finally write some words down because you could physically not not do it any longer. So, when I see someone actively chasing subscriber counts here the same way they’d chase followers anywhere else, it kind of gives me the vibe of posting an accidental screenshot of your lockscreen on Pinterest. Sure, technically it’s content. It’s just not for anything and it’s not coming from anywhere. Not from your soul, not from some unrequited passion, and not because you actually have something to say.

I’m aware this might sound harsh

but please trust me when I say I’m not writing this to call anyone out. I understand wanting to be seen, and I adore the supportive side of this community. There is, however, such a strong difference between “hi, I wrote my first article and I’m quite nervous could you tell me what you think?” And “please promote” or “how did you get subscribers?”

I love nothing more than reading the many articles you peeps take the time to send me and would truly not change that for the world. This message fully excludes this side of the platform. I’m sharing this message because I continue to notice a clear difference between the people who are in it with (creative) passion and the people who are in it for clout.

There’s no denying it.

We’ve all, at some point, confused the statistics for our because. The subscriber milestones might feel validating, but they should never be your because. They’re a byproduct, not a purpose. You’ll find that when you solely chase the byproduct you usually end up with nothing.

So, the advice I like to give is that the only way to build something truly fulfilling is by staying true to yourself. By being so unapologetically and magnetically you that you become what I like to see as the equivalent of a little star in the night sky.

Writing from an honest place looks different on the page. It might be less polished and a little scary to put out there, but it says the true thing before it says the strategic thing (as I’m probably doing right now). That ‘imperfect’ authenticity is exactly what makes people stay.

Readers can tell.

We’re not brainlessly consuming content here the way we are while doomscrolling on TikTok or Insta. We can feel the difference between a sentence written just for the sake of writing one and a sentence written because it needed to exist. Where one is calculated the other is alive. And aliveness is the only thing that can’t be replicated or fitted into some general success formula, which is exactly why it’s one of the only ways to differentiate creativity that is unique to Substack from content that already has an outlet somewhere else.

So I’d argue success here isn’t a number at all

Maybe it’s the fact that you wrote the thing you were actually afraid to write, and someone out there needed to read exactly that, in exactly your voice, on exactly this Sunday evening. It’s those few comments telling you you’ve managed to word an emotion in a way that actually made someone let out a breath they didn’t know they were holding. I find this means more than an additional 10.000 inactive subscribers ever could.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying growth doesn’t matter, or that wanting to be seen is any kind of fault. It’s human.

But there’s a difference between wanting to be understood and just wanting attention. One keeps you writing and creating because you finally found the words. The other has you micromanaging and estimating how steep your growth curve is going to look tomorrow to the point where you burn your creative self out completely.

So please, do the thing only you can do.

Write like no one is going to steal it, because no one can. No one can steal the version that only exists because it moved through you, and that’s what makes you unique. Let the numbers be what they are. The right people will find your work. They truly always do. And they’ll stay not because you hit a growth hack, but because you gave them something no algorithm could have generated: your thoughts, your words, uniquely, on the page.

That’s what I think we’re actually doing here. Or at least, it’s what I hope we are. 💌

Welcome back to the second edition of our book club!🥰

Before we get started, I want to say a special thank you to those of you who upgraded their subscription to support this community.⭐️

Your support allows me to pour so much time and love into creating this space, I truly couldn’t do it without you!! From the bottom of my heart, thank you, your endless support does not go unnoticed.💞

Now, enough of the cheesy stuff lol. I absolutely adored this read so let’s get right into it hihi!

Introduction to the book💌

Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman is a coming-of-age novel that explores topics of first love, desire, identity, and the lasting impact of a singular summer. Set in Northern Italy during the 1980s, the story follows seventeen-year-old Elio, whose quiet summer is interrupted by the arrival of Oliver. It very soon becomes evident that Oliver is unlike any summer guest they have welcomed into their home in the years previous.

Considering it is told entirely from Elio’s perspective, the novel gives us a sneak peak into his thoughts as he tries to navigate the uncertainty, excitement, and vulnerability that come with falling in love for the first time. Rather than focusing on dramatic plot twists, the story unfolds through hyper fixation on small moments, conversations, and lingering glances. Pretty much everything that comes down to yearning.

Call Me by Your Name is in its heart an introspective novel about desire, self-discovery, and the fleeting nature of time. It highlights how certain people and moments can leave a lasting mark long after they’ve passed.

Themes: coming of age, desire, love, nostalgia, sensuality, identity & acceptance

Read more

Welcome back to already the second edition of our book club!🥰

Before we dive in, I just want to say a special thank you to those of you who upgraded their subscription to support this community!!⭐️

Your support allows me to pour so much time and love into creating this space, and I truly couldn’t do it without you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Your endless support will never go unnoticed.💞

Now, enough of the cheesy stuff lol. I absolutely adored this read so let’s get right into it, hihi!!

Read more

So how come we aren’t all artists if we are all experiencing life?

After having spent a solid 21 years and 227 days on this floating rock I think I actually have a pretty good idea. See, I believe that what stops most of us from creating is the fear of imperfection. The thought of pouring our souls into a piece that’ll be considered anything other than extraordinary seems to be stopping us from pouring our souls into anything at all. What we fail to realize, however, is that art is not inherently perfect. Neither is life. I’d even go as far as to argue that it’s inherently imperfect. So if art imitates life, why would we frown upon the very traits that make us human?

We get to spend a lifetime trying. That is what the human experience is all about. That’s what sets us apart from any robot or any generative AI. We are not perfect, and neither are our creations.

Just create

Experience the process of life unfolding before you in the most humane way possible. Listening, reading, watching, and observing art is beautiful in and on its own. However, being part of the creative process transcends the fulfillment mere consumption has to offer in every way.

To look at what you painted and know that every brush stroke represents a choice and a moment in time. To read what you wrote and know that every word came straight out of your mind. To listen to a song and know it’s as close to truly recording the sound of your soul as you’ll ever come.

That is the real perfection. Not the final product but the art of doing it.

The more you engage in it, the more you’ll see it

The longer you stand still by actively creating it, the more you will notice the inspiration for it. You’ll find that art truly is all around you, all the time. The trees that surround you are the same trees that inspired many artists before you. The streets you walk are the same streets, and the sounds of life are the same ones that motivated musicians to write the songs you get stuck in your head.

Take Van Gogh, for example. The man looked at a wheat field similar to the ones you have seen with your own eyes, but he didn’t just paint a wheat field. He painted what it felt like to stand in one. The sky in Starry Night isn’t like any sky you’ll ever actually see, and that’s the whole point. Impressionism was never about getting the landscape right, it was about admitting that there’s no such thing as right when a human being is the one looking. Two people can stand in the same field and walk away with two completely different paintings in their head, because the field bends around whatever they’re carrying that day. Grief bends it one way. Falling in love bends it another. This lack of a single, perfect interpretation of the world around us is not a flaw in the process, it is the process.

The same thing goes for music. Listen to Adrienne Lenker and you’re basically listening to someone’s diary read out to the sound of a guitar. Phoebe Bridgers has the gift to write about grief as if she’s trying to burn it with matches just to confirm it’s real. Noah Kahan turns his family drama and experiences with being homesick and anxious into something you could sing in a crowd of strangers who somehow also feel exactly what he means. None of these people set out to write “universal” songs. They wrote about their own specific experiences. Their own lives, their own towns, their own heartbreaks. Somehow it is precisely that specificity which makes it land in someone else’s chest on the other side of the world. You put their song on during a breakup and suddenly your breakup has a soundtrack that wasn’t written inspired by your experience but somehow captures the feeling of it perfectly. That’s what I refer to as the loop. Life became art, and now art is quietly rewriting someone else’s life.

It spills into the physical choices we gravitate towards

Movies do this in the most literal way possible. The cinematography in Call Me By Your Name was inspired by real experiences, real memories, real light, real feelings, and now people fly to somewhere in northern Italy just to stand where a fictional summer happened. To feel seventeen and heartbroken in a place they would have probably never known about had it not been for art. The movie was life filtered through someone’s imagination, and now it’s shaping actual life, actual plane tickets, and actual people wandering around northern Italy chasing a feeling a film gave them.

Life imitates art imitates life, on repeat, forever.

I think that’s what gets lost when we treat “creating something” like it has to be flawless to be worth doing

Van Gogh’s brushstrokes aren’t clean. The paint contains dirt as a consequence of creating it outside. Phoebe’s voice cracks as a consequence of an overflow of real emotion. The imperfection isn’t some obstacle on the way to true art. It’s the part that proves a person was here, actually trying, and made something regardless of the final product.

So maybe the point isn’t to make something extraordinary

Maybe it’s just to make something that’s honestly and unmistakably yours. A painting that only you could’ve painted because only you have your eyes. A song that only you could’ve recorded because only you have your voice. A sentence that only you could’ve written because only you have your particularly ordinary and messy life to pluck it from.

Take your own experience, wherever that may be. Let it take shape around whatever it is you’re carrying inside. Paint it badly. Write it messy. Sing it off-key. Someone, somewhere, is going to need exactly that imperfect thing to make sense of their own life (chances are it’s you). And from this, life will create something new.

Your creation imitates your existence imitates your art imitates your life. And on it goes. On loop, forever.

Do not let your fear of imperfection stop you from expressing your process of unfolding.

💌: and to the gorgeous people in our book club, this is your reminder that you have five more days to send in recommendations for next month’s picks 🥰

Are you a good person? I’m actually not so sure if I am.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about who I am when no one is watching. I honestly have no clue. What I do know, is that I’m funnier around my best friend. That I’m a better listener to my brother than I am to a stranger. That I have very little patience around my parents in a way that I can imagine wouldn’t slide anywhere else. That I don’t feel the need to check my phone mid-conversation or worry that I’ll say the wrong thing at the wrong time around the people I love. That I can be patient in a way I’m often not. That I can be positive when I usually just worry. Despite the fact that I don’t seem to be her independent of anyone else, I like her a lot.

But then who am I at my core, when no one is pulling out a specific side of me and no one is there to witness it?

I don’t think there’s one clean answer. Maybe there isn’t a single “real you” hiding underneath all the versions, waiting to be located. Maybe you are just whoever you become around people, along with the parts that keep showing up again and again, no matter who you’re with. It gets even more complicated online because you’re not even reaching out to a real person in real time. You’re reaching out to a two-dimensional, curated audience that’s just as aware they’re performing. The caption you rewrite four times. The story you don’t post because the lighting is slightly off. The TikTok you reshare because you want people to associate it with you, or because you want them to think you’re the kind of person who cares about the right things.

None of it is lying, per se. But it’s curated in a way your best friend version never has to be. Your best friend gets you on a bad day. Your Instagram grid does not. Your feed only ever gets the version of you you’ve already approved. Of course, curation can be its own kind of art and creative outlet. But it will never be the same as being truly seen. Spending hours sending your friends reels will never be the same as spending that same amount of time to actually go get a coffee with someone. I think that’s the part that quietly messes with people our age more than we admit. We’ve gotten so good at editing the version of ourselves we show the world that we’ve lost track of which parts were ever unedited to begin with. If the only version of yourself you consciously perceive is the one you choose to present in different situations, when do you ever just get to be without someone, or even yourself, shaping the performance?

That’s where it gets tangled up with community

Once you notice there’s a version of yourself that’s funnier, warmer, more patient, or less anxious, it’s hard not to start chasing whoever brings that version out. You know what it feels like to be that version, and you want more of it. So you gravitate toward the people who make you feel that way. Little by little, without ever meaning to, you drift from everyone who doesn’t. It’s not one decision, It’s a hundred small ones. Texting the friend who makes you laugh back a little faster. Letting the conversation with someone you met more recently go quiet because it takes more effort to show up fully for them. Choosing the version of your evening that guarantees you’ll feel like yourself over the one that’s a little uncertain. None of it actually looks like isolation from the inside. It looks like taste, like knowing what’s good for you, and like protecting your boundaries. But it adds up to the same thing: a smaller and smaller circle of people who get your best self, and a wider distance from everyone else, including the people who might have gotten there eventually if you’d given them time.

That’s what I mean by missing someone before you know them

You were quietly idealizing the feeling of your best self showing up quickly, when some people just take longer than ten minutes, or a few hangouts, to get there with. Your siblings didn’t earn your patience by being extraordinary. They earned it by being around long enough that you stopped performing and started actually being there. That’s not something most people get the chance to do anymore because we keep gravitating toward whoever already gets the good version instead of staying somewhere long enough to build it or to let ourselves be changed for the better by it.

Side note: that’s also the issue I have with the idea of “the ick.” Truly, why are we telling people in TikTok comments to break up with their boyfriends because he wore flip-flops or threw a peace sign in a photo? Why are we taking signs of someone being their authentic, unfiltered self with you as an issue rather than a blessing.

The fix isn’t performing your best self for everyone immediately, the way you do for social media. The fix is smaller. The best friend version of you isn’t a finished thing you’re protecting or saving for the people who already bring it out. It’s a muscle that will follow you around wherever you go. So maybe the real question isn’t who you are when no one is watching. Maybe it’s who you let yourself become, slowly, instead of only chasing the version of yourself that already feels good with the people who already know how to bring it out.

I missed you before I knew you

I spend so much energy trying to figure out how I could become the best version of me to the point where I was mourning some future, more perfected version of myself before I’d even become her.

But all these different versions of me, none of them were ever waiting somewhere else on the other side of the right person. They were already mine.

They showed up the moment someone stayed long enough for them to, which means there was never a missing person or a missing self to go find. Just people I hadn’t stayed with yet, and versions of myself I hadn’t let out yet.

Both of them were closer than I thought. Both of them just needed time. Everything I was looking for was already something I could become.

There was nothing to miss at all.

💌: to all my friends and family that are reading this: I love and miss you pretty much every day of my life !!!

There’s a specific kind of dread that doesn’t show up in job interviews or spreadsheets. It shows up for me right after the happiest moments of my life. After a concert, when my ears are still ringing. After a movie, when the credits are rolling. After I park the car and the song is still stuck in my head. After finishing a good book and put it back on the shelf. What if this is all I ever do. What if I’m doomed to a lifetime of consuming, never creating?

I’m twenty-one. I can confidently say I love art the way you can love a person: obsessively. I love music loud enough to probably damage my hearing before I’m thirty. I love films that ruin me and have me rethinking the way I live for at least a week. I love museums, libraries, and concerts. I adore writing as a hobby, and I love the idea of the writer I could become. I’m slowly starting to realize, though, this might be a slightly dangerous thing to love.

One of my all-time biggest worries is that I’ll end up spending my entire life consuming. Watching. Applauding. Buying the ticket. Staying up until midnight to stream the album. Annotating the pages. Never once being the creator. Never once being the reason someone else stays up until midnight with something lighting up their soul.

On the relation between creating and consuming

Sometimes, I think about it in economic terms. Boring, I know, but bare with me…

On the surface, art runs on a balance between the people who make things and the people who consume them. Personally, nothing terrifies me more than the thought of dying having only ever been on the consuming side of it. Free riding on other people’s nerve, other people’s drafts, rejected demos, and years of unglamorous practice. Reaping the benefits without ever having sown the seeds.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think consuming is shameful. Loving art is a kind of participation in and of itself, I know that, and I truly believe it on my better days. After all, a song isn’t finished until someone hears it and a book isn’t a story until someone reads and interprets it.

What makes it worse is that I don’t want a “creative job” the way I hear it be perceived. As if it’s a costume you put on just to show it off. I want the specific, unglamorous thing underneath that phrase: I want to be able to sit with a blank page and make something exist that didn’t exist before.

A possibly untranslatable Dutch saying, but you’ll get the point ;)

As a chronically anxious girl, I see bears down the road and seem to consider everything that could possibly go wrong. So. Many. Bears. After all, I do have rent to pay, consuming art is mostly not free, hanging out with my friends and seeing the world is not free, and I would honestly love being able to buy groceries without thinking too hard about the price of eggs.

And so, this fear kind of splits into two sides. One is that I won’t be brave enough to take the gamble. That I’ll spend my one life choosing the somewhat steady paycheck. The other is worse: that I would take the gamble and find out I’m not original enough to make it work. That I’d bet everything on it, and the only thing I’d discover is that I’m a sure bet at a losing streak (in the very wise words of Noah Kahan). After all, and as I’ve written about before, we’re not in full control when it comes to our lives. I cannot possibly predict or micromanage how things will work out five years down the line. Life will happen as it happens to you, and sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Maybe I’ll just do the safe thing then? I’ll get the job that pays for groceries and rent but contributes absolutely nothing to my soul. I’ll tell myself it’s temporary. Just for now. Just until I’ve saved enough. Just until I’m brave enough. Chances are, spending eight hours a day on something competent and reasonable and entirely forgettable will make the part of me that’s eager to create just... quiet down. Slowly enough that I won’t notice until it’s already long gone. The terrifying thing here, is that there is no version of this where I get those years returned to me. Whatever gets lost there will stay lost, forever.

That’s exactly the issue. Not rejection, not poverty, not even failure. It’s the fear of turning out to be a version of myself where I stopped longing and slowly run out of time to change my mind. That I'll grow into a version of myself that got so used to the silence that sits where the spark used to be. A version who will mistake this absence of longing for a peaceful, calm existence. The version of me who never even found out if she was able.

I’m willing. But am I able?

I have slowly started to realise the overthinking itself isn’t the part I need to get rid of. Sure, it can be inconvenient and it tends to mess up my sleep schedule, but it’s also the reason I feel it is important enough to even be writing about in the first place.

Maybe I can walk more than one path at a time. Maybe the fire doesn’t have to be original to be mine. Maybe you’re allowed to be warmed by other people’s flames and use all those little sparks to ignite your own. Maybe it doesn’t matter what I end up doing because AI will replace me anyway lol.

I can honestly say that I don’t have the slightest clue how my life will turn out. But I do feel like I’d rather burn trying to light my own flame than just be content with watch everyone else’s from a safe distance. I know I’m willing, I’ll make sure I’m able.

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I found the makeup case in my closet by accident, looking for a notebook. Inside were thirteen cassettes from an old video recorder, which I discovered only turns on if it’s plugged into the charger. My parents started filming when I was around two years old. Moments as small as painting a closet with my dad at home, to memories of our summer trips to England. I could hear the voice of my toddler self, and the cries of my brother when he was born a little over a year later. I fully realized how special it was. Even though I have plenty of pictures from my childhood, there are only a handful of videos. My heart felt so full. I felt like a more complete version of myself. Like I was learning who I was, from a version of myself too young to remember any of it firsthand.

I am twenty-one. Those tapes are the most tangible thing I have as proof of a life I can’t actually remember living. And then it dawned on me that I know more about my own childhood from thirteen cassettes than from my own memory, because as a two-year-old I made barely any memories I held onto for twenty years. My parents kept it for me. They recorded my life and decided, cassette by cassette, what would be worth capturing. The little girl on those tapes isn’t quite memory and isn’t quite invention either. She’s something in between. A version of me made by other people’s choices about what was worth pointing a camera at.

That’s the part I keep circling back to. My generation is the last one old enough to have been filmed this way. Deliberately, sparingly, on a device that required constant replacement of tapes to even record, that cost something to use. By the time I was old enough to hold a camera myself (my pink digicam when I was seven years old), storage already worked through a memory card and it was barely any effort to take the pictures from the memory card and upload them to the computer. I didn’t very consciously have to choose what was worth keeping because you could keep everything. This is proven by the many pictures of chickens, cows, and stuffed animals I took. I didn’t need to record myself because, at this point, my parents had phones and were fully capable of recording as much as they liked, wherever they liked. Kids these days have thousands of filtered snapchat pictures of themselves before they even speak their first words. I have thirteen tapes. And somehow the thirteen feel like more.

I think that’s because scarcity was doing something that abundance could never. My parents couldn’t film everything, so what they chose to film. A Tuesday afternoon painting a closet, not a birthday, not a milestone, just an ordinary hour that happened to feel worth keeping. All these years later, this still shows me something true about their attention. About what they thought mattered while it was happening, not what they thought would look good on an Instagram feed. Nobody seems to be choosing like that anymore. When you can save everything, you stop having to decide what’s worth saving, and I wonder sometimes if that decision was the whole point. If choosing was its own kind of love.

I don’t have my own version of that instinct yet, and I’m not sure anyone else in my generation does either. We take four thousand photos a year and keep functionally none of them in any meaningful sense. They sit in our overfull Cloud storage. Unsorted, unchosen, technically infinite, and practically forgettable. I since started purchasing disposable cameras again. I bought one for Harry Styles’ most recent tour and have yet to developed it. Mainly because I am scared that the pictures turned out horrid. Mind you, I took plenty of pictures on my phone as well, so compared to 2007 the stakes are small. Still, I can’t do it. My parents decided what a whole childhood looked like, on a machine that needed a wire to work, and I can’t commit to a single roll of film.

Watching those tapes, I don’t think what I actually miss is the format. I don’t care about VHS as an object. What I miss, what I think all of us performing this nostalgia for cassette players and film cameras we never make actually miss, is being chosen. Being looked at by someone who had to decide you were worth the tape. There’s a kind of attention in scarcity that abundance simply can’t fake, no matter how many Instagram gritty filters try to capture it’s visual effects. My daughter, if I have one, will probably have thousands of videos of her whole life, chosen by no one, curated by nothing, and I don’t know yet whether that will feel like more love or less of it.

I’ve watched the tapes a few times now. One of the holiday tapes lost its footage on the third replay. I was surprised by how sad that made me, given that I hadn’t even known the video existed a few years earlier. I still have no intention of developing the disposable camera anytime soon, even though I know it has an expiration date. I think I’m scared that the twenty-seven photos I chose to take won’t feel like anything, next to the thirteen tapes I didn’t.

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Summer is here, finally! Exams are over, and we have officially entered the season we've been fantasizing about since Christmas holidays: unlimited time to read. No more sneaking in three pages between lectures, no more "I'll finish this book eventually" lies we tell ourselves. Just us, a book, a little drink and endless hours to fill.

And yet… Somehow the second we actually have the time to sit down, the motivation to read seems to leave the room. You open your Goodreads, scroll a bit, stare at it for a few minutes, close it, and open TikTok instead. Sound familiar? Same.

I've been there more times than I care to admit, so over the years I've put together a list of things that actually work to pull me out of a slump. Not just "read more!" advice but actually helpful steps that have never failed me. The key thing I've learned is this: you have to make reading an activity, not just something you do to kill time. Make real, intentional time for it. Don't squeeze it into the leftover cracks of an already exhausting day, because if you do, you'll always choose sleep or doomscrolling over your book. That’s how slumps happen in the first place. So without wasting more reading time, here’s what's been working for me.

⭐️ If you start a series, wrap the rest of the books. This sounds a little unhinged but a friend told me about this, and it turns out it actually does subconsciously motivate you to read faster. After all, finishing a book means you get to unwrap a little gift. It genuinely turns your bookshelf into a reward system. Also, any book you buy from your local bookstore? Ask if they'll wrap it for you. Future you will thank present you.

⭐️ Don't force yourself to read a certain amount. Make the time, but don't force the productivity. The second reading starts to feel like a task, so like something you have to do just to check it off, it stops being fun. I fear that's the fastest way back into a slump. Let it be enjoyable again!

⭐️ Make it aesthetic. Take pictures of your book. Make yourself a little drink. Get cozy under a blanket. Take yourself to a park or a café. Curate a playlist that matches the vibe of what you're reading. Put on one of those hours-long "cozy atmosphere" videos on YouTube. Make a Pinterest board for the world your book lives in. Feed into the moment. Turn reading into an immersive experience, not just an action.

⭐️ Start with a fast-paced book. This is non-negotiable if you're trying to break a slump. You need something that hooks you immediately, not a 600-page literary slow burn. My go-tos: Lynn Painter (Better Than the Movies or Betting on You), Taylor Jenkins Reid (Malibu Rising or Atmosphere), or an easy, addictive thriller from Lisa Jewell or Freida McFadden.

⭐️ Follow it up with a series to get you truly hooked. Once you're back in the flow, keep it going! Doesn't matter if it's The Hunger Games, Off Campus, or Throne of Glass. A good series will keep you turning pages you're chasing the next one. (Don’t forget to wrap every book after the first!!)

⭐️ Let yourself switch it up with audiobooks. Read a few chapters, then go for a walk while listening to the audiobook, then come back and read some more. It keeps you fully immersed in the story without demanding you sit still with a physical book 24/7. Reading half a book the traditional way and finishing the rest by audio is truly still so much better than not reading at all!

At the end of the day, getting out of a reading slump isn't about forcing yourself through pages you don't care about. Instead, it's about making reading feel like something you want to come back to. So light the candle, make the drink, wrap the books, and let yourself fall back in love with it. This is your sign to finally start that book that's been sitting on your nightstand all semester. Happy reading, peeps!!💌

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Let me start with the obvious: Christopher Nolan is one of the great cinematic minds of our time. I certainly will not be the one arguing that. The man manages to bend time, break structure, and still makes you cry over a stopwatch. He has earned the word “auteur” in every sense. This isn’t about his talent. It’s about a choice and the current Odyssey press tour that doesn’t sit right with me.

And who would I be if not an opinionated arts & culture student who loves stating her opinions online, am I right ;)

“THE FIRST EVER…” let me stop you right there actually

The Odyssey is currently being sold to us as the first film ever shot entirely in full-frame IMAX. The story behind it sounds impressive: massive cameras, physically stitched-together film, a format so demanding that only a handful of theaters in the world can even show it properly. In a recent interview, Nolan called it “a very human process.” The interviewer’s response summed the whole campaign up in nine words: “shot on IMAX, filmed for IMAX, shown on IMAX.”

[link to interview is in the bottom of this article]

But here’s my question: who is all of this actually for?

If a format can only be properly experienced in, as Nolan put it, “41 of those [cinemas] around the world”, and it barely needs saying that those 41 are sitting in wealthy countries, with ticket prices already climbing past what a lot of people can casually afford, then who exactly are you going through all this trouble for? Six full-grown men weight lifting a camera around set, just to land the full film in a shortlist of cities most of the world will never set foot in.

We spent decades making cinema more accessible. Smaller cameras, better digital projection, screens reaching more towns, a shift from the boxy 3:4 frame all the way to widescreen 9:16. And now the pitch is: come to one of a very short list of cities, pay a premium, to see the “real” version of the movie. Everyone else gets the story. A select few get to experience it “as it was intended.”

On cinema and exclusivity

And the thing is, none of this needed to be a technical arms race. A filmmaker of Nolan’s level has never needed a format to prove he can tell a story. That’s the part I genuinely can’t wrap my head around. The talent was never in question, so why does the marketing keep pointing at the camera instead of the craft? Why does “first film shot in full IMAX” get more airtime than the actual story he’s telling? Or the creative masterminds he’s telling it with?

I don’t think this is really about the audience. I think it’s about how good it sounds in a headline. “Only 41 cinemas in the world can show it” is doing exactly what it’s meant to do: communicate prestige, in the truest sense of the word. Exclusivity dressed up as a true artistic process. But art has always been a human process. Physically glueing film together isn’t some new concept. It’s a task women have quietly done since the very beginning of cinema. We went to the trouble of moving formats from 3:4 to 9:16 so more people could see more of the picture, and made that widely accessible. So why, now that we’ve finally gotten there, are we expected to pay extra just to witness the next “great” thing?

Storytelling first, always.

Let's not sell 'the full artistic experience' as a luxury add-on for a good press quote and a little extra cash. This movie was always going to top the box office, IMAX marketing or not. Let's talk about the story instead. The actual film, and the people who made it.

Will I be watching this movie? Absolutely. Will I be paying extra to feed into this IMAX delusion? No thank you.

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💌: Link to the interview bellow