The other day I had a text typed out that just said, “Want to hang out this week?”

That was it.

I wasn’t asking him to define the relationship. I wasn’t confessing my love. I wasn’t asking him to move in with me. I was asking if he wanted to hang out.

I stared at it anyway.

Because if I sent the text, I’d be the one asking.

And for some reason, asking makes me feel ugly.

Ugly.

Why ugly?

Whenever I really like someone, things usually start off well. We laugh together. We flirt. We spend time together. I’ll leave feeling good about whatever this is, and then a few days go by and I start getting in my own head.

I start wondering if I should text them or if I should wait.

I vacillate between two completely different stories.

One is, If they wanted to, they would.

If they wanted to see me, they’d text me. They’d make the plans. Let them come to you. If it’s not a fuck yes, I don’t want it.

The other one is, RV, if you don’t ask for what you want, you don’t get it.

Both of those stories feel true depending on the day.

When I’m with someone, everything feels easy. We laugh. We have fun. Nothing about the time we spend together makes me think they’re pretending.

Then we go home, a few days pass, and that tape starts replaying

You’re always the one asking.

Maybe they’re just saying yes because you asked. They were being polite.

Maybe they like you enough to sleep with you, but not enough to consider you.

Don’t be the desperate one.

It’s infuriating how quickly my brain can turn three quiet days into a complete explanation for why I’m fundamentally undesirable.

It feels like I’m terrorizing people with my desires.

It’s so dramatic, but that’s honestly what it feels like.

Every invitation feels too much, and every text is asking for something I haven’t earned.

Comparing what’s happening vs the story I’m telling myself, none of this really holds up. He’s engaged when we’re together. We're affectionate. We laugh. They tell me they had a good time.

Then somehow those quiet days outweigh all of that.

I’ve been trying to figure out where that story comes from.

I was a fat kid.

I’m still fat.

I was a queer kid.

I’m still queer.

There are still days when I don’t feel sexy, and I don’t think those feelings disappear just because I’m older. Growing up, I learned pretty early that desirability wasn’t something I expected to have. So I got really good at becoming someone people would like for other reasons.

I learned to be funny. Talented. Charming.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to become an exception by being exceptional, hoping that maybe if I was enough of all those other things, people would make an exception for the queer fat kid.

Looking back, I think that same story shows up every time I hesitate before sending a text.

Because somewhere in my head, asking feels like admitting I want them more.

Like the person who reaches first automatically has less value.

It’s a complete lie.

I know it’s a lie.

I also know how convincing it feels.

If that voice in my head would just shut up for a second, what would I actually do?

I’d text them.

I’d text them because I want to see them.

That’s it.

When I wanted to learn Mandarin, I didn’t wait for Mandarin to find me.

When I wanted to try stand-up, I signed up.

When I get excited about an idea, I spend hours chasing it.

I’ve never been someone who waits for life to happen to me.

If I’m interested in something, I go toward it.

So why have I been trying so hard to become a different person the second romance gets involved?

Maybe asking doesn’t make me ugly.

Maybe it just makes me the same person I’ve always been.

Someone who’s curious. Direct. Someone who reaches for the people and things that excite them.

That doesn’t mean I want to be in relationships where I’m always carrying the conversation or making every plan. Reciprocity still matters.

But that’s a different question.

One is about the kind of relationship I want.

The other is about whether I think I’m allowed to want someone in the first place.

I’ve spent a long time confusing those two things.

It’s over for you hoes.

Apparently I’m going to keep texting first and inviting often.

Because I’d rather act like myself than spend another afternoon trying to prove I’m someone who doesn’t care.

It’s my birthday today. I’ve been thinking about one thing I’m letting go of, one thing I’m grateful for, and one thing I’m calling forth.

I’m letting go of the instinct to make myself the locus of every problem.

I know how quickly I can turn circumstance into a judgment about my character. A quiet month, and I start to believe I’m undesirable. Being ghosted only proves that I wasn’t good enough. A closed door becomes evidence that I wasn’t worthy of walking through it, and soon I’m convinced I don’t belong in the room at all.

But I rarely extend the same scrutiny to the room itself. Who is in it? What does it reward? Was it built with someone like me in mind?

Dating has felt elusive where I live, so I’ve replayed my insecurities and treated them as the explanation. But when I travel, I do well. I meet more people. There are more possibilities.

I don’t want to replace self-blame with the certainty that everything outside me is at fault. I want a wider field of vision. I want to consider that sometimes I need to grow, and sometimes I simply need a different room.

I’m grateful for my instincts.

I have good ideas, and many of the theories I’ve trusted have proven successful. I’m smart, resourceful, and kind. I’m an expert in many things and, honestly, a genius at some. I’m also humble enough to know when I don’t know something, and capable enough to find out.

I’ve watched enough of my unlikely ideas work to know that ability is often less fixed than it appears. Usually, I need time, focus, and the willingness to be bad at something before I become good at it.

I’m calling forth more pathways.

There are many things I want, but there isn’t only one road to each of them. I don’t want to confuse commitment with attachment or reject an unexpected route because it doesn’t resemble the one I imagined.

My life has already been so incredibly iconic. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve taken what I had and what I was given and made something beautiful from it. A life worth living. A life I want to live.

I’m content, and I’m ready for more. I’m learning to relish the highs and stay steady through the lows.

My desires are never ending

I still want things. I may always want them intensely. But I no longer need every desire to arrive in the form I first imagined. Life has surprised me too many times for that.

On this birthday, my desires don’t feel like the ceiling of what’s possible. They feel like the floor.

I made a mistake at work.

It wasn’t a big one. Nobody yelled at me. Nobody threatened my job. Nothing exploded. I could just tell someone was annoyed, and within seconds my body had already skipped ten steps ahead.

I’m about to get fired.

They finally figured it out.

I’ve been faking it this whole time.

The gag is, I know better.

I’ve been doing this job for over a decade. I’ve solved much harder problems than this. I know I’m good at what I do, and I know my self-worth isn’t tied to whether I make a mistake on a random Thursday afternoon. Logically, I knew I was okay.

But my body felt like it was about to get the belt.

I hate that feeling.

I hate that my brain can understand my self-worth isn’t at stake while my body acts like I’m about to be punished for my sins. And mind you, this wasn’t even that big of a mistake. I mean, I messed up. I’m not pretending I didn’t. It’s also something I’ve struggled with before, so I understand why someone would be frustrated. But the intensity of what I was feeling had almost nothing to do with what had actually happened.

Why does something so small make my body feel like I’m about to lose everything?

Why, after all these years, does one mistake still feel like evidence that I don’t belong?

Growing up in an immigrant family, I don’t remember anyone explicitly telling me that one mistake would ruin our lives. My parents never sat me down and said, “Don’t mess this up because everything depends on it.”

But that’s what it felt like.

When you’re building a life from scratch, everything feels fragile. One unexpected expense matters. One wrong decision matters. One thing going sideways can feel like it has consequences that ripple far beyond the moment itself. As a kid, I think I absorbed that without anyone ever having to explain it to me.

It felt like we had to keep getting it right for years before we were finally allowed to feel safe.

And we did.

It’s been thirty+ years.

My parents built a beautiful life. We have stability now. I’ve been in my career for over a decade. I have savings. I have incredible friends. I have opportunities I never imagined I’d have when I was younger.

Objectively, the life I’m living now looks nothing like the life my nervous system still thinks I’m living.

My brain knows we’ve made it, but my body still thinks we’re hanging on by a thread.

It’s almost impressive how creative my brain can be when it starts looking for evidence that I’m somehow not enough.

So instead of trying to reason my way out of it, I decided to do something different.

I sat there and started doing somatic shaking.

I scrunch up. My shoulders come forward, my head drops, and I cower. I looked like a little kid sitting in the corner waiting to find out how much trouble they were in.

Instead of arguing with it, I let it talk.

I started saying all the things I imagined that younger version of me was thinking:

“They’re mad at me.”

“They realized I’m an imposter.”

“They realized I’m lazy.”

“They realized I’m stupid.”

“They realized I’m not actually good at my job.”

“They realized I’ve been faking it.”

“They realized I’m not smart.”

I let myself make the little crying and whimpering sounds my body seemed to be holding onto. It felt incredibly embarrassing, even though I was completely alone.

I was reacting to something ancient.

I didn’t try to fix it or calm down. It had a right to be there just like any other emotion.

My breathing slowed down. My shoulders relaxed. The feeling didn’t disappear, but it softened enough that I could finally text my group of friends and tell them what had happened.

I already knew my self-worth wasn’t at stake.

My brain had been there the whole time. My body had just been screaming too loudly for me to hear it.

My body updates slower than logic.

My brain has spent years collecting evidence that I’m safe, even though my body is still looking at a map made decades ago.

It reminds me of a dog that has spent its whole life on a six-foot leash. You can clip on a thirty-foot one and bring it into an open field, but it will probably still walk close to you. It doesn’t know it has more room yet.

You can’t explain slack to a dog. You just keep walking with it until, eventually, it takes one more step than it usually does and realizes nothing pulled it back.

You just keep walking with it.

Eventually it reaches the place where it expects the leash to pull tight, but nothing happens. It takes another step, then another, and slowly it starts discovering that there’s more room than it realized.

I’ve spent years giving my brain evidence that I’m safe. I think my body is going to need more time.

So I’m trying not to drag it into the open field or get annoyed when it stays close. I’m just going to keep walking with it and reminding it, gently, that there’s more slack now.

Dear me in the future, three months from now:

I’ve been so pleased with how intentional and gorgeous my life has looked since I’ve been planning my life in quarters, and this past quarter was no different.

I have made connections that I can carry forward. Honest, genuine ones that feel like good omen. I now see a clearer vision of my life than I did three months ago, and I see even more of how life connects the dots as you live it. I understand more deeply now that clarity comes from taking action. It comes from walking your own path instead of waiting until everything makes sense. Looking back, I can see the path far more clearly than I could while I was walking it.

I’m grateful that I have become more invested in living. I am not just in love with my life. I’m in love with living. I’m in love with the friction of what it’s like to be human. I’m even more in love with this platform that I find myself on, being a physical being on this Earth. I am here playing a game that I chose to play. I’m here riding the waves that I’ve always chosen to ride.

I feel even more grounded and confident in what comes next. I’m so proud of the work I’ve done and the maintenance I’ve kept up. It’s paid dividends in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It has surprised me, even flabbergasted me, the ease in which so many of my dreams have unfolded. My life hasn’t suddenly become effortless, but I have become more aligned with myself.

I’m more grateful than I’ve ever been in my life, and I’ve remembered that all I really need to do is stay engaged, apply some light focus, and understand the real essence of my desire. I don’t need to force anything, nor do I need to micromanage every outcome. I simply need to continue becoming the person who naturally lives the life I desire.

It no longer feels like an experiment. The thoughts and beliefs I continue to practice became the life I experience. Over these past three months, I’ve practiced thoughts that help me, that grow me, and that reveal a life worth living. A life worth inhabiting. A life that I am proud of becoming.

For so much of my life, I was tempted to dissolve into existential dread. To believe none of this mattered. To wonder what was real and what wasn’t. But over the years, and especially over these past three months, I have become far more interested in participating in this life than questioning whether I should. I have become more invested in having a human experience. I find myself looking less at what is safe or unsafe, what is made up or not made up, and more at what is actually in front of me.

I’m more able to see what I truly want, and I’m more able to recognize the simplest path toward it. I’m learning to trust that my inner self already understands how to get from where I am to where I want to be. My job is to listen.

I’m even more eager now than I was three months ago to follow this path where I don’t have to grind. I don’t have to earn my worth. The path that I follow is merely an acknowledgment and an acceptance of the worth that has always been there.

I’m so proud of us, and so grateful that we’ve lived these last three months with greater intention, because look where we are now. Even more iconic. Even more beautiful. Even more joyful than we could have imagined.

I love you. I’m excited to see what the next quarter reveals. I’m excited to keep following this path, to keep playing this game, and to discover what else becomes possible simply by continuing to become more fully myself.

I write this to fall in love with you, my future self, in hopes that we both reach for each other.

I’ll meet you soon!

It’s really important that we remember why we do the things we do. I’m reminding myself that this Substack is a container for my joy, curiosity, and, more importantly, freedom of expression.

It’s very tempting, when you’re making content, to feel like you have to be extremely consistent. You end up putting yourself on a hamster wheel.

I’ve felt a little pressure because I’ve been posting every week for most of the year. Sometimes it comes easily, and I have something to say. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t, if anything will come by Saturday. A lot of the time, something does come to me on Saturday morning. This time, I’m not convinced it will.

I’ve found that if I force myself to post a new thought, I’d be giving in to the very content hamster wheel I’d rather not be on.

So this week, I’ll be resharing some older articles, giving you a few recommendations, and perhaps offering a welcome breather. Instead of another constant stream of something new to consume, maybe, as we begin the second half of the year, we can use this week to catch up and breathe a little.

I really appreciate everyone who’s been reading along. It means a lot to me.

Here are some articles I really loved writing. Maybe you’ll find one you missed, or one that’s worth revisiting:

For those outside on the beach

For those who need to have a difficult conversation

For those who need a new tool for thinking through your situations

For the divas who forgot to take their meds

For those exploring more of themselves

I haven’t been this nervous in a long time.

Back stage, my heart was jumping out of my chest.

I was asked to be part of a performance night at a comedy club, and I challenged myself to do a five-minute stand-up set.

If you know me at all, you know I love trying new things. It felt like, as a comedy content creator, stand-up would probably find me eventually, so I thought, why not? Let’s just try it.

I’m always chasing a new side quest. Mandarin. Archery. Ring making. Swimming. Whatever catches my attention. I like collecting experiences almost as much as I like collecting skills.

The deadline put a fire under me because I only had about 3 weeks to get ready. For someone who had never really written stand-up before, that wasn’t much time.

So I did what I always do.

I bought books on joke writing. I watched hours of YouTube videos breaking down joke structure. I started writing.

And I could tell it wasn’t good.

My document slowly filled with jokes I hated. I’d read them back and think, “ew. no.” They felt clever “thought poems” instead of something funny. The punchlines arrived too early or too late. I wasn’t proud at all.

It really only came together the day before!!!

Then I had to memorize all of it because with standup, the setup has to be perfect or the punchline doesn’t make any sense. Miss a few words and the whole thing falls apart.

As performance night got closer, I realized something that made me relax a little.

I needed to be a superstar.

I was afraid of not being exceptionally good the first time around.

Somewhere in my head I'd already skipped being a beginner. I wanted the story where I accidentally discovered I was naturally gifted. I wanted to walk onstage and realize I'd been an incredible stand-up comedian all along.

I like trying new things, but I also like becoming competent pretty quickly. I don’t think I’d ever admitted those two things were happening at the same time.

Stand-up didn’t really allow for that fantasy.

I’d seen bad stand-up before, and I desperately didn’t want to become one of those stories people politely forgot the next day.

What if this was just… an ordinary first attempt?

Just someone trying stand-up for the first time.

That’s when I stopped trying to become a superstar comedian, and became a beginner.

The performance went well. There were beats I missed and jokes I’d phrase differently now, but I remembered almost all of it. I felt surprisingly comfortable onstage. The laughs came. I survived.

More than anything, I was relieved.

For years I’d thought maybe I’d try stand-up someday.

The version of me who’d been thinking about doing stand-up for years disappeared somewhere around minute three of my tight five.

Lately I’ve been wondering if this is what getting older has changed.

When you’re a kid, people love a prodigy.

When you’re in your twenties, people love someone who’s already ahead.

Someone who’s on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Then somewhere along the way you become thirty-four.

Nobody introduces you by saying, “Can you believe they’re only thirty-four?”

Now you’re just another adult trying stuff.

I mourn that but I also love it.

For a long time, every new hobby felt like an audition. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hoped this would be the one where I accidentally discovered I was naturally gifted. That I’d skipped the years of practice everyone else went through.

There are a hundred things I’ll probably never discover I’m naturally gifted at.

There are also a hundred things I haven’t tried yet.

A month ago, stand-up was on the second list.

Now it isn’t.

I’ve been reading The Big Leap.

The main idea of the book is that everyone has an upper limit. A kind of internal thermostat for happiness, success, love, money, attention, whatever. When life gets better than what we’re used to, something in us gets uncomfortable and starts trying to restore balance.

Some examples:

One couple eloped against their families’ wishes and ended up covered in poison ivy after laying a blanket down in the woods. Another story is about a PhD student who lost his voice right before the most important presentation of his life. Both situations arrived at moments when their lives were expanding in ways that challenged what they believed they were allowed to have.

The idea has been rattling around in my head all week because I’m visiting Los Angeles as I write this.

A brand flew me out to speak at an event. It was a great opportunity. I got to spend time with creators, see old friends, wander around neighborhoods I like, and eat a frankly irresponsible amount of food.

Objectively, everything’s going well.

And yet I noticed how quickly my brain starts trying to turn it into a problem:

Should I move here?

Should I get management?

Should I be scaling faster?

Should I be taking content creation more seriously?

The funny thing is that none of those are bad questions. They’re probably reasonable questions. But I noticed how quickly I moved from appreciating what was happening to trying to optimize it.

Instead of it being just a good trip, I kept turning it into some existential crossroads.

I started wondering if that’s what an upper limit looks like in my life:
My inability to leave something alone once it starts going well.

The thought followed me for a few days before I realized it wasn’t just about work.

It was about dating.

A few months ago, someone I was interested in happened to be passing through town. They were only there for a few hours, so we made plans to hang out.

We spent time together, talked, laughed, and eventually went our separate ways.

It wasn’t until afterward that I started replaying the afternoon in my head.

I realized how hard I had been working.

I had spent hours making sure he was comfortable. Making sure he was having fun. Making sure there was always something interesting happening. I was suggesting checking in, reading the room, trying to anticipate needs before they were even expressed.

At one point I laughed because the entire thing felt like a Destiny’s Child “Cater 2 U” music video.

None of it felt fake, I genuinely wanted him to have a good time.

I couldn’t just enjoy his company, I had to manage his experience.

But that gag is,

He already said yes.

He already chose to spend the afternoon with me.

He already showed up.

But I was still behaving like I needed to earn it.

I’ve started noticing that whenever something enters my life that I genuinely want, I immediately shift into proving mode.

If someone likes me, I become accommodating.

If an opportunity appears, I start justifying why I deserve it.

If something succeeds, I start wondering how long it’ll last.

It’s as though I never fully register that the thing has already arrived.

Part of me keeps acting like I’m still standing outside the door trying to get in.

What’s especially interesting is that my friends don’t get this version of me.

The people who know me best would probably describe me as opinionated. I have preferences. I ask for what I want. I take up space. I can be demanding and self-involved.

And yet when romance enters the picture, I often become remarkably easygoing.

I become the version of myself that is easiest to choose.

I think that’s the key to my upper limit.

When I reach a certain level of being wanted, I immediately become uncomfortable with it.

And then I start earning something that has already been given.

I don’t know if I’ll move to Los Angeles. I don’t know if I’ll get management. I don’t know if the creator career I’m building will eventually become something much bigger than it is now.

What I do know is that I’m becoming more interested in my reaction to good things than my reaction to bad ones.

I’m starting to suspect that some of the most important work isn’t learning how to get what you want.

It’s learning how to stop earning it after you’ve already received it.

SOPHIE was one of those artists whose influence is almost impossible to overstate.

She helped redefine what pop music could sound like. Her production was futuristic, playful, abrasive, emotional, and completely her own. So much of modern hyperpop and experimental pop traces back to the doors she kicked open.

She was also a powerful LGBTQ+ icon, especially for trans people, not just because of her visibility, but because she moved through the world and her art with a level of authenticity that inspired so many others to do the same.

Even years later, her impact is everywhere. In the music, in the culture, and in the artists who feel a little more free to be themselves because she showed them it was possible.

A preview:

• Shake that House - Beyonce + Big Freedia + Sophie

• Vyzee Twerkulator - City Girls + Sophie

• Rubber Lucy Liu - Charli xcx + Sophie

A video of mine resurfaced recently and somehow a joke about seafood boils and babies accidentally turned into a conversation about adulthood, queerness, loneliness, and chosen family.

The video itself was stupid in the best way possible.

I’m sitting at a seafood boil restaurant with two friends, ready to eat. I ask, “How are you?” They say, “We’re pregnant.” I stare blankly, slowly set down my gloves, walk away from the table, then suddenly come back just to grab a piece of corn before leaving again.

The caption was: “This is going to ruin the tour.”

Very dramatic and very unserious. Very obviously a joke.

Some people were passionately debating why I grabbed the corn instead of the crab legs, which felt spiritually correct for the internet.

But then there was this other wave of comments that felt way heavier than the video itself.

The comment section had parents talking about losing friendships after having children. People accusing me of hating kids and community. Other people admitting they understood exactly what I meant.

A lot of people recognized that underneath the joke was something much harder to talk about. The grief that starts happening in adulthood when everybody’s lives begin splitting into separate realities.

Some people get married and some people have children. Some people disappear into work while other people disappear into survival. Eventually you realize the people you love still love you, but the structure of their lives no longer has room for you in the same way.

I don’t even think this happens because people stop caring about each other. I think people are just exhausted.

Modern adulthood can make community incredibly difficult to maintain. Everybody’s overworked. Housing is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Free time barely exists. Maintaining friendship suddenly requires calendar coordination, advance notice, and energy people no longer have. Then we wonder why everybody feels lonely.

Especially as a queer person, friendship carry a different emotional weight.

A lot of queer people grow up building lives around chosen family because historically we had to. Friendship was practical, emotional, and sometimes survival. Friends became emergency contacts, rides home, housing, holiday dinners, and witnesses to your life.

Queer people spend years building emotional ecosystems around friendship while broader culture often treats friendship like a temporary phase before “real life” begins. And “real life,” according to conventional adulthood, usually means romantic partnership, marriage, children, and slowly retreating into a smaller private unit.

To be clear, I understand why having children changes people completely. I don’t want kids myself, partly because I take the responsibility so seriously.

A child is not a personality trait or a lifestyle accessory. You are responsible for shaping an entire human being emotionally, psychologically, and financially, and that responsibility terrifies me, for I am much too self involved for all of that.

I remember being young and realizing adulthood wasn’t some magical unlocked state where people suddenly knew what they were doing. It was maintenance. Bills, schedules, work, stress, and the constant pressure of keeping everyone alive. I remember watching my parents carry that pressure all the time.

So when I imagine having children, my brain immediately goes into logistics. Can I protect them? Can I afford them? Can I give them stability? Can I give them joy? Can I do all of that while still feeling like a person myself?

And my honest answer right now is no. Not because I hate children, but because I respect the gravity of raising one.

At the same time, I think people underestimate how much parenthood restructures every relationship around it. Spontaneity disappears and everything becomes planning, budgeting, coordinating, and recovering.

And again, I think parents should prioritize their children. Obviously. If you have a child, that child should come before brunch with me (unfortunately).

There’s a sadness people don’t talk about enough. Some friendships quietly dissolve through life stages nobody prepared you for. Nobody’s failed nor did the love disappear, but because adulthood quietly reorganizes people into smaller and smaller units of survival. I hate it.

Couples become households. Households become routines. Routines become exhaustion. Somewhere along the way, friendship becomes the thing people squeeze instead of the thing they built their lives around.

That feels especially visible for people whose lives are not centered around marriage and children themselves.

Because when I imagine my ideal future, I don’t imagine a child. I imagine a table full of people. Friends walking in and out of each other’s homes. Shared meals that last too long. Community that survives past weddings, babies, and logistics. Relationships that aren’t entirely organized around the nuclear family.

I think what I want is less isolated household and more ecosystem. Less private survival and more webs of care.

Maybe that’s why the seafood boil joke resonated so hard with everyone. Underneath the joke was a fear a lot of adults already carry: that modern adulthood keeps pulling us into smaller and smaller private worlds while many of us are still searching for a larger life together.

Some people are grieving that long before they know how to name it.

School trained me to confuse suffering with learning.

I’ve been reading A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley Ph.D.

The book talks about focused and diffuse thinking. Basically, your brain needs moments of concentration, but it also needs moments where you stop grinding and let your mind actually connect things.

Which sounds obvious until you realize how many of us learned the exact opposite.

I think somewhere along the way I started associating strain with progress. If learning didn’t feel painful enough, difficult enough, morally exhausting enough, then somehow it didn’t count.

It reminds me of how in school, all that mattered to me was an A.

I wasn’t learning French. I was just getting an A in French.

Which feels insane now. I learned how to perform competency long enough to satisfy a grading rubric. That’s different from actually absorbing something into your life.

The book talks about something called “labor in vain,” where students reread material over and over because the familiarity creates the illusion of understanding.

I think a huge part of my education was labor in vain.

I was actually trying very hard. But so much of my energy was going toward surviving the emotional experience of school itself.

Success in school was mostly about proving things. Getting the A. Impressing teachers. Appeasing my parents. Becoming the kind of person adults described as “smart.” Learning itself almost felt secondary sometimes.

And I don’t even think I realized how deeply that shaped me until adulthood.

Now I learn constantly.

Chinese. Fiber. Transit systems. Costco economics. Why one bean has more protein than another bean. My brain wants to eat everything now.

Nobody’s grading me anymore and suddenly I’m curious all the time.

Which makes me wonder how many people quietly grew up believing they “hate learning” when really they just hated the architecture wrapped around learning.

My friend is a Waldorf teacher and hearing them talk about education surprised me.

Their main focus was teaching kids how to be solution oriented, lifelong learners. To stay curious. To build an emotional relationship with discovery itself.

And I was sitting there realizing I don’t think that was ever the goal of my education.

My experience of school felt much more tied to evaluation, pressure, and achievement. There was always this invisible audience hovering over everything. Teachers. Parents. Your future. Your GPA. Your worth.

I was white knuckling information long enough to survive the test.

The book describes something called the Einstellung effect, where your brain gets trapped in familiar pathways and keeps trying the same approach even when it’s not working.

I definitely do that.

I kept trying to solve learning through pressure because pressure was familiar.

Study harder.
Stay up later.
Force it.

The funniest part is that the book keeps repeating this almost annoyingly simple advice: take walks, sleep, step away from the problem, let your mind drift.

Which explains why some of my best ideas happen while I’m driving. Or showering. Or walking around Costco thinking about olive oil for forty minutes.

I didn’t know how to learn without fear.

And I think that’s part of why adulthood feels so different now. Because for the first time, learning feels tied to desire instead of danger.

Now I’ll spend twenty minutes trying to understand the emotional difference between two Chinese words because I genuinely want to understand the texture of them. I’ll read about food systems for fun. I’ll fall into some obscure research spiral because curiosity feels pleasurable instead of evaluative.

I retain more now than I ever did when I was desperately trying to memorize information for approval.

My brain finally feels safe enough to wander.

There’s an idea that rest is not the absence of learning.

Turns out, it’s part of learning itself.

The older I get, the more I suspect that a life of ease is not the absence of discipline. It’s the absence of unnecessary resistance.

Maybe my brain opens more when it’s invited instead of cornered.

A mind for numbers by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D.

1. City Pink

2. Finally, a Slumber Party

3. So Hot You’re Hurting My Pony

I overheard a conversation in Washington, D.C. that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

A content creator casually mentioned they were making $14,000 a month talking about politics online.

The weird part is that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

I think creators should get paid. I think activists should get paid. I think people doing meaningful work deserve financial stability.

So why has this been rattling around in my head for days?

Instead of finding an answer, I found a much bigger question.

The reason this conversation stuck with me is that I’d just spent the weekend at Trending Up, a conference for creators who use their platforms to create change.

Before I go any further, I want to be clear: I loved it.

The organizers were wonderful. The speakers were thoughtful. The people were generous. I left feeling energized and hopeful. I’d absolutely go again if I were invited back.

This isn’t a critique of the conference.

If anything, the fact that I enjoyed it so much is probably why I’ve been sitting with this feeling.

Part of why I went to Trending Up in the first place is because finding my place in advocacy is something I’ve struggled with for years.

I know there are people who wish I talked more directly about politics online.

Every time something terrible happens, there’s a small part of me that wonders whether I should be saying more. Doing more. Posting more.

But over time I’ve become increasingly skeptical of the idea that caring and posting are the same thing.

There are plenty of things I care deeply about that never become content.

There are causes I support, conversations I have, communities I participate in, and people I show up for that will never appear on my Instagram feed.

Yet public expression increasingly seems to be treated as the primary measure of whether someone cares.

I care about politics. I pay attention. I vote. I have opinions about plenty of things.

But whenever I try to imagine the most honest version of what I contribute, I end up somewhere else.

I keep ending up back at joy.

I’m a fat queer Filipino immigrant.

I grew up receiving plenty of messages about who I was supposed to be, what my body was worth, and what kinds of lives were available to people like me.

Every time I make a joke, travel somewhere new, take up space confidently, or refuse to treat my body like a problem that needs solving, I think that’s political too.

When I present a version of queer life that is joyful, ordinary, successful, and full of possibility, I think that’s political too.

I’m showing people a life that I wasn’t always sure was available to me.

I accept that won’t satisfy everyone.

Sometimes it doesn’t fully satisfy me either.

But it’s the form of advocacy that feels most honest to who I am as a character on the internet.

I make comedy videos about food, travel, culture, and whatever weird thing I’m obsessed with that week. My branded content is pretty obviously commercial. A company pays me money to talk about a product.

This transaction is relatively straightforward.

What feels different about influencer advocacy is that the thing creating value is trust.

People follow someone because they care about a cause. Because they believe that person understands a particular experience. Because they see them as representing a community.

Over time, that trust becomes an audience. The audience becomes influence. The influence creates opportunities. Some of those opportunities become money, which grows the platform and creates even more influence.

Again, I don’t know if that’s a problem.

Perhaps every successful movement eventually develops an economy around it.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that success changes your relationship to risk.

If you’re queer, an immigrant, disabled, trans, Black, indigenous or part of any group that experiences marginalization, money doesn’t erase those identities.

But it absolutely changes your life.

You’re less worried about rent. Less worried about healthcare. Less vulnerable to the kinds of day-to-day crises that can completely destabilize someone.

That’s a beautiful thing.

Nobody should have to stay poor to remain credible.

But I do wonder what happens when the people who become influential speaking about marginalization become increasingly insulated from some of its consequences.

The very thing that made them effective advocates can slowly move them further away from the conditions that gave them credibility in the first place.

I found myself thinking about that while walking around Washington.

At one point D.C. started to feel a little like the Capitol in The Hunger Games.

It was the feeling of being surrounded by a professional class whose entire world revolves around politics, policy, messaging, campaigns, fundraising, advocacy, influence, and media.

Everything seemed to orbit around managing public life.

Meanwhile, the people most affected by many of those decisions often live hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Healthcare becomes a policy discussion instead of my dad not having insulin.

Immigration becomes a talking point instead of a family pursuing a better life.

Housing becomes a statistic instead of a person trying to figure out whether they can stay in their apartment another year.

And I started wondering whether creators can end up facing a version of the same thing.

The audience that trusts you on healthcare or voting rights is valuable to a nonprofit, a campaign, a media outlet, and sometimes a brand.

As your influence grows, your life changes.

You gain access and build relationships.

You spend more time around institutions, media organizations, political professionals, advocacy groups, and other influential people.

That’s not inherently bad. In many cases it’s probably necessary.

But it does create a strange tension.

The people who become the most successful at communicating the experiences of a community can gradually find themselves living very different lives from the people they’re speaking for.

Part of why I hesitated to write this is because I don’t actually know what I’m arguing for.

Because I don’t think people should stop getting paid.

Nor do I think organizations should stop working with creators, or stay more marginalized for the sake of credibility.

And if there were a cause I deeply believed in and someone wanted to pay me for my time helping communicate it, I’d probably say yes.

That’s what makes this feel less like an argument and more like an observation.

I went to Trending Up hoping to figure out where I fit into advocacy work.

Instead, I came home thinking about proximity.

Who stays close to the people they’re advocating for.

Who drifts away.

And whether anyone notices while it’s happening.

Because the thing that made me pause wasn’t hearing that a creator was making $14,000 a month talking about politics.

It was realizing that success changes every relationship it touches, including your relationship to the people who made that success possible.

I just read the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and made the mistake of calculating how many weeks I might have left.

The book’s entire premise is that if you live to around 80 years old, your life is only about 4,000 weeks long.

I’ve already lived around 1,768 weeks.

Which means, if I’m lucky, I have around 2,232 left.

That number feels insultingly small.

Small enough that it started changing how I feel about the people around me.

Every time someone spends time with you, they are giving you something they will literally never get back.

A piece of their life.

The fact that out of all the realities my friends could be living, all the things they could be doing, they chose the version where we’re laying around on our phones, watching a stupid movie, sending each other TikToks, sitting in silence, and eating snacks at midnight.

What a bizarre and beautiful thing.

Out of infinite possibilities, they chose this one.

We chose to be together.

And then I started thinking about my mother.

The fact that she decided to have a child compressed so many other possible lives she could’ve lived. Entire timelines disappeared because she chose motherhood. She spent the majority of her life raising somebody else.

What a profound act of love.

Every so often I think about the fact that one day my mother will pass. I know people avoid thoughts like that because it feels painful or morbid, but weirdly, it makes me love her more while she’s still here.

But knowing someone is temporary intensifies their presence.

Grief work, when done gently, can deepen love we have for each other.

When you remember that somebody will not always physically exist beside you, you stop interacting with them like they are in the permanent backdrop of your life.

This book affected me so deeply because it argues that meaning exists because things end.

And I realized how much of modern life is built around trying to escape that reality.

So much self-help is about optimization. Becoming more efficient. Getting on top of everything. Eliminating friction.

’ve always had this strange fantasy that one day I’ll finally optimize myself enough to fully live.

But what if limitation is the thing creating meaning in the first place?

The book talks about how every choice is a sacrifice. Every time you choose how to spend your time, you destroy an infinite number of alternate possibilities.

Suddenly I’m very aware of every molecule of air I’m touching…

This also changes the way I think about social media.

Sometimes my videos reach 7 million combined month. At their peak so far, they’ve reached over 26 million. 26 million in one month?!?!?!

That represents thousands of human hours.

Human lives.

Millions of people choosing, for a few seconds, to spend a portion of their finite existence with me.

They laughed at my shenanigans. They commented. They rewatched things. They spent part of their life with me.

That is such an unbelievably generous thing to do.

I didn’t fully understood that until now.

Even parasocial relationships contain something real inside them.

We feel loved when people willingly spend time on us.

This book also talks about legacy, and how a lot of our obsession with legacy comes from ego fearing disappearance. We want proof that we mattered after we’re gone.

I don’t think I want immortality anymore.

I don’t care about statues or historical permanence or becoming some endlessly remembered figure.

I just want a satisfying life.

I want to enjoy being here while I’m here.

And organize my life around curiosity, joy, friendship, creativity, desire, humor, love, and ridiculous little adventures.

Accepting that my time is limited makes that easier.

I’m less manic about trying to conquer life and more interested in actually inhabiting it.

A lot of us are trying so hard to optimize our lives that we accidentally spend our entire lives attempting to escape our lives.

We treat ordinary moments like obstacles between us and “real living.”

The dishes.
The errands.
The haircut.
The commute.
The waiting.
The slowness.

But this is the life.

Not later.

Now.

The fear of missing out makes you miss out on the thing you’re already inside of.

Which is your existence.

At this point, I don’t even really care whether my spiritual theories are objectively true or not. Maybe we do come from some infinite cosmic source. Maybe we don’t.

What I do know is this:

I’m here now.

And if I only have around 2,232 weeks left, I want to spend them learning how to love my life while I’m still living it.

Not after I perfect it.

Now.

The Fifth Element is easily one of my top three favorite movies.

I was hooked on the futuristic world, Ruby Rhod, a loud and iconic queer-coded presence, and Diva Plavalaguna performing her version of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Enjoy this mixtape inspired by The Fifth Element. It moves through my favorite parts of the film.

1. Lose yourself to Alech Taadi

2. Ruby Killah

3. Stronger Diva

Remember that you can listen to this in the background even without the Substack app!

Listen to other mixes:

The biggest thing sabotaging creative people, is trying too hard to be original.

It sounds backwards because everybody says originality is everything.
Be unique. Stand out. Create something nobody’s ever seen before.

That mindset traps people before they even begin.

My friends ask me all the time how to make successful content on social media, and they almost get offended when I tell them to study successful content first.

Not copy it, mind you. STUDY it.

Figure out why it works. See why people care. See why it spreads. Then inject your own personality and remix it into something new.

People get so caught up trying to create something completely “unique” that they freeze up.

I used to be this way so I understand.

I’d spend all this time trying to think of something completely new and groundbreaking. I’d sit there brainstorming until I was so overwhelmed with analysis paralysis that I wouldn’t make anything at all.

Eventually I’d force myself to post some completely random “original” idea, and when it flopped, I’d feel crushed.

And yes, sometimes videos just flop. That’s part of the game.

But I think a lot of people are trying to skip a step.

Even Michael Jackson, somebody people consider a one of one, was pulling from the artists before him. A lot of his movements, styling, and performance instincts were influenced by the greats.

What made him special was the synthesis.

He combined influences in a way only he could.

People hear “take inspiration” and immediately think that means becoming a clone. They think if something resembles another format at all, then it’s automatically fake or uncreative.

I’m not talking about copying and pasting somebody else’s work shot for shot. That’s dull.

I’m talking about taking a proven format and injecting something deeply personal into it.

Something only you can bring.

That’s why I think Virgil Abloh was so fascinating.

He had this controversial “3% rule” philosophy where you could take an existing design, change a small percentage of it, inject your own perspective, and suddenly it becomes culturally new.

And he was completely open about it.

He wasn’t pretending inspiration didn’t exist. The point was the remix. The taste. The lens. Some people may disagree, but hey, he’s made a name for himself.

I think social media and creativity works similarly.

A lot of people refuse to participate in trends or formats because they want every idea to feel completely born from their own brain.

But we don’t exist outside of culture.

Like, did you fall out of a coconut tree?

Not to quote Kamala Harris, but we live within the context of everything around us.

Your personality is already shaped by other people. Your humor, your references, your timing, your taste. All of it comes from somewhere.

So why would creativity be any different?

The irony is that trying too hard to be unique can actually stop you from discovering what’s unique about you in the first place.

Because the way you figure that out is through volume.

Through experimenting.

Through making things consistently enough that patterns start revealing themselves.

That’s been one of the biggest lessons of my life.

I have a successful web series called Better Than Everyone where I point out the smugness people feel doing very mundane things. Bringing a salad to work and secretly feeling superior. Working outside and acting enlightened. Eating an apple dramatically like you’re morally above everyone else.

That format itself wasn’t completely original. It was inspired by other smug-character content I’d seen online.

But what made it feel like mine was everything personal I layered into it.

I reference a memory of one of my teachers eating apples loudly during silent work time, covering her mouth with the curled finger, then throwing the apple core into a giant empty metal basket that would clang through the whole classroom.

That detail was specific to me.

Then I layered in my own performance instincts. The laughing. The phrasing. The editing rhythm. The looking around. The curled finger. The way I escalate the smugness.

Those things came from repetition.

Iteration.

Play.

I’ve seen people try to recreate my format before, but usually it doesn’t hit the same way because they’re missing the magic that can’t really be replicated.

The years of refining tiny mannerisms that feel natural to me specifically.

And I don’t think I would’ve found that version of myself if I sat around waiting for some completely original idea to emerge from my subconscious.

It’s unconscious for a reason.

One of the things that changed my life was taking clown classes.

In clown, you stand in front of people and try things. Tiny things.

You meow shyly. You meow angrily. You meow seductively. You keep changing the rhythm and energy until the audience reacts to something.

Pay attention to the hot spots when people laugh.

And slowly you start teasing out something strangely specific about yourself.

You discover patterns in your body language. Your timing. Your face. Your instincts.

Then you refine those things over and over again until they become unmistakably you.

That’s where uniqueness actually comes from.

Not from sitting alone in a room trying to invent something that has never existed before.

It comes from reacting. Borrowing. Playing. Iterating. Paying attention to what resonates, then pushing deeper into the parts that feel most alive to you.

I think a lot of people are trying to skip the embarrassing middle.

The phase where you’re clearly inspired by something else.

The phase where you’re experimenting.

The phase where you’re still becoming.

But that phase is how you build your unique voice.

You discover yourself through repetition, reflection, and response.

That’s why I think trying too hard to be original can actually delay the very thing people want most.

Because the people who eventually feel the most unique usually spent years letting themselves be influenced first.

The gag is…being gay was the least of my problems.

For most of my life, I treated being queer like it was the thing ruining everything. The obstacle. The reason I had anxiety. The reason I hated myself sometimes. The reason I self-sabotaged. The reason I felt awkward, nervous, behind everybody else.

I thought once I solved that, everything else would magically click into place.

And honestly, when I finally came out to myself and felt safe in my own skin, it did change my life.

Just not in the way I expected.

Because the moment I stopped spending all my energy surviving that one thing, I finally had enough room to see everything else underneath it.

That’s when the real work started.

It’s almost funny now. I really sat there thinking:
“Oh, I have bad self-esteem because I’m gay.”
“I have anxiety because I’m gay.”
“I have self-image issues because I’m gay.”

Turns out some of those things were informed by being queer, sure. But once I peeled that layer back, I realized a lot of the pain underneath had nothing to do with sexuality at all.

I had anxiety.

I self-sabotaged.

I had wounds from being an immigrant kid watching my parents stress about survival all the time.

I had issues around money.

Around perfectionism and control.

Around feeling like I represented my family every time I walked into a room.

Around constantly hovering ten feet above myself, monitoring everything I said or did like I was under surveillance.

And weirdly enough, I think being closeted gave me one giant explanation for all of it. It became the container I poured everything into.

Being gay became the answer to every question.

Why am I unhappy?
Why am I scared?
Why do I feel disconnected?
Why do I feel broken?

How convenient. Painful, but convenient.

Because once I dealt with all of that, suddenly there was nowhere left to hide.

I had to confront the fact that I still had depression sometimes.
That I still struggled with motivation.
That I still had anxiety even after I accepted myself.

I had to confront sleep apnea.
Being pre-diabetic.
My relationship with my father.
My relationship with money.

And honestly, some of those mountains felt way bigger than coming out ever did.

Being queer once felt like the defining crisis of my life. It felt enormous. Like it swallowed everything else around it. That’s one of the cruelest parts about shame. It distorts scale and makes one thing feel bigger than your entire universe.

But now?

Being queer just feels like a part of me. A meaningful part. A beautiful part. But still just a part.

My life turned out to be so much bigger than that one fear I centered everything around.

I thought coming out would fix my life, but what it actually did,
was introduce me to the rest of it.

This set honors the sacred cycle of remembering who we are, and then forgetting.

A preview of this set:

1. Waiting for a Runway

2. Toxic APT

3. Hit ‘Em Up Child

Remember that you can listen to this in the background even without the Substack app!

Listen to other mixes:

There’s a version of me that thought if I was careful enough, I could control how people saw me.

So I got very careful.

Careful with what I said. Careful with what I wanted. Careful with who I was.

I paid attention to what people responded to. I adjusted. I got good at being someone people liked.

And it worked.

People liked me.

That felt like proof I was doing something right.

It took me a long time to realize what I was actually doing.

I wasn’t being careful.

I was trying to control everyone around me.

I just didn’t have language for it yet.

The book Courage to Be Disliked gave me that language.

If you’re not being true to yourself and to the people around you, you’re living in a delusional world where you think you can control other people’s actions.

That’s what I was doing.

Trying to manage the outcome. Deciding whether who I am is palatable, then adjusting. Not being true to my desires or my boundaries.

And then dealing with the quiet resentment that comes from that.

I felt my brain develop when I read that.

When I’m not being true to myself, I’m making decisions for other people. Acting like I have power to decide what people think of me.

Experience tells me I could be the nicest person in the world, the most charming, gentlest person, and people could still decide to hate me.

And I was still trying to manage that.

Trying to be the most accommodating person in the room.

Even when it worked, it was still manipulation.

That’s what flipped the switch for me.

I don’t want to live like that.

It hurts me and it hurts my relationships, because people aren’t in relationship with me. They’re in relationship with an image.

When you create an image to get loved, what gets loved is the image.

Once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere.

I’m suspicious of people who are too nice. Some people are genuinely like that, but it’s rare. People without clear boundaries are hard to trust.

I look to the people in my life and want to know that when they say no, they mean it. I can trust their no, so I can trust their yes.

I don’t trust people who say yes to everything. People pleasers are still trying to manage the outcome. When I can’t sense boundaries around someone, it’s hard to trust them.

I feel most at ease with people who understand who they are, or at least try to. They have moments where what the group wants isn’t what they want, and they’re okay with that. They take actions that don’t fit the group.

I can trust that they belong to themselves.

I also see it in insecurity.

People who are always thinking about what others think of them. Constant reassurance. Still trying to manage perception.

Like the book mentions, inferiority sits on the same coin as superiority.

Acting very insecure isn’t that far from acting superior. It’s a miscalculation about how much people are thinking about you.

I saw myself in that too.

So I had to separate being an insecure person from being someone who gets insecure sometimes.

I needed to become more real and more boundaried. About who I am, what I want, what I’ll accept, and to be okay with the consequences.

I was a very insecure, closeted gay kid.

My coping mechanism was to be a people person. To be charming, cooperative, skillful, a golden child, successful.

My hope was to become exceptional so I could be the exception. That if people found out my secret, they’d make space for me anyway.

But even that was a kind of control.

So I’ve had to change the direction of this boat.

Work against years of momentum as a climbing immigrant kid chasing the same dream as my parents.

Become a little less governable.
A little more outwardly opinionated.
A lot more serious about my boundaries.

It mattered to me to become an example of the person I needed when I was younger.

Someone who belongs to themselves.

Further reading and inspiration:

• The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

• Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott

• https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVoAFs8DYoh/?igsh=MXFvMmFoNXdrcnV3dg==

• https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTkjS1vrx/

This is a story about the first time I said “I love you” to a boyfriend.

We’d been dating for a while, and I kept asking people around me, how do you know if you love someone in a romantic sense?

Because in a cosmic way, I can say “I love you” to almost anyone and mean it.

At the time, I didn’t know what made it different in romance yet.

I asked my friends and got answers like:

“you know when you can’t live without them”,
”when they’re your better half,”
“when they complete you.”

Those felt too codependent. Like love meant erasing myself. I kept wondering what it would look like for me to feel romantic love and express it in a way that felt grounded.

I couldn’t answer it, no matter how many people I asked. So I figured it would come when it came. I even talked to him about what saying “I love you” might look like.

I didn’t expect to be pushed into it.

I was getting off work on Thanksgiving Eve. I’d been texting him throughout the day, like usual, and then he stopped responding. That wasn’t like him.

I tried to stay chill and not triple text. After a while, I started to panic.

I called him. No answer.

I spiraled. I left a worried voicemail. I kept texting. I was on my way to a workout class, and my brain went straight to the worst place.

The night before, he told me he had to drive an hour in horribly icy roads. Accidents everywhere. My mind filled in the rest.

I believed he died in a car crash.

His family doesn’t know me yet. They don’t have my number.

My boyfriend just DIED, and I never told him I loved him.

I kept thinking, “RV, You finally met a nice guy that really like you, YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID IT WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE!!!”

I went to my workout class and started stretching, still fully spiraling.

I went outside and called him again. No answer.

So I left another voicemail. I said I didn’t know what was going on, that I was worried.

And then I said, “if it’s worth saying later, it’s worth saying now.”

And I told him I loved him.

It wasn’t how I imagined it. I thought I’d say it in person. But in that moment, it didn’t matter. Time felt so fleeting.

I let myself feel it before I understood it.

Part of me wishes I didn’t need fear to get there. I wish I could have that kind of clarity without thinking someone I love is DEAD in a ditch from a 7 car pileup.

Funny how the mind works, but that’s how it happened. It pushed me forward.

In the middle of a workout I rushed to my ringing phone. A relief to see his name.

I can almost hear him blushing through the phone as I said hello.

This idiot was helping his grandma make Thanksgiving meatballs and put his phone away because couldn’t touch it. THAT’S why he hasn’t been answering the past couple hours?

What an annoyingly cute excuse.

We’re on the phone, both giggling. I’m shoving myself between two columns, hiding myself from everyone. He’s telling me he loves me back, and I can hear the grinning in his voice.

I return to the gym like I just didn’t grieve a man who was actually just making meatballs.

People were doing deadlifts. Someone’s complaining about lunges.

And I’m just standing there thinking, oh.

That’s what it feels like.

Here are the title I gave the tracks. I hope it gives you a nice preview of what’s to come:

1. Yummy Work

2. Midnight Area Codes

3. Hiss Deceptacon