Hey, Cool Life!

I quit! I’m cured! Congratulations me! I’m perfect! Or why I am taking a break after 8 years of intensive therapy to stop looking at game tape of Ls and Wins and start experiencing all the ways I will be always be okay.

This one is about how I use social media to tell me how to feel. And how I use other writers’ motivation to tell me what’s wrong with my storytelling when I need to trust my own intuitions around my emotions and my work processes. It’s also about happiness and finding meaning.

You know what’s impossible to mask? Being a tourist who knows NOTHING. This one’s about how traveling makes me way more Autistic and how weirdly great it feels.

Week two in Japan. This one is about enthrallment and how any intensely joyful feelings also hold grief. And how I’m reparenting my inner teen by revisiting the most hilariously, bizarre fashion wormhole.

I am Japan and working MANIC hours and feeling spectacular. This one is about not immediately vilifying erratic behaviors and accepting quirks with humor, openness and loving support. This is about affording yourself grace and asking the question: what if I am not in trouble or doing bad things but instead I am CRUSHING.

You ever get burnout from trying to avoid burnout? I do. Plus, remedial affirmations for people who sorta don’t believe they work. The world is a sad, cruel place. Please be gentle with yourselves.

When I say have a gentle day what does that mean? How does a dog wear pants? What does being kind to yourself and your cognitive needs actually entail? For me it’s been a lot of tiny things that I am never quite convinced is real or will make a difference. Also, how being tired makes me feel like I’m under attack and how that unfolds.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom! The writers strike is over and what that means inside my brain. Bees! It means bees. Also, how you can have FOMO for F’d up bad things because there are so many bad things for authors and creators to contend with. And how to find some gallows humor and gratitude in all of it.

Guess what? I’m Autistic. What that means for even more gentleness and how I arrived at the decision to be assessed.

This is about conversation and audience. Media platforms (RIP Buzzfeed and Twitter) as well as safe spaces to create story and work out individual truths. It’s also about banned books, how it feels to have banned books. Plus, how AI storytelling technologies are not it. Plus, the director Joanna Hogg and the feeling of unwritten dialogue.