It has been seven years since I built this site and almost five years since I’ve posted anything here at all. It feels time to give an updated introduction and breathe new life into my writing.

I started this website by writing my Origin Story, a post I made when I was seventeen years old. I am imagining the version of myself who wrote those words and I can’t help but feel like I am instead fondly remembering reruns of a childhood show— chuckling at obviously poor choices that the character made and holding my breath right before I know shit is absolutely going to hit the fan for her. That couldn’t have been me, right?

Is it part of the human experience to recall your past in discrete, episodic scenes divorced from the timeline of your life? Did no one prepare us for that? It feels especially perplexing to me because I know that when I was seventeen, any amount of reminiscing at that time would have just been filled with childhood memories of things that kind of just… happened to me, not things that I did. Does that distinction make sense? It feels like it was easier to internalize old memories of previous versions of myself back then.

I grew up in a family culture that prescribed the boundaries of where my values and interests could go and anything outside of that was threatening to assimilate to an irreverent Western culture. The most devastating, yet inevitable, outcome for any child of immigrants living in America today. It was not until I was entering “the adult world” that it felt like I “became” a person. Up until then, I did not have the autonomy to even consider that I could choose how to show up in the world based on values I derived from my personal experiences. As I got older, reminiscing about my childhood began to embody a sense of dissonance: what I was living and experiencing was one thing and how I was told to feel about it was another. It wasn’t until those two things finally came to a head when I was seventeen that for the first time recognized I was sentient and could be sure-footed when making life altering decisions.

In this moment, I am thinking back to her with her newly developed, and thus very inflated, sense of self-worth. I give her grace for thinking she knew everything there was about being human, creating art, and truly thinking she had something revolutionary to say.

I digress.

Sharing prose is weird. But writing it brings me into a state of reverie so much quicker than anything else– how fantastic that we can make tangible what was just a dream through the mere act of stamping symbols onto a page. The reckoning, though, is that dreams change, quickly and often, while those pages remain the same forever. This results in dozens of well-loved journals piled in a box somewhere collecting dust for fear that cracking the spine will open a Pandora’s box of emotions— the primary one being cringe. Thus, I must admit it has been challenging to revisit the first versions of this dream. It was almost unrecognizable from what I dream of now, hence a little bit of a website cleanup before this post goes out. There is an immediate want to hide those rudimentary dreams forever, to pretend that I have been this version of me forever, but that would be a lie.

What brings me back here, then, to restart writing prose after blogs have all but died?

Substack did, funny enough.

Well, it was certainly the final straw. Over the last five years, I have been trying to iterate ways to get my writing out to the world in some sort of consistent semi-official-way. Allow me to recount what my writing journey has looked like since my last post to all five of you wonderful people still subscribed to this website for some reason.

At first, I got sucked into the blogging tropes (see any of my journals from 2019 and 2020) and I mapped out my website to include a perfect template of journal posts that would be helpful and fun for people to read. I was a young new homeowner! So many new things to experience and write about! I was about to start grad school! More new things to write about! I even made little categories on my website for different things I would write about, like homeowner tips or writing/creative advice, as if I was running my own little lifestyle magazine. I was excited to write things that I thought people wanted to read because that was what the internet told me blogs were for and writing was supposed to be: consumed by others and helpful, productive, or entertaining in some way.

I made lists of content ideas and intended to write a bunch of journals that I could stock up and schedule out to post weekly because apparently no one actually immediately posts anything to social media, you have to strategize your content. It needs to be scheduled out so that you have time to write more new content because if you don’t have something posted every week, what’s the point? (We’ll get back to the point, I promise).

Naturally, I never followed through with any of that because I never could actually bring myself to come up with anything to write. Surprise, surprise…. It’s almost like planning out content to post, strategizing what would be most read, and researching how to write about them becomes work and no longer scratches the creative itch that writing used to. I abandoned the journal idea pretty quick and, with it, this website.

I tried switching to Instagram. Maybe I can be more consistent by posting poetry on Instagram. I have a huge backlog of poems I have never shared, it should be easy to schedule those out, right? Nope. All of my interest for that died as soon as I had to fight several different free-versions of photo editing apps to emulate the aesthetic posts that got shared on everyone’s Instagram “Stories.” My poetry was too long for the little squares, too dense to have a cute picture behind it, and my ability to draw minimal little flowers was subpar so huge shoutout to Rupi Kaur for realizing there was a market for shitty, minimalist, aesthetic poetry and capitalizing on it.

Except, I don’t think it was entirely Kaur’s fault (and honestly, whatever, girl, get your money). I think the Rupi Kaur-ification of Instagram poetry opened my eyes to the bigger, more malicious, trend of short-form content creeping its way into art and forcing the monetization of creativity. The people I followed started moving their posts to TikTok, an app that went from being a cringey advertisement plastered everywhere to becoming the most downloaded app in America today. Seemingly to compete, Instagram launched Reels and updated its algorithm to prioritize those posts with trending “sounds” and “audios.” It was absurd. The same joke, the same skit, the same sound, over and over and over again.

It seems so normal now, but “algorithm” went from being a word I rarely used in my daily vocabulary to becoming a widely known joke about how the “Algo” knows you better than your friends do, hell better than you know yourself. It made scrolling through your regular feed stale— no longer showing you chronological posts from any of your followers, but a random cycling of posts from like twelve people. Inevitably, it became more interesting to scroll through whatever the Algo thought you wanted to consume via Reels.

The prioritization of short-form content is designed to promote things that are entertaining, attention captivating, and short enough to want to scroll to the next thing (to make money for creators and for the app), and that’s about it. These quick videos or short tweets have flooded social media and encompass every facet of the human existence you can think of. Every niche, special interest, or hobby. Never has it been easier to make money, the creators say, just record yourself doing anything or everything. Film yourself cleaning paint brushes and make a quick post about the importance of brush maintenance. Have someone film you on a typewriter and make a post about your next short story. Lean your phone against a rock to film yourself hiking (and then run back to go get your phone) to post about the benefits of being outdoors.

I want to make note that of course art can and does get sold and we can and should compensate artists for contributing to the health & well-being of society. My problem is that as soon as the financial incentive to create anything overshadows the inherently human compulsion to make art, the outcome is a market product that no longer can be considered art but instead becomes Content. Optimizing the creation and sharing of art for the sake of profit because we are forced to. Legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin says it beautifully in her award acceptance speech in 2014 for the National Book Foundation Medal:

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”

I know that my commentary on this is not revolutionary– and it’s actually almost worse how self aware we are all. This kind of Content is colloquially (and often) referred to as literal brain-rot or, my favorite, slop. It is promoting an inherent facade by staging the thing instead of doing it. Content requires a level of pretending to do the thing in order to share the perfect, bite sized piece of it without any nuance or context whatsoever. These things aren’t easy to make either, I tried! That’s why the app is also flooded with content creators whose full time gig is making posts filled with tips and tricks to making the best videos to get the most likes to make the most amount of money.

The economic incentive overshadowing the simple want to knit, to paint, to write, to bare your soul to the world through your art. You spend more energy pretending to do the thing than actually doing it, and I’ve watched some of my favorite artists burn out, close up shop, and simply disappear because they couldn’t take the hustle of it anymore. Staying engaged and up to date with the short-form content post trends while also trying to be an artist and do the thing became too much.

I felt ashamed that I was, once again, sucked into the capitalist-driven-content-creation-machine by wasting hours of my life consuming superficial brain-rot content about writers and authors and the perfect journals and pens that would magically jumpstart my creativity and breathing exercises to ground myself in my body and candles that would inspire you to finally write, but none of those things stimulated a single, solitary creative thought. Quite the opposite, actually. I thought I was experiencing writer’s block. I took this personally as a failure of my own doing, a lack of creative ability or “trying hard enough.”Eventually, without the motivation to post short-form content and the belief that it wasn’t worth creating anything different than what I was seeing be shared, I stopped writing altogether.

I was unable to satiate my need for creative expression and the inability to pull myself out of shallow, soulless Content began wearing on me in ways I couldn’t see at the time. I was just so fucking tired of being fed slop. I couldn’t focus on longer form art, I noticed myself scrolling and swiping quickly. My attention span was waning and every time I caught myself, whether after minutes or sometimes hours of doom-scrolling, I would immediately become overwhelmed with disgust and throw my phone across the room to re-engage with the world around me. It got so tangibly frustrating that sometime in early 2023, I dug through the Instagram accounts I was “Following” to create a shortlist of artists I specifically cared about & subscribed to their email newsletters. I wanted to force myself into reading longer form content from people I loved, independent of any social media algorithm. I wanted to intentionally engage with their writing or art or poetry or whatever it was, I did not want to stumble upon it based on whatever background song they picked for their video. I deleted the app for that year and it was absolute bliss.

I was able to focus on grad school and academic research without the urge to pick up my phone every ten minutes. I found myself getting bored and using those moments to let my thoughts wander. I even started dabbling in writing poetry again. I felt in tune with the media I was choosing to consume— it fed my creativity and inspired me to reflect on the purpose of my own art-making outside of the need to share it on social media.

Unfortunately, this bliss didn’t last long. In October of 2023, it became very clear that the only place I would get accurate reporting on the atrocities Israel and the IDF were committing in Gaza was going to be on Instagram from the literal phones of Palestinians who were surviving and live-streaming a genocide. I couldn’t turn away, I needed to be plugged in, to be connected with allies locally, to advocate, and there was no where else I knew to go to do it. There is so much I could write about on that, but we will leave it there to pick up on another time. Mostly because to this day, I still have not been able to write about it.

I was once again in the clutches of Meta and its stupid algorithm. After another year of slop, the urge to find another artistic escape was growing. Last August I started looking into Substack as a writing platform, “the app for independent voices,” as I saw so many leftist and politically engaged creators move there with the specific intention of writing long-form, thoughtful pieces to share. It felt like the exact solution that I was desperately seeking and a way forward to start writing and sharing it again.

Except, after initially following the only creator I wanted to read from (Shoutout to Ismatu Gwendolyn and the fucking amazing work she does as a writer and educator, please read her work. (Also I literally just found out in trying to link her Substack to this journal that she must have deleted it too so honestly fuck yeah go find her writing wherever the fuck she is)) I was inundated with articles from “others you might be interested in” that quickly became too much to keep up with. I was getting emails from Substack as a new user that gave me tips on getting started, how to monetize my work using paid access tiers, what kind of things I should write about, and it just felt like another marketplace of pressurized bullshit, once again. I couldn’t keep up even with the amazing writers I did follow on there and eventually I just gave up before I could even start.

I made the mistake of trying again in December as my partner hopped on there and without getting sucked into any of the marketing, just started writing whatever was on his mind and posting it. No followers, no interest in looking at what other people were doing, no mysterious algorithm to follow. Maybe I was just of weaker will and overthinking it— I wanted to try again.

But between August and December Substack introduced “notes” (basically tweets), as a new, easy way to get followers! And then, in January Substack updated to allow videoooooossssssss, yaaaaaaaay!!! Short-form videos!!!! This is how to make the most MONEY on your CONTENT. It’s all about churning out the fuckING CONTENT. It is inescapable. It’s infuriating. They even updated their website tagline to “Substack— A new economic engine for culture.”

Economic engine? Do you mean a job? Paid tiers for access to your thoughts, make a career out of your hobby, monetize your shit ass writing that you are having to pump out daily to keep up with trends on top of your full time job because you were promised that when you are your own boss, it will finally, one day get better? Friend, no! Get real. Art is supposed to be used as resistance to the economic engine!!

I was, still, amazed that none of this sentiment deterred my partner from posting on Substack at all. I later found out this was because none of that sentiment really made it to him at all. He accessed Substack through his laptop, and, let me tell you, the desktop version is so vastly different than the version accessed through an iPhone— no pop up pages forcing you to interact with interests, no pop up “follow these people”, no “automatic helpful push notifications” guiding you to monetize your posts. The difference is so stark, it almost feels intentionally predatory that the more accessible version is chock-full of the same addictive marketing bullshit that every other social media site has going right now. My partner opened up the app on his phone and immediately saw what I was talking about. It’s actually very, very fucked up.

I would like to share with you below a collage I made a couple weeks ago while getting tattooed. It took less than thirty minutes to compile some of the most vile screenshots from emails I have received over the last month, “how to grow” articles found by just trying to look up how to use the damn platform, and two posts from the literal front page of TODAY (as of this writing) with the same MLM-style shilling of “You can be rich just like me by selling your content TODAY! Just follow ME!” All of these articles are so genuine, it’s actually quite sad. Yes, even that “find your n-word” one. Idk who the fuck approved that.

Behold this monstrosity:

In having this realization, I was like well fuck, I guess I could just email people my writing with this here website that I have been paying for the domain of for the last five years. So yeah, I guess I am back and I am not overthinking it this time. Why is it so fucking hard to make art and not feel pressured to monetize it? Why must everything be a hustle? AND worse yet, why does it feel like if I don’t want to monetize my writing, there is no point to be writing at all?

Tuning back into myself, my thoughts, valuing them for existing, valuing artmaking for the making’s sake, valuing art for the art’s sake, valuing myself outside of the capitalist economy but in relation to the world around me; all of these things have been heavy on my mind and heart these last five years and I haven’t written about them nearly at all. Not even to process years of built up grief for the traumatic changes I endured in my life or the loss of life during the pandemic or the genocide or the planet or or or. Not even to process my day to day emotions or thoughts for myself in a journal. Not to just write silly short stories to share with friends.

I have not been writing and it fucking sucks. I am so glad to be here, and it feels so stupid that all it took was just giving myself permission to write this here journal without having an end-plan for what this website will hold, or a fancy, aesthetic way to market it.

I am actually really looking forward to writing journals about shit that has been percolating in my brain for years. Every time I open my mouth to chat about something with friends lately, I am told that the way I talk about world events and life and nature and love and ecology and and and feels so concise, so eloquent, so uplifting, so inspiring so fuck it. I might as well write that shit down and enjoy doing it, like I used to.

P.S. No shade to Substack users, use whatever you gotta to make your art— huge shade to Substack, though. That’s all.