attic box

one unorthodox and unaccredited thing I made up that fundamentally increased my self-trust: I took six months where I stopped talking to friends about ‘my problems’ or ‘pending decisions’ and started recording voice memos to myself. 

turns out, I mostly needed a place to…

Depression as a reliable symptom of unexpressed agency.

Over-intellectualizing feelings to avoid vulnerability might look like having an hour-long rational discussion about the overall deficit of hugs rather than just asking for a hug.

it’s sad that most people don’t have a community or friend group that makes them feel loved and safe

Years ago, someone asked me: if I could have any superpower I wanted, what would I choose? 

I said I’d choose the power to have people drop their masks and be real with me.

Turns out this is a real superpower anyone can cultivate. It starts by dropping your own mask.

best editing advice i ever heard was from walter murch when he says

when you find the moment you love the most b/c it's the *perfect* summation of everything you want to convey - take it out. & see how everything else around it fills that void in a newer, stronger way

Quit placing people high above you then reacting to your own invention with anger.   Jealousy is self-abandonment.  Have some dignity

You want to get enlightened? Throw yourself at your fear. Again. And again. And again.
All else is commentary.

There are places in the incentive landscape where the incentives are aligned with your values, and your job is to find them

chronic self-criticism is a way to feel like you're "doing something" about the perceived problem, without actually taking any action

it's your subconscious finding the perfect compromise between the desire to stay stuck (and therefore safe) and the desire to move forward

one year of consistency in doing anything hard will 10x your self-belief

spent a while drafting before deleting a long insensitive tweet of observations i've made about depressed people, based on the many who have confided in me

tl;dr is that they're usually basically correct in their self-assessments and this makes things very difficult

People fall out of love when they lose faith in the story the other person is writing. You wake up one day and think: why am I trapped inside this narrative? I don’t even like your prose.

me: let the time run out. who cares. the world is better off without me anyway…
jigsaw: heyyy nooo. cmo-(voice filter off) cmon man. you’re awesome

It is not that I’m some grumpy person who thinks that some people are great and others aren’t, in some predetermined way—I think you can to a large extent decide which kind you want to be. But if someone else isn’t measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people who have already decided.

feeling safe with a woman in a relationship is actually really important to me and not something I hear a lot of men talking about. safe to be emotionally vulnerable. safe to be honest. safe to be authentic, to be one's full self. safe to have conflict, disagreements.

i've spent many years– actually now two decades– circling around articulations of things that felt obvious to me that seemed to elude the people in my social reality. rn i'm feeling that at the core of a lot of it is "you can figure stuff out" and "you can talk to people"

If you don't let yourself have the satisfaction of completing a thing before moving onto the next thing, you miss out on a golden opportunity to reinforce the behavior you want.

Pleasure closes the loop. It can be a long/diffuse loop ("I'll let myself feel some abstract…

pay attention to those who have experienced the transformation you want to see in yourself

“Intelligence is making hard problems easy; stupidity is making easy problems hard; genius is making hard problems go away.”