texting myself should be a series.
made a decision literally right this second—11:55 AM, right before I’m hopping on a very, very important call that’s making my skin buzz and eyes light up and my blood simmer in fire—that these off-the-dome ramblings need a specific column on this Substack. Why? Because I want to, mostly. The second reason is because they deserve to have their own home. We all have unorganized thoughts that deserve a place to stay. Some people love their notes apps. I don’t really love those, to be honest. I have a lot of thoughts to capture as I roam, but I prefer unleashing them all in one sitting if I can. The ideas stew, and stir, and flood, until they break a gate I can’t even see—more on that later, actually—and I’m suddenly bombarded with creative imagination and backlogged daydreams and full bottomless oceans rampant with the DESIRES and the BEAUTY and all the things I LOVE more than the air we need to breathe. (Do we love air, really? We respect it, but do we truly love it? Do we love it like we do our favorite books, or candies, or songs? I say I love air almost out of obligation, like I’m talking about an abusive boyfriend who might be controlling my finances, or something—with some kind of detached fear that if I admit I don’t actually love fair, it’ll spontaneously disappear, and I won’t have access to ). Wait, no. Your mind isn’t a dome. It’s a floodgate. FLOODGATES. They’re protecting an unbelievable amount of influence and power and danger as well, beautiful and terrible, but you have to be aware of those things before you can truly harness it. I have an ugly attachment to my floodgates. Guess it’s time to break them open. It’s really hard to shift identities between the Creator and the Curator, especially when working, but it’s vital to recognize the differences. Realizing this is a point we can all learn from, regardless of where we come from and how we work and think and make things, you know?
slop. chic. taste. fuck.
terms. social media. destruction. beautiful things. ugly things. templates. SO MANY TEMPLATES. reels, reels, reels. carousels. instagram. linkedIn. Substack. yelling. laziness. zero effort turned into glamorized “strategies.” courses, courses, and more courses. big blocky rebranding that screams desperation more than the fat straight-laced letters tinder is trying to pass off as something “new.” (new doesn’t always mean better). learning I'm getting too used to complaining about people who complain about complaining. complaintception. everyone jumps on trends and they all feel so boring, and lame, and dumb. you’re smarter than you think and you’re wasting your time trying to show up as everyone else. stop doing that. you have a voice, a story, an opinion, things you love and things you hate. don’t let the internet decide what you can and can’t say or should and shouldn’t say. did you know you actually have control over how you react? that you’re not automatically entitled to rage just because someone upset you? you have agency, choice, whatever buzzword you want to use to make yourself feel better. it’s a growing billion-dollar market opportunity to convince you that you don’t have control over your life and you need to “learn how money moves” as if a cotton dollar bill has a fucking soul attached to it. funny. also rich people are not inherently evil and poor people are not inherently virtuous. I loooooove monochromatic as a visual style and architectural point of view, but it’s becoming its own template, and the more I see myself copied and pasted, the more I realize I need to spend time recuperating within the PERSONAL PALACE OF MY OWN DESIGN. wrote about that this week, and really enjoyed that. “slop” is used too interchangeably and has lots definition. “chic” is a commodity now, and nothing more; a cheap costume that ironically has redefined itself through the cultural zeitgeist, and not what it was originally meant to convey.
your attitude needs to change. not substack.
if you’re new here, i left Substack for a hot minute because I had brainwashed myself into believing that the platform was the problem. it wasn’t. obviously. think we both know that, but i digress. it’s a really cool place. full of deep thinkers and stupid people pretending to be deep thinkers. I’m a weird hybrid of the two. (i mean, you have to be a little delusional to publish daily letters like this on top of freelancing, consulting, and working on personal fiction projects, right?) All social media platforms can be cool places. i experience this constantly; people waxing poetic about how “toxic” their platform is, but they conveniently forget that if they don’t like something… they can just scroll past it. they can ignore it. they can block people. they can just create, mind their business, and move on. if you don’t want to play in this ocean, you don’t have to. move along, and no one will miss you. or, stay, and learn how to adjust and stop being a victim. make every place you visit, digital or physical, an opportunity to express yourself and bend the rules the way you want. no one else is stopping you, and that’s a type of freedom millions of people don’t have.
i want to be big. REALLY BIG. but my way. not yours.
I told someone I admire the other day that I wanted this newsletter to be something extremely special, and huge, and something I can’t even properly visualize yet. I want to help people as I help myself—this multi-hyphenate writer who aspires to leave her footprint on the world across brand, art, digital culture, editorial, the internet, the physical mediums that translate our work and thoughts and creative blood in the way it was meant to, and a bunch of other things. this could be one of my BODIES OF WORK that deserve a place on my mantle when I’m 95 years old. I want that so bad. I believe in it so bad. the vision is all over the place, too, but so am I. (part of the appeal, you know?) It’s part of what makes my writing voice the way it is—this odd, misshapen, lovely, ugly thing that can come off as untamed but is designed to live as its own beast. I like it. some people will hate it. others won’t. that’s the whole point, remember? to just be yourself and live the life in your truest way, and tell stories in only the way you can. no restrictions and minimal outside inspiration. you are meant to create, not consume, so stop eating everyone else’s dishes and learn to make your own fucking recipe. it’s one of the many things I'm trying to do with this letter, with CUT YOUR TEETH, and all the things we talk about every day. dream big, have audacity, go after what you want, watch and eat and think and live and write the things you’ve always wanted. do it. you have to. no one else will.
i want to be rich.
in money. in art. in love. in peace. enough fucking said.
— Taylor Barnes.