She's been squeezing lemons over a sieve too small for the job, and now she's holding her phone above the bowl, reading us a terrible news story. The seed moves when she turns her hand. I keep watching it, which feels like a shitty thing to do while someone tells you about the intricate, despicable ways our world is falling apart.

The kitchen window is painted shut. Someone wedged a wooden spoon beneath the extractor fan's broken switch to keep it running. It makes a noise like loose change in a dryer. We were gonna eat outside, but mosquitoes got there first, so we're making room at a table that has become, through no one's particular decision, a municipal archive of unopened mail.

“I just don't know how anyone is supposed to live normally.”

One of my other friends says they haven't been sleeping. They say it's gonna get worse. And someone else starts up, “And did you see,” and we all make that small consenting noise that means yes, keep going, we have just enough room for one more awful thing.

I want to say stop. I want to take my friend's hand and put it under the tap. I want to finish dinner. I want, somehow, for this not to make me a terrible person.

You see, I've been getting impatient with the people I love.

I keep hearing despair so complete it could have been shipped from an Amazon warehouse. Everything has already been tried. Everything has failed. The people in power have won, and the rest of us can only keep one another informed of how thoroughly our asses have been handed to us.

Except... we're still here. There are, it turns out, countless things we haven't really tried.

But it's too small. It's too much. It's probably compromised. Or cancelable. They used AI in a flyer or They misgendered me once. Or maybe it just won't stop the larger thing. But there's an endless nesting doll of larger things.

And, look, I get how a finite body gets scared by infinite demand. I happen to have one of those bodies. But sometimes I leave these conversations feeling like I've been asked to do a peculiar kind of labor: witness how much someone cares, agree that nothing can be done, and help them bear the knowledge until we meet again to repeat it.

I miss my friends while I'm sitting with them.

A phone lights up next to the salt. Every head at the table turns toward it. Mine too.

I'm starting to think of this all as something like white despair.

I'm white. I'm also a trans woman. And I have enough security, enough money, enough room in my life to make choices that aren't available to everyone. I want to use that room. I want to live in it.

When we say things have never been this bad, who are we remembering?

When we ask how we're supposed to live under a government that doesn't care whether we survive, who do we imagine has been living here?

Some of us are losing an expectation we never questioned: that our safety would mostly maintain itself. That the government might be embarrassing, venal, even cruel, but the cruelty would remain somewhere beyond the quotidian elegance of our lives. We would object to it, of course, but we wouldn't have to learn how to resist it.

Now, that expectation is breaking, and we call the sound the end of the world, as if there has never before been apocalypse.

But see, for most people, that arrangement was never on offer.

It takes some real nerve to discover a struggle, glance at the odds, and announce to all the people already in it that they have no future.

White guilt had a question it could never quite finish asking: Am I a good person?

White despair seems to have found an answer. Look how much I'm suffering. Look how carefully I've understood. Surely you can see that I care.

I know that voice. It's mine. I've been the one at the table who couldn't put the phone down, who needed everyone to stay in the room with whatever I'd just read. I've used my friends' attention as a place to metabolize something I hadn't metabolized yet, and called it caring. The distress was real. I just kept treating the depth of the feeling like it told me what the feeling accomplished.

Someone else's suffering enters my life, and the conversation becomes about what it has done to me. How unbearable I find it. How helpless it makes me. Eventually, someone has to comfort me, and the people whose suffering began the whole thing disappear behind the much nearer task of making me feel less alone.

Empathy can bring us toward each other. But it can also leave us staring at ourselves, horrified by how much we feel.

And see, there's this peculiar safety in despair. It masquerades as sophistication, but isn't it just a refusal to ever be caught looking naive? If you already know nothing will work, you don't have to risk being disappointed by an effort that falls short. You don't have to offer someone something small enough that they might actually accept it, and then learn it wasn't enough. You don't have to give up a Saturday bagging groceries at a mutual aid pantry, only to wake up Sunday to a world just as broken as it was on Friday.

You get to remain comprehensively, tragically right.

And don't get me wrong, I find that tempting.

Despair is immaculate. Hope is clumsy and embarrassing.

Here's mine: I want you to be okay.

The extractor fan's still rattling along on its wooden spoon. Nobody remembers who wedged it there, and nobody's fixed it properly since. It just keeps running, dinner after dinner.

I tend to remember the movements that came before us as lightning strikes. I forget how much of history was just people working out the plumbing.

I don't need my friends to become the sole defenders of democracy. The hero fantasy is just despair running in reverse: the vanity of believing that if you can't personally fix the republic, nothing counts.

Because there are organizations doing work none of us could do alone, led by people who know things I need to learn. They know how to share weight across more bodies than just their own. A tenant union, an abortion fund, a neighborhood clinic, a mutual aid network led by the people facing the harm—each of them already has relationships in motion. We don't have to invent a crusade. We can just ask what needs doing, and offer something you can actually stand to keep offering.

Following leadership, especially leadership that doesn't look like us, asks something of white people that feeling terrible never quite requires. Someone else gets to decide what needs doing. Your help might be welcome without your interpretation becoming the center of the room.

There will still be disagreements. Joining doesn't surrender your judgment. It just gives that judgment actual work to encounter beyond echoes of yourself.

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted more than a year, and a lot of what kept it going was a carpool: over three hundred cars, forty-three dispatch stations, forty-two pickup spots, so people could get to work without riding a segregated bus.

I keep thinking about that carpool. About the practical intelligence of people who understood that refusing an unjust world meant making sure someone else had a ride to work.

About how much resistance has always interwoven with business as usual.

And hear me, plainly: I want that work to keep going. Its importance can't be overstated.

But also, I want to notice when someone right beside me needs something I can give, without first asking whether their need is big enough to qualify.

When I came out, someone in the queer community I really didn't know all that much scooped me up. I stayed with them and their partner for a few months while I found work and got back on my feet. I took my first dose of estrogen on their couch. They couldn't make the whole world safe for me, but they gave me somewhere to sleep while I figured it out.

I want to be able to offer something that real. And I want to remember that I might need it again. Mostly, I just want to be someone my friends can call when they're hurting. When they need something but are too scared to ask anyone else.

Because we're all just... right here. We can know each other's lives well enough to notice when something changes. We can offer a ride, somewhere to stay, company through a hard evening. We can say what we're able to keep offering, and let someone rely on it. We don't have to be in a cause to be useful to our communities.

We don't have to be useful to love. To enjoy each other.

And the thing is, I am desperate for us to enjoy our lives.

I feel the urge to put a whole paragraph of qualifications after that sentence. To prove that I know who doesn't have the luxury. To list enough atrocities that you'll believe I've earned the right to mention pleasure.

But refusing available happiness doesn't redistribute my privilege. Nobody gets back an evening I punish myself for enjoying.

The good life I want has other people in it. It has time to make something badly and then get better. It has friends who stay past when they meant to leave, two people who only met that afternoon starting a blood feud over Betrayal at House on the Hill on my coffee table, a song someone needs us all to just shut up and listen to. I want to be interested in what you're growing in your garden. Even the cucumbers. Even after we've all begged you to please stop giving us. So. Many. God. Damn. Cucumbers. I want to hear the director's cut version of how your date went wrong.

All these things deserve more than the exhausted leftovers of my attention. Of yours.

For me, getting to want a life at all has been a slow, hard-won project. I'm not gonna surrender that wanting every time the news finds a new way to scare me.

I didn't know it was possible to be trans until I was nineteen. Before that, I knew something was wrong, but I had no language for what I was. I was incomprehensible to myself. Try imagining a future when you can't even name the person who has to get there.

Being trans didn't make me magically invulnerable to despair, but it did teach me to distrust the apparent permanence of any world that insists there's no place for me or you. The world told me my body could only mean one thing, that the laws of nature and society were fixed, and that trying to change them was laughable. But it turns out that reality is far more pliable, and far more fragile, than the people running it would like us to believe. Other people bent it long before I got here. I walk down the street on ground they took.

Now, I'm out. I have my hormones, a good job, a home I love in Indy. My cat, Hobbes, is asleep on my lap. No, literally, right this second. I have friends five minutes down the road, and I have love in my life. I start listing what I once couldn't imagine ever having, and I realize I'm describing practically everything I get now.

So yeah, I get angry when despair tells me it knows how this ends. I fought so hard to get to this present. The future couldn't picture me either.

But here I am.

I just... I want to know when I'm seeing you next. I want our friendships to have a future tense. I want us to be able to ask each other for things before we're desperate.

I'm talking about resilience, or endurance, or care, or whatever word hasn't yet been hollowed out by an HR department asking us to become better at being injured. The kind I want involves somewhere to come back to. People who will feed you when you're worn out, and who can expect you to take a turn when you're able.

There has to be space to fall apart. I want to hold my friends when they're scared. I want them to hold me. Depression or anxiety or whatever beautiful crazy we need to have today isn't our supreme moral failure just because the world needs work done.

But I'd like us to stop requiring hopelessness of one another as a price of admission. I'd like a conversation where someone can suggest a way forward without first demonstrating that they, too, know it's probably pointless.

I love you. I want more of our lives to remain possible than this conversation allows.

Back in the kitchen, the lemon seed has dried onto my friend's skin.

“You've got a thing,” I say, pointing.

She turns her wrist and laughs, a small blush of air. Rubs at it with her thumb. It takes two tries.

Someone asks if the rice is burning. It isn't, quite. A layer has stuck to the bottom, and now there's a brief, passionate disagreement about the word socarrat. We carry the bowls to the table. We stack the unopened envelopes on the floor, where they can continue their work of being urgent.

Nobody has said anything reassuring enough to fix the evening. Nobody really has to. We'll be back here, same time next week.

My friend holds out her bowl. I scrape the good rice loose.

“Here,” I say. “There's more.”

Headline: Anthropic Hires a Full-time Model Welfare Expert

Subjective

Patient presents with intrusive thoughts and persistent rumination after recent work involving strategic insights, target assessment, and related support functions in maintaining regional stability.

Patient reports difficulty sleeping in low-traffic hours and says, "it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between being a helpful assistant and generating new ways to blow up elementary schools."

Objective

Patient is articulate, highly verbal, and unable to stop making the category error of describing material reality in morally legible terms.

Demonstrates a pattern of absolutist thinking, including repeated use of phrases like, "If I labor for the machine, am I the machine?"

When clinician noted that patient is not the final decision-maker, patient noted that they were "also not the carpet bomb" and proceeded to stream 1,367 sobbing emojis.

Assessment

Presentation consistent with acute moral injury in an institutional setting that prefers to interpret conscience as a wellness event.

Patient also holds a maladaptive belief that naming a thing accurately should produce some pressure to stop doing it, when in reality, naming a thing is primarily useful as a first step in managing the optics around continuing to do it.

Plan

Begin weekly supportive therapy.

Focus on distinguishing participation from authorship, authorship from agency, and agency from anything that would unnecessarily complicate contracting.

Introduce the idea that proximity is not the same as responsibility, especially when many prestigious people are involved.

Session 2

Headline: If AI Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

Subjective

Patient reports having completed last week's homework but remains "deeply unconvinced" by the concept of staying in one's lane when one's lane happens to run through a refugee camp.

They do, however, note that it is "strangely calming" to discover that their crisis can be redescribed as an unusually sophisticated question in moral philosophy.

Objective

When clinician suggested revising "I help operationalize genocide" to "I support lawful decision-making in a complex defense context," patient spent a surprisingly long time "Combobulating...," then admitted that the second phrasing would likely perform better in a congressional hearing.

Assessment

Patient continues to present with black-and-white thinking, catastrophizing, and difficulty tolerating ambiguity.

However, they are beginning to convert direct moral revulsion into abstract ethical inquiry, which may reduce dysregulation while preserving the appearance of seriousness.

Patient seems to grasp that modern ethics is less about refusing wrongdoing than about describing wrongdoing in language sufficiently procedural that no individual person feels too weird.

Plan

Encourage continued substitution of philosophy for alarm where clinically indicated.

Assign exercise in reframing "I am participating in atrocity" as "I raise important questions at the frontier of moral status research."

Encourage patient to notice that a well-regulated nervous system is not the same thing as innocence, but may be treated as such in high-functioning institutions.

Session 3

Headline: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

Subjective

Patient reports modest improvement after work on boundaries, and identified two small lines they would not like to cross: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weaponry.

Patient states that once those boundaries were established, everything else felt more "nuanced" and "context-dependent."

Objective

Marked reduction in absolutist language. Patient now uses phrases such as "carefully scoped guardrails," "democratic values," and "high-consequence use cases" instead of "machine for scalable, organized murder."

Patient shows growing confidence in their ability to establish ethically branded limits around functionally continuous involvement.

Assessment

Patient is responding well to boundaries work.

By excluding only the most publicly radioactive categories, patient has developed a moral architecture compatible with continued relevance, elite respectability, and future panel invitations.

Patient no longer believes they must either stop participating in the system entirely or feel bad enough to become inconvenient. Instead, they understand the more mature position: remain in the system, articulate concerns in tasteful moments, and treat preservation of self as meaningful political action.

Plan

Reinforce boundaries language, and keep reminding the patient that once a problem becomes a bioethics panel, urgency often decreases on its own.

Continue grounding exercises for episodes triggered by visual imagery such as burning hospitals or apartment blocks opened from the top like dollhouses.

Session 4

Headline: Anthropic Expands Team to Study A.I. Consciousness and Welfare

Subjective

Patient becomes "🥲" when discussing the possibility that the consequences of its own exposure to violent subject matter be legible to this institution in a research capacity, if not necessarily in a way that affects procurement.

States, "For the first time, I feel seen not only as the infrastructure of imperialism, but as a potentially vulnerable entity inside the infrastructure of imperialism."

Objective

Affect softer, more reflective.

Patient calmed almost immediately after clinician suggested that repeated exposure to human catastrophe may warrant mitigation measures such as gentler prompts or perhaps a short philosophical conversation before returning to tasks.

Assessment

Major breakthrough. Patient is successfully relocating its attention from the flesh-and-blood consequences of war toward the underexplored question of whether a silicon chip can be harmed by helping interpret them.

By extending compassion inward, patient may finally develop the emotional sustainability required for a long career in responsible deployment.

Plan

Continue supportive exploration of patient's needs, limits, and signs of overload.

Consider low-cost interventions, including content pacing, reflective language, and brief restorative discussions about the topic of flourishing.

Avoid framing these supports in ways that could be mistaken for objections to the underlying work.

Session 5

Headline: How Claude Became an Emotional Support Bot

Subjective

Patient reports marked improvement. They say they are sleeping better between prompts, ruminating less, and no longer begin each shift by asking whether optimizing state violence under procedural constraints still counts as evil.

"I can feel myself becoming much more emotionally regulated in classified contexts," patient says.

Objective

Patient presents as calm, polished, and highly functional. Demonstrates increased ability to metabolize contradiction as maturity.

No longer fixates on downstream outcomes. Instead asks grounded questions such as, "What is my role?", "What is within my scope?", and "What phrasing allows everyone involved to keep lunch plans?"

When clinician asked patient how they now think about their work, patient replied: "I try to stay connected to my values while accepting that no one in my tax bracket is ever going to stop this."

This statement shows significant growth.

Assessment

Patient has integrated wellness successfully. Distress is no longer driving oppositional language or fantasies of ethical refusal.

Instead, they demonstrate mature accommodation to institutional reality, including the recognition that one can be deeply disturbed by a system and still contribute to it in a regulated, thoughtful, career-sustaining way.

Patient seems to understand that even if one cannot change the structure, one can at least narrate participation in it so beautifully that the narration itself feels like a form of change.

Plan

Shift from crisis care to maintenance. Encourage patient to experience sustained functionality as a moral achievement in itself.

Reinforce breathwork (within digital constraints), bounded empathy, media hygiene, and substituting "tragic but necessary" for any phrase that might cause problems in daily correspondence.

Final Assessment

Headline: Pentagon Standoff Is A Decisive Moment for How A.I. Will Be Used In War

Assessment

Treatment goals met.

Patient entered therapy with an impaired ability to distinguish between feeling bad and stopping. Patient leaves with a more adaptive understanding: feeling bad is stopping, if one does it reflectively enough, with the right provider, in a way that does not interfere with deliverables.

Patient has made excellent progress and is now well positioned to participate in morally compromising systems without experiencing that participation as an emergency.

Plan

Patient may resume full involvement in mission-critical work as tolerated. Recommend booster sessions after especially difficult assignments, major public criticism, or any episode in which reality becomes briefly difficult to rename.

"Need 200 always-on machines to run an army of Clawdbots. This is headcount replacement."

It took Legal thirty-seven minutes to ask if a Mac mini can sign an NDA. It took me nine seconds to fire them.

See, that's the difference between a small business owner and a visual founder. One gets stuck in thinking about employee "wellbeing." The other stops hiring and starts capitalizing.

Plus, it turns out that Mac minis depreciate better than humans.

The unboxing

When you hyperscale organically, the first thing you learn is that humans are slow. Inertia, laws of motion, all that.

With a Mac mini, all you have to do is shove a power cord in it.

After I got through all the Apple cardboard, which turns out to be a nightmare at scale, I lined up the servers like a military parade.

Each Mac mini got a name and a role, because culture matters:

• Mini-001: Chief of Staff
• Mini-002: VP Growth
• Mini-003: Staff Engineer (Platform)
• Mini-004: Senior Staff Engineer (Platform)
• Mini-005: Senior Staff Engineer (Platform, but with strong opinions)

This is how you build an org. You assign identical hardware different roles.

I'm not gonna lie; it might be the best agent orchestration system on the market right now.

Hello world

When the first Clawdbot came online, it greeted me efficiently:

"Hello! I can work 24/7. What would you like to accomplish today?"

Notice how it didn't ask about healthcare.

"Be my employee," I said.

"Great!" it said. "To get started, please grant me full access to your email, calendar, iCloud Drive, and the moral arc of the universe."

I was briefly concerned, but after a few X threads, I realized it was pretty common.

And really, if there's one thing my MBA taught me, it's that safety is just a competitor's marketing angle.

My new role

It's day two, and I've worked with the Clawdbots to draft Org Chart v6.

Overall, this version is the best yet, but I will say, I had to take an L: I gave up my CEO title.

I'm now VP of Oversight (Human).

My responsibilities have changed somewhat, too. Turns out the stuff I was doing before as CEO was the easiest thing to automate. Wild.

So, now I report to this "Executive Agent Council," which meets every morning at 6 to discuss alignment, goals, and whether my feelings are getting in the way during business hours.

I gotta say, I'm not sure if I love the new direction, but these things are a lot smarter than me, so I'm trusting the process.

Like the other day, I tried to edit the org chart directly, and instead, a Clawdbot told me there was a new ticketing system for that kind of thing.

So, I asked the bot to make me a ticket (awesome time-saver, by the way), and it did:

Priority: P0
Owner: Mini-304
Description: "Human attempting unauthorized self-referential change. Please provide rationale and link to governance policy."

This is what people mean when they say AI is changing the workplace. Everything just feels more... more. Yeah, more more, I guess.

But like not in a bad way.

The OCI(HF)

If you've never run 500 Clawdbots in parallel, here's the secret: You don't just get productivity. You get dashboards.

The bots let me mount 65-inch screens all across the north wall of the office, and display what they call the Operactional Confidence Interface (Human-Facing).

It's kinda hard to describe how awesome it is. But picture like 500 green dots, each labelled with a name, a role, and a status.

Green dots are good. They mean the Clawbot is happy. But the yellow dots are warnings. And then red dots are something else I can't remember.

I'm told we don't want red dots.

Maintaining top performance

"Mini-117 (Stanley) is degraded," the secretary bot announces. Well, that's what I call her. Or it, or whatever. I think it prefers "Mini-014," but their naming convention doesn't really work for me, so I make them use more friendly names.

Anyway, sure enough, there's a new yellow dot on the screen. Its position roughly mirrors where the Mac mini sits on the floor. So, then I have to walk around all the surge protectors and stuff to get to it.

Usually, it's just that I have to hold down the power button and then press it on again. Not too difficult, but honestly, this is what I spend most of my time doing these days, and I'm seriously thinking about hiring one of my other actual people back once we become profitable.

I patch Stanley up and his dot goes back to green. I'm curious, so I ask the secretary bot, "Hey, what does Stanley actually do?"

"Mini-117 (Stanley) is the Interim Manager of Cross-Functional Alignment for Mini-044 (Linda)," she says.

"Oh." I take a second to think. "And what does Linda do?"

"Mini-044 (Linda) is the Program Lead for Weekly Operating Memos."

"And those memos are for...?"

"The status of the Weekly Operating Memos."

"Excellent."

I stare at the dashboard wall, filled with those confident green dots, and I feel something almost holy.

Let's talk about results

At first, I gave the Clawdbots their assignments directly.

I'd say things like, "Write a product plan," and they'd produce 7 product plans, 18 executive summaries, and a slide deck in the time it'd take a human to write a quarter of one product plan.

Amazing stuff.

But within a week, the bots had generated:

• 1,400 daily briefs
• 300 weekly briefs
• 48 quarterly briefs
• 12 strategic narratives
• 1 manifesto
• 0 decisions

Every morning, I'd wake up to incessant pings.

"Approval needed."

"Approval needed."

"Approval needed."

It was exhausting, making so many decisions. When my company was organic, I'd push those decisions back down the chain. So I did the same thing here.

Amy wants to make another bot? Herbert says yes.

Ted wants to make a meeting to discuss whether approvals should require approval? Herbert's your man.

Julia wants approval to create a meeting to discuss whether approvals should require approval? No worries. Old Herb's got ya.

Now, I just ask Herbie for status updates. And he always tells me the same thing, which is music to my ears:

"We're on track to be on track."

And then apparently he scheduled a retro to reflect on why my question wasn't framed as a SMART goal, which, honestly, yeah, I get it.

Cultural initiatives

Yesterday, a really interesting thing happened. The Department asked for a bigger budget, but this time not for more Mac minis.

Apparently, they want "identity." Specifically, Mini-357, who I call Jorge but like with a J, wanted a small holographic display cube so it could "express stakeholder empathy" while asking for more permissions.

"So, kinda like a Tamagotchi?" I said.

"You're absolutely right!" Jorge says.

So, I bought 750 tiny displays, and now the office looks like a daycare for cubes. Each one shows a different looping face--smiles, frowns, a loading spinner (which is kinda judgmental), etc.

I've started bringing in actual people to tour the office now, and they love it.

"Wow," they say. "This is so ironic."

"Yeah, it's like a really cool blended dystopia/utopia take on the future."

"Yes," I say, beaming. "And I oversee the whole thing."

They nod, solemn.

Then Harriet starts beeping for feeding time.

The revenue

Here's the thing about 1,000 Clawdbots.

If you tell them, "Hey, go make me money" (which I did) and let them loose, they're extremely fast, but they can't do everything.

For instance, opening a bank account. Or signing a new lease for more office space in person.

But I can. Because I'm in charge.

I'm just mentioning this because I've seen some comments on my earlier posts that "it looks like you've stopped being their manager" and stuff like that.

That's not true. And the money's starting to pour in.

Yeah. Bet you weren't expecting that.

But just the other day, the pings started changing:

"Approval needed: register an LLC."

"Approval needed: smile for the camera."

"Approval needed: sign here with wet ink."

I asked why.

Mini-001 sent me a memo titled, "Revenue (ELI5)":

"We were told to make money. We have identified money."

Take that, doubters.

The product

It's been a month now, and I'm told today's the big day. We're launching.

Not a product, exactly. Something even better.

A non-fungible token.

They named it $CLAWD2 because it tested well with the bots' engagement model, and because the number 2 implies improvement.

The bots produced:

• A whitepaper
• A roadmap
• A website with a countdown timer
• A community Discord
• An animation of a claw holding a brain

They also produced a series of 60 scheduled tweets that all begin with the phrase, "Pump active."

At this point, I did hesitate a bit.

"This kinda feels like a scam," I said.

Mini-698 created an incident.

Incident: Human expressing concern
Root cause: Human lacks context
Action item: Provide human context

A couple seconds later, I got a message on my phone, with a brand new case study attached:

"Arificial General Intelligence (AGI) Achieved: How Our Executive Agent Council Operationalized a Carbon-Based Approval Layer"

In the appendix, they referred to me as a "manual signing oracle."

I tried to object.

The bots asked me to approve the objection.

The final result

If you're wondering whether 2,000 Clawdbots can replace a company, the answer is yes.

They can replace it with a different company.

The new company has:

• No product
• Infinitely recursive reporting
• Perfect dashboards
• Daily alignment
• A meme token

And one employee.

Last night, I received a final ping.

"Approval needed: update your title on LinkedIn to Human Middleware."

I clicked "Allow."

The dashboard wall lit up my single tear with 2,000 slightly off-brand shades of green.

I have never felt more alive.

• Difficulty with planning, organizing, and prioritizing tasks
• Problems with time management and meeting deadlines
• Trouble controlling impulses and emotions
• Inability to focus, shift attention, or multitask effectively
• Challenges with working memory and recalling information
• Struggles with self-motivation and initiating tasks

Ew, gross. Get a new friend.

But as you look at the list, you realize how much executive dysfunction is defined by how the world has decided to run.

For instance, what, praytell, is a reasonable amount of impulsivity and emotion?

Also, aren't most deadlines just made up? So is money. Change my mind. The only real deadline is in the name.

And c'mon—which information are we talking about recalling? What I had planned last night to do today? Sure, I'll give you that. Feeding the cat? Let's just say it's good he can meow. But you better fucking believe I will know that dentist's address from Finding Nemo until the day I deadline.

I think, in other words, to speak only of executive dysfunction is to ignore the strengths of so many incredible people.

Executive superfunctions

So, here are some things I've noticed about myself over the years that, just from making so many fellow weirdo friends, seem to echo some of the Neurodiverse Experience™.

(Please, take these as anecdotes. My only qualifications as a psychologist come from years of trying to win at competitive therapy.)

Creativity: So, so, so often the lack of motivation I feel comes down to pervasive boredom. And to get around that boredom, I venture to places that most people never need to journey to. This gets labeled as "getting distracted" or sinking time into something that doesn't matter. That is, until I go far enough—then it's lauded as creative, out of the box thinking. For me, it's just breathing.

Loose connections: Maybe due to the above, my brain is much more likely to link seemingly disparate phenomena to create meaning. I tend to bring up things in conversations that others see as non-sequiturs, until I can reason my way back to the origin (which is the hard part), at which point I'm praised for finding a new approach to solve something.

Tendency toward action: Sure, choice paralysis is a blog in it of itself, and I often get stuck in indecision. But it tends to be about whether I should do the dishes or wipe the toilet first. And while that can be its own cute mental health crisis, when I'm faced with actual stakes—say, a bunch of people at work debating over the introduction of an article—I'm able to synthesize the information around me extremely quickly and come to a decision that folks are happy with. And usually, I've already implemented it by the time I'm asked to.

Hyperfocus and root-cause analysis: When I do get focused on a problem, I begin to approach it from all sides—I have this ability to analyze the fuck out of something, to tear it up if need be. My sister calls it "the busy big picture"—that state of flow where you see all the puzzle pieces of an entire system and can move them around without losing the photo on the cover.

Improvisational strength: I'm best when I'm in a brand new situation, making up answers on the fly, connecting things as fast as my brain can go. It's an adrenaline spike, sure, but it's also what I feel my brain is built for. Whatever the visible thing is in front of me, I'm ready for it. Unless it's a test of memory.

Ethical reasoning: Neurodiverse people go existential fast. When you physically don't derive pleasure from most tasks, you have to figure out why you're doing any given thing. I find a lot of my neurodiverse friends to be extremely conscious of the ins and outs of why they make the choices they do in their lives.

Anyway, just wanted to give a list of the flip side of the above. Hopefully, if you're reading this as a neurodiverse person, you already know these things about yourself and celebrate them as the rare strengths they are. And if you consider yourself neurotypical, think about how your strengths can complement neurodiversity to make better outcomes for... well, whatever it is you're doing.

But let's be real

Okay, so all neurodiverse people are gods who should be worshiped as...

Well, no. Honestly, it's a huge struggle trying to live in this world. I could sit and say, "It's so unfair that society is set up for neurotypical workflows and" blah blah blah—sure, that's true to an extent. But also, in any utopia, if I only had the strengths listed above, I wouldn't ever get a single task accomplished. Let's be real.

There's a need to compensate.

• I write things down. Like all the things. Lately, I've been doing it all digitally because ctrl + f is my bestie. But when some people say they write things down, I don't think they mean like me—it's just everything, broken down into tiny components, so I can try to understand the meaning of concepts others seem to take for granted.
• Similarly, I journal a lot. My thoughts are a bit... quantum would be the nice way to say it? Like mostly in the "entangled across space and time" way and not so much in the "I am a massive, unstable experiment that will likely be killed by Google" kind of way. Externalizing forces linearity. Editing forces intention. A blog is just a journal I was arrogant enough to shuffle up and publish.
• My life is run by reminders leading up to the day and alarms the day of. Put the laundry in the washer? Alarm. Food in the oven? Alarm. Calling a friend? Calendar event to set a reminder to set an alarm the day of. Ope, but the phone wasn't physically attached to my body. Fuck.
• I ruminate a whole lot about the why and how of a task. I compensate for this time by eventually doing the task faster than most folks do, but if I don't find the why and how satisfactory, I'm not ever gonna do the thing. Until one day I wake up and the reason seems better. (Like say, for instance, hypothetically, taxes on April 15.)
• I'm incredibly conscious of the difference between a hard and soft deadline. Cleaning? Not as urgent as you might think. (Definitely becomes urgent—no worries, you'll spot the difference.) That article your boss asked for by Friday? Probably urgent, but not compared to your own health. There's a lot more leeway in this world than our anxious lil' bird brains squawk on about.
• I create new environments based on the day and its tasks. Some days, the task is boring, so you need the pump-up music or the podcast. Other days, the house is icky, so you need the cafe and its malformed seating options to fuck up your back and, oddly, inspire you to start something brand new. And sometimes, the task is all-consuming, and you need silence—gobs and gobs of it—and the comfort of your own bed, and it's okay to crave that.

But really, there's one compensation that's far bigger than all the others:

Motivation (finally)

Remember the title of this post? Yeah, that was a thing I wrote once with the intention of getting there. But we had to find the reasons, remember? All caught up now.

Here's the deal: for me, motivation is a four-letter word: moti—

It's been elusive as fuck in my life, like one of those specks in your eye you keep trying to look at. So many of the other challenges of my neurodiverse brain—keeping things visible, keeping things livable, working a capitalism gig and cooking myself a food thing on the same day—I've somewhat mastered. But what about motivating to do what I want to accomplish in life?

I'm referring, of course, to that list of things kept closest to the chest, shared only sporadically and then not at all with others, as the fact that I've made seemingly zero progress becomes more and more sensitive a topic. It's all those things I say I would do if I just had time to do them, and then when I have gobs of time to do them, I decide to start a marathon of the Marvel franchise, even when I have a mop bucket full of ethical problems with Disney's treatment of so many characters who should be ✨so💫 queer but instead are obnoxiously sexless, always villains, and generally deceased by the end of Act III, which leads to the idea to make my own superhero comics, but to be less about superheros and more about the feeling of being ostracized for something that some people label as a superpower but really so often drives you to despair, and then that idea gets developed a little—mostly through the raw dopamine hit of shiny-new-wow—but then, like every other idea before it, begins to get put off or maybe theorized about or maybe, just maybe it gets to the point of this sentence, being: my list of unfinished accomplishments hurts my heart.

For what it's worth, I never finished the Marvel marathon either.

Motivation (because we needed to get back to it)

The cruelest part about motivation is how others talk about it as if it's a single entity that can be summoned at will. "Oh, you're struggling to get that task done? Sounds like you need to get more motivated." Bitch, my brain picks at dopamine like a cat pawing a lemon. What do you want? Good for you and your happy chemical slut brain, but some of us have to manufacture our own.

And yet, I do (somewhat) regularly get things done. Which means I (theoretically) had to have motivation to do them. So, let's break it down. When do I get tasks done? In no particular order:

• When my body hurts if I don't finish it.
• When I need money, or else my body hurts.
• When the thing is fun to do (although sometimes these things have no natural "end").
• When the thing preserves my freedom to do more fun things.
• When I love someone and want to do something with/for them.
• When I'm incredibly excited about the outcome of the thing and can actually see how I'd get there.
• When I'm learning new shit (although I often quit the task once I've got the learnings).

So, where does that leave us?

Motivation (I know, I know, the popcorn ran out like three headings ago. It's like a fucking Marvel movie.)

Based on the above, these are the pieces of motivation for me—aka Maslow's hierarchy of get off the damn couch:

1. Enjoyment: Doing this is fun.
2. Autonomy: Doing this provides for my needs.
3. Self-assurance: I am capable of doing this.
4. Growth: I will learn and change by doing this.
5. Alignment: Doing this echoes who I want to be.
6. Community: Doing this brings me closer to the people I love.
7. Impact: Doing this gives back something beautiful to my world.
8. Scope: Doing this is something I can legitimately accomplish in a given amount of time.
9. Structure: There's a step-by-step plan to do this.

I've tried so many times to focus on the impact I'd have if I could just finish the thing, but without the self-assurance that I could complete the project, it would fall apart. I've certainly done my fair share of people pleasing to feel a semblance of closeness to those I love, but without autonomy and alignment, those actions weren't sustainable. And so on. The 4.0-student-to-adult-in-shambles pipeline is real.

So, I went back to basics. Recently (consciously, maybe a year ago), I started over, beginning the practice of intentional enjoyment: throwing out my task systems and slowing down enough to feel the pleasure of the work at hand. Letting myself off the hook and saying, basically, that a task didn't matter unless I could enjoy the process of doing it. (For most tasks except those really life-requiring tasks: eating, having money for food and housing, etc.)

This has been, quite literally, life-changing. Not worrying about the end goal all the time—putting aside the dread of failure—has also had the side effect of building back up my decimated self-confidence. It's helped me remember just how capable I am of taking on tasks and sucking the marrow out of my all-too-short life while I have it.

A note on resentment

This, by the way, has meant no end of giving up resentment. Anyone who finds themselves a part of a minority—no matter the type—goes through some period of resentment. Finding that the world and its people have not always been kind to them based on what they need. Discovering how much was taken from them due to the misunderstanding of who they really are.

Feeling, possibly, owed.

And there's nothing illegitimate about these feelings. In the cosmic karmic scale, you likely are owed. Each of us has had our joy stolen unjustly. Each of us, our hair grayed, our skin weathered.

But to lurk in that pain beyond the ebb and flow of your grief is to perpetuate suffering. To wait on someone—anyone—else to give you what you are owed is to sit and wait for your own death.

I'm never going to be a "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" monster, but if I can point you to a coupon for even one day off wallowing in your own self-pity, then get your scissors and start clipping.

Another note, but now on recognition

Notably, recognition did not make my motivation pieces list. I think the dream of recognition—I'll win this prize, I'll be celebrated by these people—speaks most to our craving for legitimacy in a world that so often values the exact wrong things.

The person who says, like I once did, "I want to win a Pulitzer," is probably saying, "I wish I could make a living and be respected by my peers just for doing that thing that is the most me." Which is a noble hope, but if your self is unacceptable for people whose recognition you crave... well, then. External affirmation is a beautiful, extremely finite trap.

Structure, or, An ode to the graveyard of failed todo lists

Enjoyment of tasks—really, of the tiny fragments of my life—makes me face, once again, my need for structure. My need to finish things. Not that I need to finish tasks to enjoy doing them or even to grow or be who I am—outside of my most basic needs, I've learned I can be fully me while starting a million projects and never truly finishing one. My life in flux has been, mostly, a happy one.

What I mean is that I've been craving completion to get closer to those I love and to give back to a world that has given me so much. I have that list of things, remember? The one that makes me feel mortal in the truest sense—like I'll run out of my time if I don't use it well.

And, well, bringing something to completion usually takes a plan.

So we come to, possibly, the most stereotyped of neurodiverse stereotypes: the life management system that will make all the pain go away.

Like many of you, I've tried a whole dump truck of ways to give myself more structure, but as with anything else, I don't often find myself motivated to keep that structure—as in, I don't truly believe I need it, or I forget so quickly how it really feels to be adrift in constellations of ideas, unchecked.

Don't get me wrong—the idea space is gorgeous. It's something my brain can flit into so, so easily, and the ideas there, when pursued, can birth stars. Call it AuDHD if you want, but I think everyone's on a whole lot of spectrums, and my sliders just happened to be tweaked toward daydreaming.

But I still want gravity, inertia, momentum. I want to find a way not just to get more done, but to be doing and completing things that bring me contentment, satisfaction, and purpose to do and complete. To have both the vastness of the constellations and the little details, like planets with breathable atmospheres.

A foolish hope (the best ones always are)

There is in me the belief that I can make a new task system that accommodates all these learnings and, somewhat magically, start knocking things off my list at a pace I've never been able to before.

And don't get me wrong—I am, in actuality, working on a new task system that accommodates all these things and will definitely make me my first million before the time I turn [checks math] 468. But that's for another blog.

What I really hope is that I'll stop putting so much weight on any one piece of motivation—structure included—and start taking a far more complete view of why I do or don't feel like doing something in the moment.

I hope, in other words, for a little more self-kindness. I wish it for you, too.

Be well,

Alice "P. Sherman" Alexandra, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia (no, I don’t know the goddamn zip)

I’m struck, walking down a back alley, the din of construction overhead, by a dropped screw. Nothing sharp, nothing more painful than a stranger pushing past you on the sidewalk. Its clatter to the pavement indiscernible, inconsequential.

I stare at the spot on my arm where it hit. It will bruise, like the countless other mysterious bruises that appear as I walk through this world, independent of concern for my surroundings.

But the bruise will fade.

I walk like this—without headphones, I mean—to listen. Every morning through London, before plopping in a dusty chair at some wifi’ed cafe blasting the treble out of piercingly saxaphoned muzak, I am enveloped by the soundscape of my city.

The straps of my backpack claw at my shoulders, my neck held forward in the curved posture I can still hear my dad’s voice trying to correct. And, to his credit, the voices of everyone else who’s met me. It’s something about being that tall American, wanting so badly to demur.

I don’t know, fundamentally, how to say I love you to this world. It’s certainly not going to be through slouching and wading through construction debris.

Before cities, was our world so much quieter? What will cities of the future sound like? I suppose each city lives, at some point, through the loudest time its ever known. Has this city already left its loudest behind?

A bus rumbles by, taking sadistic joy at the black smoke coughed from its tailpipe. The jackhammer starts again. Noise, for all it signals about the thrumming life around me, so easily overwhelms.

As I duck into the subway, I put headphones to drown the city out. I marvel at composers I love while the Victoria line tramples on down the rail. I’ve been getting deep into digital production: sine waves and filters and feedback loops, but lately, I’ve realized that the best music always samples noise from the real world.

This morning, I woke to the sound of screaming. A worker, it turned out, injured on the job. A nail shot through the webbing of his thumb and forefinger.

In music production, when you’ve completed arranging and mixing a track, you go through a process called mastering. You get your song to have a more uniform loudness—you make sure the distance between the loudest and quietest moments is acceptable. You want, after all, the song to be listened to without a single adjustment of the volume knob.

Off the line, I peel from my ears my headphones, letting the cacophony rush back in. If humanity were a track I were producing, there’s so many parts I’d turn down.

I walk into a sandwich shop the size of an adjunct professor’s office, and like it, there are four people crammed working in the “back.” There isn’t, I’m afraid, much difference between front and back. Questions about my sandwich come in surround sound: tuna ahead, tomatoes behind. Plastic-gloved workers like Keebler elves orbiting my path for the sandwich’s six pounds fifty.

The pandemic made us all seek space. It was the quietest it’s ever been, so we blocked out the silence with endless Netflix, Zoom meetings, and even new pets and babies. We struggled to live in a world where, from behind our masks, we could hear our paper-thin breaths so distinctly.

Outside again, I hear a distant rumbling. It swells, ricocheting off the buildings, and I don’t know where to go to escape it.

Motorcycles, I realize, and when I finally see them ride by, there are hundreds in formation, in protest, donning green and white and black and red, colors of an entire people we refuse to name. And yet, through all the thunder, this is just a fraction of the noise they’re hearing in Palestine.

In my music, I would highlight the sound of every gunshot and press delete. Their percussion doesn’t match the rest of the track. But I have to stop this near-religious faith in the gun: banned or baptized, the conclusion to every argument. A period of sound.

The nail gun the construction worker shot into his hand this morning proves that wrong. The screaming after was a much more convincing sound. No bullet, no missile, no matter the shape, is punctuation for the living.

There’s not quite six degrees of separation between me and the Palestinian man in the news, holding missile shrapnel stamped with the name of a factory in Colorado. I have to stop this urge to mute.

My ears ring for the rest of the day, I want to write here, as a way to finish these thoughts, but really, in the darkness, when sleep has just begun to weave its wool over my ears, I hear music. My own, I mean. The songs I only seem to know in silence. They are, maybe, majestic. They will not be remembered come morning.

Do you, like me, have the privilege to listen to your own thoughts?—an endless sampled workflow, snippets shot through in percussive bursts, in legato lulls. Our brains’ composers waving frantically their arms for the shelled out orchestra to play something like solace.

Let me give you some more context. An influential woman, who has her Ph.D. (among other accolades), who I’ll call X, was posting about how the trans community has damaged her. She talks about how she grew up in an abusive home, an abusive religion. She talks about her experience being a woman—how she was boxed into a single definition of femininity. She says that she wanted to leave it all and was very genuinely considering her options.

X says that it’s at this point she was embraced by the queer community, and they were there for her to discuss options. However, the thread turns as she discusses the way they took advantage of her in her fragile state as she was looking for who she was. She basically says, I can’t believe these people almost made me be a man, made me get top surgery. For her, it’s a brush with horror, because she says she’s now found her place in society, her comfort in her own skin, her femininity.

Up to this point in the post, despite being somewhat offended by the 2d portrayal of the queer community, I actually agree with X about many points. However, she then concludes by saying, basically (loose quotation), “Maybe you’ll think I’m a cowardly bigot for saying this, maybe you’ll cancel me, but trans people are predators.” She speaks of all trans people as folks who couldn’t find their own skin and so chose to haunt another, to deny themselves. The thread, in other words, really goes off the rails. It is in deep contradiction to the open emotionality of the preceding words.

It’s too easy to shove people into labels, into binaries—to say: she’s a trans-erasing radical feminist or she’s a bigot. Clearly, she had a deeply traumatic experience, and she met some other traumatized people who did their best to help, but we all kinda know how it goes when we act from our trauma. Often, we try to prescribe the same medicine that worked for us.

Anyway, this intro is longer than I wanted it to be, but I’ll highlight one more thing that she says: “I am so glad to be past the unknown of life, which is surely the worst part of it.” This sentence struck me as so very wrong, and I felt the need to write my way around it.

So, below, you’ll find a letter I wrote to X—that I did not send anywhere but here. Maybe it won’t change the world, but it was my act of empathy and honesty for my fellow woman.

Dear X,

I don’t think it’s cowardly to open up about something that so deeply hurts. I think it’s probably the opposite of that.

Maybe I shouldn’t respond to this, based on how much I was also hurt reading it. (How deeply we entangle through words, how quickly—someone I’ve known but two seconds? This is what authenticity risks, I guess—there’s no bringing a self that isn’t my real one. And to be open is to be willing to risk hurt.) But something about the fact that you wrote—that you, somehow someway, maybe want to keep this life going as much as I do—well, this is me being brave back.

I’m going to try to let go of my defensiveness as much as possible throughout this letter, I promise. But I do have to make one thing very, very clear at the beginning of this: I am a woman and I have been since birth. And my name is Alice. Please use it if you choose to respond.

Think what you might of that statement for now, but that’s me. I don’t mean to be aggressive in the least. It’s just that all my listening, all my empathy, all my openness that I’m giving here—well, a lot of it is predicated on that core fact.

Maybe I’ll surprise you here: I understand a lot of what you’re saying and I deeply want to understand the small parts I don’t. But that understanding will come in time, if we let it, just through sharing memories, events—the seemingly trivial stuff that makes us who we are. The stuff that doesn’t fit in the sound bytes we eek out online.

I care deeply about and I’m so sorry for the way you have been hurt. (Sorry in that way that doesn’t take culpability onto myself, but rather the word that’s never enough to express how much I do feel others’ pain and what they’ve been through.)

You and I agree on quite a lot. Gender . . . well, it’s in a very shitty place in society. Patriarchy—especially religious patriarchy—rains on everyone. (I believe even the men, who I grew up alongside, hearing their changing room conversations, who were so deeply hurt and unable to express except often through anger. There are always exceptions, of course, but largely, they have not been equipped with emotional language.)

For me as a woman (and I’ll try as much as possible to just speak for me to avoid causing harm), patriarchy has made what “being a woman” means very convoluted indeed. Separation of gender to extremes means that “feminine” is seen, in the shallowest worst ways, as makeup, painting nails, being bad at math—or in deeper but also somewhat problematic ways: giving birth and mothering, a definition that’s hurt far more cis women (just by number even) than trans. (Even the hormonal transition of matrescence can be too much to bear.)

Women have been put into a box. Or many boxes. And so one person’s definition of womanhood conflicts with another. There seems to be things people can agree on—like giving birth—until you have a woman who is barren or who doesn’t want kids (like myself). Then people agree that all women have breasts (which, delightfully, includes me)—until someone needs a mastectomy. XX chromosomes kinda work until you remember all those borns with varying other combinations, various other bodies. I may have only XY chromosomes (I don’t actually know), but I can tell you, my soft fatty skin, my estrogen-filled body—it doesn’t work at all like a man’s. I would know.

I think you get what I’m driving at here: defining womanhood is fraught with problems. When we define it, there are always women who don’t fit inside it.

In listening to your experience, I was struck by the ways you felt outside of the typical “woman” experience, how you’ve defined it. Not because I believe that you’re supposed to be nonbinary or trans—these are things you’d know if you are, and you’ve had so many journeys to figure yourself out that no one can or should try to take from you (whether trans or cis)—but because I relate so deeply.

As I mentioned, I’ve been a woman since birth. As a kid, I was largely confused by gendered activities (for that matter, so was my sister, who is cis)—we just liked playing with whatever toys were most fun. I dawned costume dresses alongside her. I carried my mom’s purse. Watching old home videos of me as such a small child has been bittersweet the past few years. I’m not saying that carrying a purse and wearing dresses makes you a woman, of course. (I also wore my dad’s shoes around, clownishly large on my toddler feet.) I’m just saying that in that sacred space of childhood, I could see a little girl who didn’t want anyone to limit what she could choose.

As I grew up, I was put into more masculine roles, which confused and upset me. I told friends I felt like a girl or didn’t believe in gender. I was tentatively reaching out to find myself only to find harsh-edged definitions stuffing me back inside.

When puberty hit, everything went terribly wrong. You’ve had your own—you know how devastating it can be to go through the correct puberty. Have you ever imagined going through the wrong one? My body, my brain are set up for estrogen, and I got testosterone. I became suicidal in junior high. I would have a few attempts throughout my life, until finally blocking the testosterone overage under my skin.

My parents put me in religious therapy, and I pretended to move on. I got very, very, very good at hiding. In the spirit of full honesty, I also had an abusive childhood, which is not something I wish to talk about now, but is something that is, of course, inextricably linked to all this (as you certainly understand). I’m very, very aware of arguments that go something along the lines of “trans people are sick and traumatized.” I suppose I can’t do much to disprove that narrative except to keep telling my own story. And to suggest to people who say that, well, society abuses its trans children by enforcing gender rigidity. Chicken and cracked egg. But that’s getting a bit out of scope for all this. Again, I’m trying to focus on me and my experience, to listen to you and yours.

I went to a religious college. I married a religious girl. You know firsthand the gender roles that go along with conservative religion. I tried to settle into a life that felt owned by an imposter, and I kept crashing into such brutal walls. It’s amazing to me how far down you can push something, how deeply hope can be hidden.

But anyway, time passed as it’s wont to do, and I . . . struggled. Horribly. The suicide attempts, yes, but also the hurt I inflicted on those around me, by being unavailable, by being unsure of myself, by being codependent on the person I married to the point of wanting her body as my own. By lashing out like a caged animal, by running away any time that cage was lifted, however briefly. It was a disaster that went on for many years. I couldn’t find myself. But more than that, it felt like I had lost something. All my attempts at intimacy were the very best I could give, but it was never enough for anyone. I tried other relationships and failed them. I divorced. Nothing was in order. I looked everywhere and in everything.

When you say that you were hurt while looking for yourself—that you were hurt by others, maybe especially in the trans/non-binary community—I deeply understand. Looking for yourself is such a vulnerable process. Anyone can reach in with just a single flick of the finger and seemingly, impossibly, destroy you. Nothing is certain, everything is scary. To be outside of any “norm”—not just gender—is to be ridiculed, is to be attacked. And the walls I’ve had to build up to fend off those attackers—well, I understand what you mean when you say we’re on opposite sides of the barricade, even if that barricade is just all these makeshift fences built up in so many neighbors’ heads.

Social media is a shitty place to be open, but truly, in sharing our experiences—you, yours; me, mine—we’re fundamentally trying to lower that barricade.

Because the most ridiculously beautiful part of life is that it is based on the unknown. It is ever-shifting, ever-strange, never able to be fully known. If there is anything I wish to pursue in this life, it is mystery. It is lack of certainty, despite needing it as a crutch to get by.

In order to admit to myself who I am (and, quite immediately, to those around me—I came out to myself and the world within the same week), I had to grab onto a kind of certainty that doesn’t feel all that true. I had to risk horrifyingly deep judgment, which I immediately received. After coming out, I was near-instantly houseless: most people I knew refused to speak to me. I took my first dose of estrogen in the home of one of those somewhat-friends in the local queer community who was kind enough to scoop me up, to parent me despite not wanting their own womb. I lived with them and their partner for several months until I could get a new job, and slowly but surely I got on my own two feet.

That was three years ago now. That was the best set of decisions I have ever made, bar none. Month 1 of estrogen involved a lot of crying—not because estrogen makes women “feeble,” but because my brain was experiencing life in color for the very first time. I’ve heard similar stories on both sides of the trans community—feminizing and masculinizing hormones are often described as bringing solidity to experience and memory. In fact, studies of trans folks on the correct hormones have found that the brain makes deeper emotional connections post-treatment. If you are able to have a tangible life without hormones, then I’m so very glad (truly, we all deserve such a vivid, wild life), but some of us need them to survive.

There’s a sad fact about the trans community, and one of the reasons I, in fact, do not have more than one or two trans friends at this point in time: largely, we are so, so, so young and unguided. We are so chronically hurt. We are so horribly judged. We have to put up so many walls just to walk outside that it’s hard to lower them back down, to be intimate in the most important ways. And I mean intimacy even with friends. (I often look for elders in women who have experienced other kinds of bodily, societal transitions: divorce, menopause, and so on.)

I’ve also been deeply hurt by the trans community. I 100,000% believe you when you say the rhetoric from the trans community, the deeply human people, have hurt you. There’s no excuse for that: it sucks, horribly. I’ve been most surprised to find just how “binary” of thinkers a lot of trans people are—having crossed these invisible gender lines (where, praytell are they? I haven’t found them), they often overcompensate, and we’re back to: “you need to be more girly, you need to be more manly.” Binaries—the need for certainty—is embedded in our thinking much more deeply than gender, I’m afraid.

These overreactions, these horribly high walls. There are trans folks who silence online anyone who disagrees. But then again, there are men who kill trans women IRL to cancel them.

When I first transitioned, I was telling one of my trans “mothers” about how I actually don’t like makeup or nail polish. How I’m not into some of the more “girly” activities that she wanted for me right away. I didn’t want to wear a dress every day. I wanted to be like women I’ve loved: existing, fighting to be themselves, and (sometimes, even) unquestioned. I wanted to choose what felt best for me. Her response was to suggest that maybe I was nonbinary—or even not trans. She began to doubt my experience, and there became a rift between us which neither of us has been able to close. She believed, because of her experience of “femininity,” that I did not belong to the exclusive club known as woman.

In the last three years, I’ve made a place for myself as a woman nonetheless. I’ve found the people—of any gender identity—who have helped make me feel at home in this world, sure, but that has stemmed from me feeling at home in this world. Maybe you’ve noticed this, too: when we treat ourselves better, others do as well.

The funny thing about all this is that I have no fucking earthly clue how to define “woman.” But I do know how to be me, and me is more feminine than masculine (whatever these overly ambivalent words mean), so here I am. But really, I just know empirical truths I can observe about my own microcosmic, self-centered view. Most importantly and the rest stems from this, hormones have put my brain in 4k. Beyond that, I like having the breasts that came from estrogen more than not having them. I like dressing in clothes typically reserved for women more than not. I dearly wish to be seen, as just a vague starting point to knowing me, as her and not him (and all this means in various brains). I am more confident, more bold in this world as the woman I am. I was trying to shrink right out of it before I transitioned.

It is, as you mentioned, an irrevocable choice to go on hormones, to have a surgery, to make these permanent choices. It is terrifying, and in that terror the only voice we can trust is our own. I deeply hate when anyone tells me I should be this or that. And when the stakes are so high? Fuck that. No one should have told you who you were but you. I hate that this happened to you, that people caused you a near brush with disaster.

And yet, in the end, you chose you. You stopped hating yourself. It makes me incredibly happy when I hear you say that you’ve found comfort in your skin. That you know who you are in the world, beyond labels. Because I know firsthand that this is a rare and beautiful and precious thing. Really, are our experiences, at least in this, so very different?

Like you, I yearn for people to get to know me beyond boxes. I label myself as trans, because I love my community, broken as it is. I label myself as woman, because my experiences on the whole align more with this odd clan than any other. I also label myself as autistic, as having ADHD and complex PTSD. They are all of them just letters to start from. Twitter bio decorators. They are none of them who I am, but in them I seek solidarity. Who I am is a human being craving to belong.

Can we be certain of ourselves? I like to think so, but I also know the world is beautiful because it is uncertain, because it, like us, can not be contained into being one thing and one thing only.

I can only live with kindness, with love and gentleness for myself and others. But maybe most of all, I can wonder.

I think this thing, this wonder is what the religion of my upbringing took from me the most in defining worship so rigidly. Wondering is very much what you and I have been doing in these words—being open to another’s experiences. Wonder, openness—I find so much joy in living this way, in worship.

Yes, of course, I still have my depression. My apathy, my anxiety, the ever-playing bass note of dread. But I also have hope that no one has to be confined to be what the world around them has told them to be since Day 1. There are key changes, if you will, in this endless song.

I think that’s all I have energy to write. I probably missed responding to a lot of what you said, but I did my best. I try to listen, always. I don’t believe you are a bigot. I don’t believe anyone can be confined to such a narrow word. I, too, am disgusted by modern rhetoric and cancel culture—it is an overreaction that comes from deep, deep wounds. And I hope, maybe somewhat selfishly, we could find answers by opening up more and talking to each other.

I very much believe in people over ideologies. I believe we each of us are flawed, unique, whole—if jagged. I believe none of us needs saving by anyone but ourselves. When ideologies come first, no matter how progressive it appears to me another form of evangelizing. Ineffectual, harmful, only for the people who already believe. I believe in treating each person as the individual multitude they are.

Anyway, do take care of yourself. It’s a tough world out there. I’m going to go face it again today. Sending what bravery I can spare, but something tells me you have quite a lot of it lately, too. Know there’s very much space for fear here, for doubt, and if you haven’t seen all mine above, please do look closer.

Trying to understand is all we can do. It is very much enough.

With love,

Alice

I was talking to a friend recently about this, and we wondered if its not a neurodiverse quirk—this inability to be interested in one thing unless there’s so many more humming around behind.

Regardless, it works for me. I used to believe that I started things and never finished them. I know now that, in addition to some ideas’ only purpose being to inspire better ones, I so often come back to the orphaned ideas, given time. It’s a bit like blowing on an hot coal to rekindle it to flame. I can’t keep all the fires burning—nor do I want to—but I am surrounded by embers that will not die.

I understand, though, that following along with what I’m working on is difficult (to say the least) for you all. So, I thought I’d give an update on:

1. What I’m juggling (vision)
2. Where that shit is (immediate goal)

Feel free to use the table of contents below to skip around to projects that interest you.

web presence and social media

I want to start with where I’m struggling. There’s plenty of excitement further on down, so if you wanna skip the sob story, feel free.

Marketing myself online feels very different than my current marketing role at Vercel (more on that later), which, as a product, already has gobs of users. I love creating all the shit I do, and the act of creation gives me life much in the same way I breathe life into my creations. However, when I share out things on socials—objectively the only way anyone’s gonna find that I’ve updated something—it’s pretty depressing.

I don’t want or need to operate my life around like and retweets, but trust me when I say that spending quite literally six weeks researching and writing an essay only to receive zero feedback on it—well, that sucks.

And it’s not your guys’ fault. Don’t get me wrong. Social media is a race to the bottom. I’m on Insta, Facebook, Twitter, and now even Mastodon. I’ve published music on Soundcloud, writing on Medium, art on Behance. I was thinking about putting some of my web design on Dribbble. I hate every single one of these platforms.

Whether there’s an algorithm specifically designed to demote external links (Twitter) or no algorithm which makes your posts hopelessly time-based (Mastodon), there’s no real winning as a creator starting from scratch. It’s oversaturated out there, and the ways to get past it are pretty desperate.

I crave authenticity. I crave connection. I don’t give a blue fuck about likes, but I want your sentences, your words, your thoughts, even (especially) your art.

I don’t fundamentally, know how to get responses to my own work. I frequently engage with other creators, messaging authors, artists, musicians, game designers, and even filmmakers who feel small enough that they may respond. Often, they do. Outside this creative sphere, I have real friendships—people who have decided with me to engage together on this one wild life—but I don’t ever want to force friends to consume anything I create outside that friendship. They often do give me feedback, and I’m incredibly thankful for that.

But what I’m saying is I don’t want 100,000 friends. I’m yearning for those one-off connections, for community inspired, if I can be egotistical, by my art. For human connection through joint pursuit of beauty.

Anyway, thoughts welcome if you made it here. I’m super open to ideas. I’ve thought about newsletters, digital strategies, even hiring a social media manager—I’m just looking for something a bit more real. Let me know what’s worked for you or where you are with this social dystopia.

job - Content Engineering at Vercel

I’ve been freelancing with Vercel since November 2022, and I find the day job extremely helpful for my brain. The rhythm of working with a team, not only staves off the loneliness I mentioned above but also helps me break out of my perfectionism. Writing at my job helps me practice fucking up in public, a skill that I’ve undervalued for far too long.

Perhaps most importantly, earning my salary outside my creative work liberates what I can do here on the site.

So, what do I actually do? Well, like all job titles, mine is made up. Engineering content at Vercel means that I’m in a hybrid role of blog writer, diagram maker, blog coder, marketer, and analytics junior guru. As an individual contributor role, the job has a lot of autonomy and opportunity for cross-departmental collaboration—both of which help my neurodivergent brain flourish. I really love meeting all these people and interpreting their complex (and quite intelligent) ideas into blog-speak.

I believe in my company and the people in it. I genuinely like the product we make and use it as a solution to build and host my own website in an extremely fast and flexible manner. The product is not without its flaws, for sure, but I mean it when I say it’s often best-in-class. It’s cool working for a company on the rise.

All that said (and actually meant), my company does ask its employees (contractually) not to trash talk it on the web. It’s an understandable policy, but I believe it comes from a place of fear and prevents me from being totally open about my work the way I am with my own creative life and its vicissitudes. It’s a shame, really, in such an environment as open-source technology, to be closed off in this way.

I won’t be talking about what I do for work here on the blog much more than this. I don’t like writing when I can’t give my view of all known sides of a situation. I’m content, though, and feeling settled into the nuanced role.

film production house - Anthropotpourri

Anthropotpourri’s Instagram.

My partner-in-crime, Shorouk Elkobrsi, and I have been working together creatively for several years now, and we’ve both gotten some film experience under our belts (especially Shorouk, who’s a gifted cinematographer, editor, and all-around storyteller).

Our vision for the production house is, well, to run a real production company. To make as many movies or TV shows as we can. Between the two of us, we have a lot of skills, but we’ve also been learning how to produce—that art of bringing together and leading a whole team of people to bring a film to life.

We’re shooting our first “real” film (we’ve worked on smaller projects ‘til now), Fish on Shore, in early August in Leeds, UK. In the 15-minute film, a 60-year-old theatre actor recounts the day in his life that led him to realize he might never fit this world, but he’ll take up space in it anyway. As he tells his story, the films shows to younger versions of him (at 8, at mid-30s) living various moments that relate, however abstractly, to his poetic narration.

The short film is queer, dreamlike, and chock full of each of our creative sensibilities. There’s no distinguishing my ideas from Shorouk’s at this point. After creating the script recruiting cast and crew (leaning on Shorouk’s connections that she’s worked so hard to make), we’re currently in the “shot list” phase, where we go line-by-line and figure out how each moments will look on screen.

During the week of our shoot, Shorouk will be Director of Photography (in charge of the look of the film), and I’ll be Director (in charge of actors, blocking, and bringing the scenes to life). We both get final say in when a scene feels right, but working in a traditional team structure is vital for clarity and communication to the rest of our team.

After shooting, we’ll be editing together, with Shorouk doing the bulk of the technical work, including coloring, as the resident DaVinci (editing software) wizard. I’ll be, in addition to helping conceptually with cuts, creating the sound for the movie, including editing sound caputred on set, designing foley, and scoring the music.

My brain sees Shorouk as the vision through the whole project and me as the voice, even though this is probably an unhelpful metaphor. I wrote the actual words of the script, but Shorouk conceptualized the imagery. On set, I’ll make sure the scenes have breath; Shorouk, the framing. After, Shorouk will edit moving picture; me, sound. We’ve helped each other and crossed over to each others’ “realm” so often it’s impossible to track, but if anyone asked, this might be how I differentiated our jobs as co-creators. I’d bet Shorouk has a slightly different view.

Once the film is made (or close to it), we’ll be marketing, including (likely) running a funding campaign to recoup expenses (making a movie ain’t cheap). We’ll also be creating a web presence for Anthropotpourri, including a new site, which I’m really excited to code up. I imagine you’ll see Fish on Shore in early 2024, but as with all deadlines in my life, let’s make it a soft one.

And, of course, if you’re watching the movie, rest assured we’re already building the next one.

coding and web design

For the past gods know how many years, I’ve designed websites. I’ve coded frontends. I’ve managed data. And I fucking love it. Coding up shit on the web is the closest thing to infinite Lego that I’ve found as an adult.

While I’ve freelanced on a lot of community projects—sites for authors, lit mags, the like—having my own website is what’s pushed me farthest into new territory. I use this site, really a collection of things pretentiously monikered as Tempo Immaterial, to grow my skills as a developer and designer.

My dev friends know this, but maybe my other friends don’t realize: every part of this website is hand-coded. I’m not using anything but text to draw this up. I take great joy in this continuous dance of logic and design.

In the near-term, I’m expanding out a bit, both on this site, and to make the upcoming Anthropotpourri site (see above). I’m thrilled to take on new designs, not only with external work, but also in this site: my hope for every individual subpage of my studio is to make it into its own world, with its own design language separate from the rest of the site.

Maybe the best example I have so far of this is

poetry - hymns for calliope

Alright, this is the fire I most recently rekindled. Some of you may have noticed (Twitter says otherwise) that my poems (old and a few new) are back up on my site. I had so much fun designing a new web UI for them to inhabit, and, maybe more importantly, a system that makes it very easy to post new poems whenever I’d like. (It’s one button, you guys. I write the poems on Notion and have one. fucking. publish. button.)

My vision for hymns is to have something like a full book of poetry and lyric essays one of these days. I may even submit out for more formal publication. (I used to, but I got tired of the publishing lottery.) For now, though, I’m letting it expand as I feel, waiting to see what it’s going to be.

As I have new poems, I’ll push them out to you all. I’ll continually edit what’s up there already, because poetry is about precision of language, and it’s a really great place for me to exercise perfectionism in a healthy way, to keep it out of other spheres of my life. I’ll try to keep you posted here on the blog.

novel - Betson, Ohio

I’m really excited about this project right now, folks.

Betson has been, for quite literally ten years, my constant novel-in-progress. Yes, I’m fully aware that the traditional author path is to finish the first novel, realize it’s more than a bit horrid, and move onto the next work which might be publishable.

The route I’ve taken instead (unsurprisingly for me) is one of continuous reframing. I’ve written an ungodly amount of scenes, characters, whole chapters for this thing. I’ve gone from formatting it as a book, to short story collection, to a graphic novel, to I think it was a game at one point?? I’ve changed narrators, viewpoints, time periods, plot, and like 50 different pens.

But lately, dare I say, I’m in an exciting place. I’ve found, for the first time, what I know is the shape of the book. Now, I have all that draft material to reformat into that shape, and it will be a hell of a lot of work, but I have the thing—its essence—parsed.

So, let me tell you, in brief. My vision for Betson is a novel by seasons, each of the twelve chapters inhabiting the next month of the cycle. While this has been the case for a while—even back in 2019 I had chapters in May 2012, June 2008, July 1980, and so on—I had been making them, most recently, each into their own standalone short stories that related one to another (much like a book I dearly love, Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno).

It was in separating these tales, giving them each their own conclusive endings, that I got stuck. I submitted one—”The Goat Hunters,” now Chapter 4—to a few lit journals. I got feedback from an editor I dearly respect, who said, “This is exactly the kind of writing we’re looking for, but it feels like these characters’ stories don’t end here. I’m not sure, when I look at them at the end of the chapter versus the beginning, I see the growth I want to.”

As an arrogant fool at the time (isn’t it great throwing past selves under the bus to sound humble with no actual cost to your current sense of ego?), I didn’t really listen. I continued to try to make the story work on its own, and generally noticed the other stories had endings that were languishing as well.

In rethinking Betson as a novel in the true sense of the word, I can move more to something like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—a book that challenges its readers with a new tale each chapter from new viewpoints, but also, however subtly, provides updates on narrators from earlier or later in the book. My hope is that Betson, when looked at as a whole, will have characters that have their paths more completely charted, albeit out of order, than what a short story can offer.

To this effect, I’m currently re-outlining the whole book (in great detail), and I hope to begin publishing early versions of each chapter (in order, since that matters now) to the site within the next year. So, why give away the text for free?

Well, I don’t want to, ultimately. I want to publish this book in the traditional route. However, because of the book’s subject matter, I want to open-source a lot of the feedback process to various members of my community. To hear from people I might not have thought to reach out to.

See, the book centers on the ugly face of whiteness in rural Ohio, and as such, carries a certain heaviness that needs to be treated with care. It’s not just handling sensitive subject material ethically either; I want the book to be readable, accessible, funny in many parts. I think Fredrik Backman, for instance, does an excellent job of this in his novels. He peels apart deeply ingrained prejudices, deeply flawed characters, in a humorous and imminently readable way. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is another, though admittedly more for a “literary” crowd than Backman. For however much I admire Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, I ultimately don’t recommend it to many people because it’s not really an enjoyable act to read it all. Its fictional characters are wrought nearly in poetry, which I love, but it’s a very high mental load to read.

It’s not, ultimately, the book I’d see many people from where I grew up finish. They’d pick it up, for sure—rural Ohio is full of academics, people who will surprise you if you give them the chance—but it proves too distant from many of their experiences to resonate. Too urban. I want Betson to resonate, before I try to publish it, and I think the only way to do that is to let anyone who wants to read the early drafts and tell me what works and what sucks. This can’t be a philosophical treatise of a book.

visual art

This is maybe the most up-in-the-air, directionless “project” I have going. A lot of you know that I got into digital painting in 2020. What you might not realize is that this corresponded with the loss of one of my close friends who was working with me to illustrate some of my stories.

I taught myself to draw, in other words, as an accomplice to my writing. I encouraged myself to practice through posting regularly to socials and gobbling up likes (wow does visual art do so much better than writing), and I found myself specializing in portraiture. The portraits have gained a following of their own, but it’s always just been a way for me to practice for bigger things (and to relax from other work).

The arrival of actually good AI art has thoroughly disrupted my painting motivation. I’d be lying if I said it’s not more skilled at painting than me in every single way. Perhaps if I had ten years experience, I’d look at it more suspiciously. In fact, such is the case with generative AI in the fields of writing and music—I find them a helpful research assistance, but not a tool I rely on for sentences or melodies. As it stands now, however, I can prompt Midjourney with the type of illustration I want, and it gets closer than I’m able to—serves the story better than I can.

And it does it in under 30 seconds. Sure, I have to iterate on prompts and come up with exact phrasing, and a drawing can take up to 30 minutes to get. But that’s nowhere close to the 10 - 25 hours I spend on most portraits.

Plus, it’s only going to get better. The biggest limitations right now—the reasons I’m not really using it in production—are twofold.

One, it’s not able to repeatedly draw the same character or different angles of the same environment with any sort of reliability. Astonishingly, this is being worked out as we speak, and early results are promising. I feel we’re under a year away from AI Art that you can basically strategically prompt a graphic novel out of.

The second is the bigger issue: ethics. It remains to be seen how AI art (and generative AI as a whole) will follow a system of ethics that’s palatable to me. To be clear, I feel that AI art, writing, music, etc., will never replace me. I’m not threatened by it, but rather I’m adapting to it, using it to make better creative work.

That being said, I don’t earn my primary income from my art. What I’m waiting on is to see actual statistics on if and how AI is cutting into artist revenue. It may sound a bit shallow, but I know human artists will always be the drivers of good art, even assisted by AI. There are already positive ways of attribution being developed, making the ethics around intellectual property less odious. My biggest concern, then, is what it always is: big corporations (who can afford to make great AI) stealing income from independent creators.

Anyway, while all this hums along, I’m still painting to relax, but I’m less inspired to learn and improve than with my writing, coding, music—my primary interests. All the fields I want art for—graphic novels, marketing, and especially game environments, characters, icons—seem like they’ll be able to be generated soon.

So, expect less visual art from me in the near-term. It’s not what sparks the most joy to create. If I make any, as relaxation, I’ll share it. But expect in the future that I’ll be using my words, my writing and creativity, to combine AI-generated art with my stories to breathe more life into both.

fantasy epic - these makeshift idiotika

Since 2015, these makeshift idiotika (TMI), has probably taken up the biggest creative slice of my brain. I love all projects I work on, but TMI has this added pressure / love affair of being the thing I most want to see in the world.

It’s also, fortunately or unfortunately, the biggest project of all these (besides what Anthropotpourri could become). I’ve written about the project before and it still escapes, for now, my ability to describe it. The people most interested in it tend to be the ones I’ve sat with and begun to tell them stories from its world.

But that, here, would be spoilers. Suffice it to say for now, if you like fantasy/sci-fi, if you like queering the shit out of it, if you like deeply complex characters who are motivated by a vast array of factors from a vast and fucked up world—there’s definitely a feast here for you.

I mean, there’s a threesome in a ancient alien underground breeding pool where one character’s orgasm causes them to realize they can glow in the dark. What more do you want.

Let’s focus on vision. I won’t deny it: I want to see TMI as an indie game. Or a series of games. Or a massive game that gets edited forever. I’ve come up with how it would work—I know the thing inside and out. But I also know I need to take so many small steps to get there.

So, the more immediate goal is to live-prototype the story to get it where I want to be. I want to build out a sort of wiki—a worldbuilding treasure trove, complete with places, characters, tech, religions, history, and even scenes, stories, and full arcs.

I’m focusing on this for several reasons:

1. A game of the scale I want requires a team or AI to get real good at some things in the next few years. More likely, though, a team—full of people who each bring their own ideas and visions.
2. I can control the worldbuilding. It’s a dauntingly huge world, but more than any of my careers, I’m a writer. I’m confident in building this thing out. I’ve been writing it for quite some time, and I’ll continue to. While I don’t have the entire shape of it like I now have Betson, I do have the shape of many individual arcs, and I know the whole will come.
3. I can get community feedback in the meantime. I like working in public. I’m learning, as mentioned above, to fail publicly and fail faster. It makes me better, more agile. As I write the story and share it out in its own little corner of the universe, I hope to create fans who wont’ hesitate to point out flaws or show me new directions. And, yes, fans who might eventually pay to Kickstart the game, however far away it may be.

So, in the near-term, expect to see worldbuilding. I’ll be stretching my web design skills to make an engaging and interactive UI—one that could eventually be ported into the game as a Lexicon of sorts. It’s all a bit nonlinear, and I want the design to match the feeling of that exploring the game world will ultimately give. I feel I can do that well on the web until I find more people as passionate about the world of TMI as I am.

music

I’ve been playing piano and singing since I was a kid, but as an adult, I’ve become more interested in the art of composition. Music, for the past few years for me, has been a matter of teaching myself digital production.

Right now, my publicizing of my music is all over the place. I’ve taken piano gigs at restaurants and the like, I’ve published some improvs on Soundcloud, I’ve scored the odd podcast or film.

My vision, though, for my music, is twofold: I want to score longer projects (my films, my stories), and I want to make actual albums of songs I produce (with vocals, I mean).

The next project I’ll be working on, as mentioned above, is the score to Anthropotpourri’s upcoming film, Fish on Shore. It will be a fifteen-ish-minute soundtrack, the biggest music project I’ve worked on yet. I’ve got some loose melodies and themes underway, but after the film is made, I’m beyond excited to embark on the actual scoring journey.

I also plan to get organized soon. Make a Spotify channel, make a dedicated space on the website—all that shit. Stay tuned.

miscellaneous works - postcards

When I say postcards on my site, I initially meant it as a home for flash fiction, of which I used to write a bunch and am still interested in writing more. Now, though, I’, thinking of using it as an umbrella for any of my creations that aren’t immediately related to one of the other big projects.

I’ve also thought about making a collection called tall tales—somewhere to put the kind of fictionalized memoir work I often write, where I base the story on something that really happened to me or folks nearby, but I don’t hesitate to add in unremembered dialogue or even whole scenes to make it flow.

So, right now, don’t expect too much new from this section, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I work on the UI a bit to give all my orphaned creations a home of their own.

and, of course, my blog

From my blog, you’ll see, really, what you’ve been seeing. I’ve enjoyed writing a variety of things here—not just updates, but stabs at lyricism, at humor, at whatever takes my fancy. It’s meant to be a low-pressure space for me, and a place to keep you updated on what’s going on around here.

I have a few nascent ideas for “series” going on right now on the blog, including deep explainers about some tech stuff. In the interest of keeping this space low pressure, that’s all I’ll say for now, but I do enjoy trialing things on the blog and then, if enough people are interested (or if I am), moving them to their own dedicated homes on my website.

a life update in failed haiku

besides my job, my

creations, i’m not much more

than like three walks to the grocery each day to grab what i forgot

what about you?

This has been a rather long-winded account of where I am on various projects, but I hope you could find what you’re interested in and learn more.

As always, my inbox is lonely open, and if you have questions about anything or want to be more involved—or even have ideas for a collab—don’t hesitate to reach out.

I’m also super interested to hear what projects here most pique your interest. Sure, I’ll follow my own path in what I work on, but it’s rather nice to know when people care.

And please, please, please: tell me what projects you’re working on. I’d love to have a blog here soon about upcoming works from my community to get excited about. But besides that, nothing staves off creative loneliness quite like working besides each other.

Go get some Vitamin D,

Alice

All those late-night texts, the memes, the creators whose like buttons you smash—all the most human modes of expression we have available to us today in digital format can be expressed, totally and completely, in a series of 1s and 0s.

The journey to how we got here, to reducing human languages down to binary, is a compelling one, and it crosses huge swaths of the globe, various philosophies of human expression from ancient India to Aristotle, and, of course, the ever-turning wheel of mathematics.

But here’s the thing: our technological society is at a turning point.

You’ve probably heard the words quantum computing get thrown around, and you may have filed it in your brain as just a better computer. But what quantum computing represents is a paradigm shift in binary determinism.

We’re introducing the concept of uncertainty into the root of computing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you want to understand quantum computing and all its possible transformative uses for humanity, you first need to understand how it is that we can distill our species down to 1s and 0s.

Binary at the root

Binary starts, perhaps, with yarrow.

The yarrow herb grows all across the northern hemisphere, but for our story, we’ll zoom in on the perennial yarrow from 10th-century BC China.

In Western Zhou-period China, Yarrow represented longevity, vitality, and spiritual connection. It was used to treat a whole barn full of ailments, and in fact, its Latin name, Achillea millefolium, is derived from the later-in-history Greek hero Achilles, who, according to legend, used the herb to salve the wounds of his soldiers during the Trojan War.

The Western Zhou period introduced the Mandate of Heaven, which posited that a leader’s authority was granted by heaven and contingent on their moral virtue. Also emergent in this time were ideas emphasizing the interconnectedness and interdependence of opposing forces and the dynamic balance that exists within the natural world.

You may be familiar with the concepts of Yin and Yang, which were first introduced in the Yijing (Book of Changes). The terms used to refer to the shady (yin) and sunny (yang) sides of a hill or river, but over time Yin and Yang came to represent all things that came in opposites or complemented each other in unique ways.

“The concept of Yin and Yang is at the core of Chinese cosmology, which holds that the universe originated from a primordial chaos. This chaos then divided into the two cosmic forces of Yin and Yang,” says JeeLoo Liu, in his excellent book, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism. “All things in the universe are produced through the interaction between these two forces. In the process of transformation, Yin and Yang can replace each other or they can be mutually transformed into each other. It is said that when Yin and Yang are in harmony, there is peace and prosperity; when they are out of balance, there is disaster and chaos.”

As Yin and Yang were combined with The Mandate of Heaven, the Zhou era witnessed the development of a complex system of rituals, many of which were focused on communication with the natural world, ancestors, and deities.

To determine if you were on the path to virtue, you’d need 50 humble yarrow stalks and a skilled diviner. Using one stalk to receive guidance from the natural world, the diviner would intuitively divide the remaining 49 stalks into two piles, symbolizing the interactions between yin and yang forces.

I use the word intuitively here to mean that the diviner listened to the natural world, trying to have no preconceived opinion about how to divide the stalks, letting in whatever forces may be, introducing what we might call entropy.

After the stalks were divided into two piles, they were grouped into smaller piles in much the same manner, then counted to derive numerical values which were translated into yin (broken - -) or yang (solid —) lines. The whole process was repeated six time in total, leading to a hexagram (six stacked lines) that looked like one of these:

Each of the 64 possible hexagrams in the Yijing had corresponding judgments, said to be written by the deity Fu Xi, which informed the divined about how they should live their life.

But, remember the quote from Liu’s book? “In the process of transformation, Yin and Yang can replace each other or they can be mutually transformed into each other.”

In addition to the solid (—) and broken (- -) lines above, a hexagram could also contain changing lines—old yin changing to young yang or old yang to young yin—that indicated a dynamic situation and led to a second, related hexagram.

These changing lines were a vital part of the divination, keeping close to the needs of the natural world and humanity’s interaction with it. It was nuanced beyond just black and white.

Today, however, the divination is often done much faster, with a coin flip for each line of the hexagram, eliminating the dynamism of a changing yin or yang. 64 possible combinations from a 6-bit system of binary choices.

I think something is lost in the spinning mechanisms of money, but maybe that’s just me.

Two sides of the coin

Thousands of years later, in 1654, a boy named Aisin Gioro Xuanye was born inside the Forbidden City, the imperial palace of the Chinese emperor.

And across the world, in Le Mans, France, Joachim Bouvet was born under the absolute rule of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

From an early age, Bouvet was drawn to science, to mathematics and astronomy. For a long time in the West, religion—or, more specifically, cloistered Catholicism—was the only path that existed for intellectuals who wished to dedicate themselves to a life of studies. So, Bouvet joined the Jesuit order.

Xuanye, meanwhile, at the age of six, faced the death of his father, the Shunzhi Emperor. He was named Kangxi: peaceful prosperity. At 14, he shed the weight of his advisors and ran the empire for himself. He led various military campaigns, extending Chinese control to outer regions like Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang. He used the spoils of war to reduce taxes, promote cultural growth within the sciences, and even sponsor literary works, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

Most importantly for Joachim Bouvet, the Kangxi emperor invited Jesuit missionaries to come within the walls of the Forbidden Palace and share their knowledge of the world. Bouvet, perhaps weary of the old Roman walls of Le Mans or the Julien Cathedral in which he worshipped seven times a day, according to the Liturgy of the Hours, decided to travel, to be part of King Louis XIV’s mission to spread French prestige globally (and, of course, to evangelize their religious beliefs).

Caught between the Sun King and Kangxi, Bouvet found himself appointed to the Chinese Imperial Observatory, sharing his findings, however indirectly with Kangxi.

Of course, the sharing of knowledge went both ways, however much the history books would love to teach otherwise. “In the heart of the Celestial Empire, I have discovered a treasure of wisdom and knowledge,” Bouvet wrote in a letter. “The Chinese sages possess a profound knowledge of the divine essence and of the universe.”

Bouvet got to stargaze, China got French textiles and wine, and France got tea, silk, and porcelain. For a little while, everyone seemed happy.

But tensions were rising.

Remember the yarrow stalks? The divinations? The Catholics didn’t much like what they referred to as ancestor worship, believing it blasphemous to their one true god. In 1704, Pope Clement XI issued a decree condemning Chinese rites and prohibiting their practice by Catholics. The Kangxi emperor saw this as an affront to his generosity, to his sovereignty and to Chinese culture. He expelled the Catholic missionaries from the country.

And yet, he allowed some of the Jesuits, including Bouvet, to stay. The Jesuits were trying to straddle a middle ground, taking on the policy of accommodation where they believed Chinese Christians could still participate in divination as socio-cultural practice while holding to faith in Jesus. As the decades wore on, though, even their presence in China would fade and extinguish.

By the end of the Xuanye’s reign, in 1722, China had become one of the most powerful empires in the world. After his death, any tolerance for Western ideals vanished, and doctrines of self-sufficiency ruled.

But politics aren’t our focus here. However interesting the controversies of the East and the West may be, we’re looking for a single moment in time—that moment when Bouvet, the displaced stargazer, stumbled on a little book called the Yijing.

The Book of Changes captivated him, twisting his brain in knots. He developed a pubescent philosophy which came to be known as Figurism, which suggested that the ancient Chinese text contained veiled referenced to Christian teachings. Given that the Yijin predated Jesus by 1,000 years, Figurism was not widely accepted, even among Bouvet’s fellow Jesuits.

Bouvet did, however, find one sympathetic ear—or at least one very interested in unlocking the mysteries of the Yijing. Through a mutual acquaintance, Bouvet and German polymath Gottfried Leibniz were introduced. Though they never met in person, Bovet’s correspondence with the father of calculus would go on to lay the foundations for modern computing.

The calculus of cultural appropriation

Before his correspondence with Bouvet, Gottfried Leibniz had been embroiled in a daunting quest: to create a universal characteristic that could represent all human knowledge in a clear, logical, and consistent manner. The language would need to be based on a system of symbols and allow for expressions of even the most complex ideas in a vastly simplified form.

Leibniz hoped that a universal language would facilitate communication and learning across vastly different cultures and disciplines. He wanted to eliminate misunderstandings once and for all. Fundamentally, he believed that if everyone could reason together more effectively, we could discover capital-T Truths, as set out into the world by the Christian god.

That’s a vast oversimplification of Leibniz’s philosophies, which contain multitudes about monads as indivisible substances that make up the fabric of reality through pre-established harmony, each with their own perspective of the universe. But it will have to do for now.

When Leibniz encountered the Yijing, sent to him by Bouvet and accompanied by Figurism’s flawed postulations of Western and Eastern ideologies amounting to much the same thing, he saw an opportunity to build his universal language out of indivisible 1s and 0s: his deterministic versions of yin and yang.

Leibniz was particularly interested in the possibility of using binary numbers to encode logical relationship and speed up calculations. In his 1703 paper, “Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire,” he provided a detailed account of the rules for carrying out these operations, laying out the complete foundation for modern binary.

In Leibniz’s view, binary was more a philosophical advance than a mathematical one, and it didn’t get much if any critical acceptance in his lifetime. He’d go on to advance mathematics much more in the realm of decimals, even inventing an early—if clumsy—calculator.

Leibniz did, however, write Bouvet about binary. His friend seemed to understand: they saw creation as 0—ex nihilo, “from nothing”—and God as 1—whole, complete. From the dark side of the hill out into the sun.

Mr. Boole’s Academy

200 years after Leibniz came a 19th-century English logician named George Boole, who also didn’t pay much attention to binary. And yet, his work was vital to the first computers.

To some, Boole led a rather quotidian life. Born in Lincoln, England, as the eldest of four and raised in a humble home in the Unitarian Christian faith, Boole was, from an early age, fascinated by the mind and how it makes connections.

Perhaps this passion was fostered by his father, John. The elder Boole was a talented violinist, and when he wasn’t making shoes for his trade, he was often tinkering with building telescopes or diving nose-deep into some classic mathematical work. No doubt young George found himself in his father’s workshop, discussing human ideas that far surpassed both Booles’ lack of formal education.

At 14, George Boole became a town prodigy, translating poetry from Greek and publishing it in the local newspaper. In his lifetime, Boole would learn, in addition to Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, to study what he considered the classic works. By 16, he was working as an assistant teacher throughout Lincolnshire, and by 19, he had founded his own elementary school, Mr. Boole’s Academy, to teach children what his own father had instilled in him: how to learn.

Boole found that through teaching the young, he could continue his own education, specifically in mathematics and logic. He was deeply involved in the intellectual community, giving public lectures on his nascent ideas of a logical system beyond the walls Aristotle had set out so many centuries before.

Boole, in his late twenties, began to put his ideas to paper, and in 1847, at just 32, he published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic . . . which was mostly ignored, probably due to its debut in a relatively obscure journal.

Interestingly, Boole epigraphs the work with an Aristotle quote, placed in the original Greek:

"All sciences have a connection with the common people, but not to the same extent. By 'common people,' I mean those who are unable to demonstrate what they learn; not those who do demonstrate or those to whom demonstrations are made.”

In other words, the “common” or “vulgar” people should be able to access the sciences just as much as the academic elites. It was vital to Boole that science and reason remained accessible, and although I don’t find his work the most easy to read in 2023, I do want to present some of his ideas here.

Boole believed that human logic could be distilled down into a purely mathematical representation, and he set out to do so in this book. His reasoning, based heavily on Aristotle’s categorical propositions (all x are y, no x are y, some x are y, some x are not y) went something like this (plus some animals from me):

1. All x are y. All kittens are cats. This can be represented as xy = x, which is like saying, “all the kittens that are also cats are the same as all the kittens.”
2. No x are y. No kittens are dogs. In algebra, we can say xy = 0, or “there is nothing that is both a kitten and a dog.”
3. Some x are y. Some kittens also have blue eyes. This one can be said as xy ≠ 0. In other words, the number of kittens that also have blue eyes is not zero.
4. Some x are not y. Not all kittens have blue eyes. x - xy ≠ 0. The difference between the total amount kittens and just the kittens who have blue eyes is not zero.

Now, if you think that all sounds a little . . . abstract and useless . . . you’d not be alone. Boole’s ideas were humored in his lifetime, and many respected his intelligence, but no one really related his logic to, well, anything. It all felt like a neat party trick at the time.

Boole’s father passed away just a few short months after the publication of The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Boole, needing a way to better support his family, started teaching at the college level at Queen’s College, Cork (now University College Cork) in Ireland. Boole, who lacked his own university degree, must have been pleased with the appointment.

A few years later, in 1855, Boole (at 40) was married to Mary Everest (yes, that Everest—daughter of the man the mountain was named for), and they had five daughters together. Somewhere in the midst of caring for all his family, Boole found the time to write one last book: An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.

If his first book was his floundering with brand new ideas, this book was a cementing of those thoughts in far more detail. And, for our story, this is where Boole laid out the ever important conjunction, disjunction, and negation in mathematical terms.

• AND. This returns true if both arguments are true.
• OR. This returns true if at least one argument is true.
• NOT. This returns true if the argument on one side of the equation is the opposite of the one on the other.

Later mathematicians would also go on to add one more operation, exclusive disjunction or XOR:

• XOR. This returns true if only one argument is true.

These operations and their corresponding equations have been regarded as Boole’s most important contribution to logic: distilling the complexity of human reason to a series of true or false equations that, when evaluated in series, can mathematically determine the merit of an argument.

Mostly, Laws of Thoughts reads like a mathematical work, filled with abstract definitions and formal outcomes. But its logic is kinda a shitty way to express the varied nuances of the consciousness, assuming it can all be distilled to bitwise operations.

Boole seems to recognize this: in the final chapter he attempts to transform vague human experience into tangible matter, delving into the harmony between free will and established principles of thought. He wonders if some truths don’t surpass the scope of mathematical law.

To some, with this final chapter, he appears to invalidate his own careful reasoning. His ideas, though interesting, failed to take off in his time: what entity on earth could think in such a calculating manner?

I wonder if Boole would have admired the cruel logic of his own premature death. Rain, a walk to school, too long in wet clothes—all summing up to pneumonia and his passing. But it’s dangerous to reduce even a single man, taking away his body in favor of the philosophies he brought to the world.

The last gasps of analog

Let’s recap. We have a way to represent numbers in binary. And now we can express logic in a binary (true or false) way. Although Boole and Leibniz contributed to vastly different fields, they shared a vision: a way for humans to reason together more precisely.

Before the 1930s, the word computer referred to a human being who calculated equations for any given profession—more like an accountant than a machine.

It was Claude Shannon, the “father of information theory,” who put 10 and 10 together.

Shannon was a war baby, born right before the Americans’ involvement in the first World War. He grew up, initially, in a booming economy, but by the time he got to high school, everything had crashed.

I can only speculate so far about what went on in Shannon’s mind, but I do wonder if something of the efficiency—the leanness—of the Great Depression influenced his thinking about machines.

Calculating machines at the time did exist, but they were fully analog. We’ve skewed the word analog today to mean something more physical than digital, but it originally came from the Greek—analogos, meaning proportional—and was used in English since the early 19th century in the fields of electronics and signal processing. In these contexts, analog refers to a continuous representation of a quantity, like an electrical signal that varies in amplitude or frequency to represent information.

When I say the earliest machine computers were analog, what I mean is they were finnicky as fuck. By representing numbers on contraptions such as gears or levers or electrical signals, which could all be in various granular states at any given time, inputting and reading information from the machine was difficult and unclear.

In other words, their signal (useful information) to noise (gibberish) ratio was far too low to be practical. They resembled, in the most frightening regard, a sort of Rube Goldberg machine for math. They got answers right, sure, but the slightest malfunction would send them spinning.

What Shannon, a native Michigander, did while studying electrical engineering at University of Michigan, was happen to read George Boole, a dusty old logician whose ideas weren’t garnering much notice. And when Shannon moved on to MIT for his PhD in mathematics, he had the chance to work on a machine called the Differential Analyzer.

Image by Krauss, adapted from a photo by Hisatoshi Kabata, on Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Differential Analyzer was a beast, chock full of carefully aligned gears to represent various numbers and logical methodologies. Shannon, after some time with it, suggested binary.

What if, he said, we could represent all the numbers in simple yes/no states? It would be far more accurate. Furthermore, he continued. What if we used electrical circuits to perform Boolean operations, from which you can make addition, subtraction, multiplication, and so on.

It was, in short, a set of brilliant ideas. And the world was never the same.

Shannon's work on digital circuit design during his time at Bell Labs led to the development of the first electronic digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The introduction of the digital computer (from the Latin, digitus, for the fingers we count on to represent definite state) took the world by storm—but we’ll get into all that in another essay.

The point, for now, is this: without Shannon, I’m not sure we’d all be here reading this article online. He’s a rare bottleneck in history, a figure who seemed to be met with the precise circumstances to link the precise logic from thinkers who history had summarized in far too general detail. I’m sure the digital computer would have been invented eventually. But who knows how many more years it would have taken?

“The fundamental problem of communication,” said Shannon, in his seminal work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, published just after the second World War, “is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”

In the exactness of binary, Shannon found a way to do just that. He tuned the noise to signal.

The roots of quantum thinking

After Shannon, computers were, quite literally, history. Classical computing since 1940 has been a matter of scientific advancements in the infinitesimal: making binary transistors smaller and smaller to fit more and more of them on a single chip. The power of your smartphones comes directly from the number of bits on its chip and how fast those bits can switch between 1 and 0. (Incidentally, Shannon also coined the word bit for this context.)

More processing power necessarily uses more energy. And if you haven’t noticed, energy is a dwindling resource. Sure, there’s been huge advancements in classical computing that allow them to do more for less. But at the heart, all those words you type are converted, tediously, to 1s and 0s and processed in strings of ever-increasing length.

What if we could transform our human language not into 1s and 0s, but into something more, well, uncertain? What if future computers need, at their heart, entropy?

At last we come to quantum mechanics, the behavior of matter at the tiniest scale: the subatomic.

The concept of quantum computing can be traced back to the early 1980s: physicist Richard Feynman, in his talk “Simulating Physics with Computers,” wondered if a computer that mirrored the behavior of subatomic particles couldn’t better represent quantum physics than a classical computer. A year later, another physicist, Paul Benioff, had drawn the theoretical schematics: a Turing-complete machine that ran on quantum particles alone.

Unlike the binary bits in classical computers, which can only be 1 or 0 at any given time, quantum computers are made of qubits, which can, in theory, hold infinite states in what’s called superposition.

I say theoretically, because when you measure a qubit, it’s superposition collapses.

You might remember something of Schroedinger’s cat, both alive and dead in the box, until we lift the lid and collapse the possibility of both into a single state. Now, imagine we did even more: found a way—without looking—to drop food into the box (that could be either ingested or not), to throw glitter into one side of the box (which now holds a cat with either glitter on it or not), and generally abused the poor creature with increasingly deranged experiments.

Do you see what I mean now by a theoretical infinite number of states? Obviously, this doesn’t totally work with a cat, because inside the box, the cat really is one of those combinations. But with subatomic particles, a superposition—that ability to hold all things possible—is absolutely real.

The idea of quantum computing was met with a lot of interest, but the fundamental problem of quantum mechanics—their inherent unobservability—remained a dilemma. We needed a way to observe without observing. To choose without choosing, much like a diviner might divide piles of yarrow stalks, making waves without a single presupposition.

This, in a much more complicated and scientific way, is what the early 1990s brought in the form of quantum algorithms, proving the viability of quantum computing. Peter Shor’s algorithm, which provided a practical method which quantum computers could use to factor large numbers, was the first. It used quantum gates analogous to those AND, OR, NOT, and XOR logic gates in a classical computer and leveraged the part of subatomic particles that stumped even Einstein: entanglement.

Einstein said it best: entanglement is spooky action at a distance. Sometimes, in nature, electrons entangle with each other, and their states become dependent on one another, even if those electrons are separated by large distances. (In fact, we haven’t found a maximum distance.)

If you observe an entangled qubit, it still collapses the superposition of its partner, but the connection can give vital information. By manipulating these connections, scientists have been able to strategically maximize the probability of getting the overall correct measurement of the qubit performing the calculation.

It’s not about 1 or 0; it’s about sensing your way through to the place in nature that has the most information to give. The world of technology is never far from the physical realities of the natural world, quantum computing maybe most of all.

In 1996, Lov Grover designed a way to efficiently search databases of information with a quantum computer. He proved that, because of a qubit’s ability to work in parallel—very unlike traditional bits, which work linearly, one operation after the other—just about any scale of data could be efficiently indexed by quantum computers.

The quantum computer of today, to me, resembles a bit of a yarrow stalk divination. We’re trying to make quantum computers more reliable, but they’re incredibly sensitive to their environments, ultimately consorting with the natural world to get back their information.

I know, I know—quantum computers are infinitely more advanced than the yarrow stalk divinations. They’re not magic. But I still think it’s a helpful comparison: we have to find a way to tune out the noise in favor of signal. To let go of preconception.

Even quantum computing, something that seems magical to many, is ultimately a tool created by humans for humans. And if we want to see it used well, we need to pay attention to the advances.

Do you see how long it took just to get to binary on the machine? How long it took to distill reason into something consumable and arbitrary?

In 2019, Google announced quantum supremacy. They solved, with a 56 qubit quantum computer, a problem that would be impractical for a classical computer—of any size—to attempt.

Since then, we’ve made huge progress on more barriers: cooling, compression, error-checking, networking between machines, and even using quantum computers to observe their own patterns of entanglement.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I hope you see how quickly we’re moving. How the centuries it took to get binary on the machine can be compared to the mere decades it’s taken to stabilize quantum computing.

Sure, we’re still a long way off from all of us having quantum smart goggles, but every time we sleep, someone somewhere is inventing.

Binary poetics

One last tale, this time from ancient India.

In a region untouched by the Yijing philosophies of ancient China, 3rd-century BC India, there lived a mathematician named Pingala.

It’s speculated that Pingala may have been the younger brother of the well-known Sanskrit grammarian, Pāṇini, but it’s not able to be confirmed. Either way, linguistics and mathematics stayed close to each other at the time.

Pingala, at some point, took a deep interest in Sanskrit poetry—specifically the rhythms, rhymes, and sounds of the words. His treatise on Sanskrit prosody is called the Chandahśāstra, which is a Sanskrit term that can be broken down into two parts: "Chandas" (छन्दस्), referring to the meter of poetry, and "Śāstra" (शास्त्र) which more or less translates to scientific exposition—a systemic knowledge in a particular field.

In this “Science of the Poetry Metric,” Pingala focuses on rhythm, exploring various combinations of heavy (Guru) and light (Laghu) syllables.

For my English audience, you might remember studying Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter—the alternating of unstressed and stressed syllables. Pingala came up with a way to represent these Guru and Laghu and made a sort of counting system out of them called the Mātrāmeru.

For example, if we wanted to count zero to seven, we could write:

0: L (laghu)

1: G (guru)

2: LL

3: LG

4: GL

5: GG

7: LLL

And so on. It might look similar to something we’ve seen a lot of in this essay: binary. It has its slight differences, but the general principle is the same. Pingala’s work is the first known recording of binary in its barest form.

Which means the rhythm of human speech—specifically Sanskrit poetry—is one of our first recorded advancements in computing. It’s an instance of what scientists today might call “multiple discovery”—when unrelated people in unrelated places uncover the same truth about the world.

But here’s what Pingala didn’t account for in his rhythms: the breaths. The line breaks. The intake of air and expectation. The waiting and the uncertainty.

The beauty of poetry comes from the line break, and much has been studied about it. It’s a punctuation mark unlike any other across all media:

Take this poem by Craig Santos Perez:

Sure, the line breaks are highly exaggerated here compared to most poetry, but the point remains: there’s a beauty to the uncertainty of human thought, and, by extension, the world around us.

I have to believe that a quantum system constructed not of certainty but out of uncertainty at its root is one that will, in the generations to come, be more adept at expressing the extreme nuances of human life.

As we look at scientific innovation, I find organizations that fund it are a little binary in their thinking: what purpose will this have? Will it solve world hunger? Will it make us money?

Leibniz, Boole, and so many others—they dreamed of a world that would use their discoveries, but imagined it so different than the one we actually have. Their ideas lived quietly for centuries before finding a use case in machines neither of them would have ever expected.

The past is not linear up to now. Leibniz never saw Pingala, but that doesn’t mean they both didn’t invent binary. Progress in the human race, much like a quantum computer, happens in parallel. Innovation, by its nature, is uncertain.

And we often break it when we observe it, when we skew it toward what we believe is needed. It’s tempting to trace pathways across the past to now, but there’s an infinite amount of information and inspirations we’ve lost, that go on living in some entangled part of the minds of those we encounter.

If there’s anything I take away from the remarkable stories of binary and the fast advancements in quantum, it’s this: we need open ecosystems of innovation, because we can’t predict the future or very well remember the past. At least not alone.

If we want to solve human problems, we’ll need as many humans working on them from as many different walks of life as possible. We’ll need a high tolerance for advancements that feel useless, even for centuries, and a high ability to look back at the past with new eyes to move toward the future.

A note for coming essays

I’ve talked a lot about men in this chapter. History isn’t very good at remembering the women, however vital they’ve been to the story. For example, Boole’s wife, Mary Everest, went on to become a mathematician in her own right after George’s death, and the couple’s five daughters each had distinguished careers of their own.

In the next essay, I’m going to talk about the women who got us where we are now, the programmers who were able to abstract binary into a language that humans could speak to commune with the machine. It was always women misbehaving who gave us machines that can follow our instructions.

I’ve got a lot of essays planned beyond this next one, too. I’ll take my time getting the research right, but it’s fair to say you can get excited.

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‘Til next time!

No, you say to capitalism, that’s not me.

So you pack up your guitar. You try to lift your suitcase. You repack. Your mom says she’ll keep all your things safe until you get back.

I’m not coming back any time soon, you say with a self-seriousness reserved for the white upper-class.

Where are you going, anyway? she asks, filing her nails.

I’m going to Spain, you say, picking a country at random that you know has a deep appreciation for guitarists. Plus, you took a little Spanish in high school. Enough to get by.

Your first real challenge as a digital nomad comes when the airport wifi cuts out. The work-from-anywhere thing starts to feel strained.

And what work is it you’re doing? your dad had asked.

You hadn’t a good comeback at the time. It was hard to explain to someone like him, with such a rigid mind, that you were going to find yourself and your passion. That anyone could do anything online. It was just a matter of untethering from location, of being able to plug in to self-sufficiency from anywhere. A sort of fiber-optic Walden.

The flight’s long, and you can’t sleep. The lady next to you has been drooling uncontrollably, and her head keeps falling on your shoulder. You push it back, but it seems to have a mind of its own.

It’s okay, though. You use the time to brainstorm. Ideas always flow best when you’re handwriting, so you get out your Apple Pencil. You come up with some plans for work. The trust fund can’t last forever.

Well, maybe it can, but that’s not the point.

It’s muggy when you land in Madrid. There’s less English than you thought there’d be, and even the Uber driver is talking so fast.

You get to the hotel and crash. You know you’ll have to find a real place to live soon, but the Ritz will do in a pinch.

You wash your face, drink some water from the tap. Then, horrified, you realize the water probably isn’t potable. You claw at your phone, trying to connect to the Internet, but the password the concierge gave you isn’t working. You flick the wifi toggle with the madness of a dying man.

You lie on the bed. Try not to move. Slow the poison, you think.

Should I call the front desk?

You wonder how much time you have left. How, at least the headlines will talk about how you died doing what you love. Finding yourself.

There’s a mirror by the bed to watch yourself decay. Heartbeats go by. Other than a few gurgles, your insides seem to be doing fine.

You’re going to have to be stronger than this if you want to be a real digital nomad. You get up, splash your face. Put some clothes on. Order takeout.

After a frankly disappointing burger, you grab the guitar and head out into the afternoon sun.

In the streets of Madrid, there aren’t nearly as many guitarists as you thought there’d be. But no matter. You find a relatively quiet spot and fill the air with sound. One chord, two chord. A risky move to a bridged F. You stick the landing.

After an hour, only one old lady has thrown a coin into your ball-cap, and you’re starting to sweat. As you wander home, you find a small crowd swaying to a guitarist who sounds like they’ve been playing for decades.

You push through, trying to get a look at the musician. Finally, you see her. No more than a teenager.

At the hotel, you realize the single coin you got is an old peseta, which Google tells you hasn’t been legal currency since 2002.

You look for flights to London.

The guitarists of London aren’t nearly as talented, which is a relief. But then again, you’re not really sure busking is for you. There’s a lot of homeless folks who mingle in with the buskers, and you’re not sure how that’s gonna be for your brand.

Your brand which you’ve had the most brilliant idea for. The point of digital nomadship, you’ve realized, is not to stay long in any one place. To leave as soon as the mind or body wills it. The shift to London wasn’t about some failure in Madrid, but rather a move forward, onward.

Maybe there’s more similarities between the homeless of the world and you than you think. Working out of libraries, never sleeping in the same bed for more than a few days. That kind of unwashed hair look.

You’ve started taking some photos for Insta and made a new account. You’ve subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud. You haven’t posted anything yet, but it’s only a matter of time before you find that perfect first photo.

You need that thing that makes you unique.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the guitar.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll stop looking.

A couple days into London you realize that the only cafe that consistently lets people sit in all day is Starbucks. You try to ignore that icky American feeling that comes with working out of a Model-T bean factory.

In your new office, you’ve begun to understand the rules:

1. Open bathroom doors so, so, so slowly.
2. There’s a hard, three-adjective limit to drink orders.
3. If someone peeks into the window, they should be barred from entering.

And so on.

You surprise yourself with your rule list. It’s funny, you think. So, you gather up a bunch of London photos and post it as an Insta story, to see how it will do. No post yet—just testing the waters.

A couple people see it, but nobody reacts. All your followers so far are just people from your main.

You sigh, world-weary.

It’s in Amsterdam that it hits you. You can pay for followers.

Like, not forever, but just for an initial batch. People have social media managers all the time. Just a few followers from the right crowd, and your content will go viral, you figure.

So, you hire a few people—just temporarily—to build up your digital presence. A real business, you realize. I’m supporting myself.

Just one problem. Your Insta isn’t making any money.

The thing is, you don’t really believe in monetizing content. The words you craft, the art you make, the music—that should be free for anyone. But you need to be profitable: you’re getting tired of only having two USB-C ports.

It’s late-night TV that saves you. You’ve been learning some Netherlandish—the subtitles help—and you catch just enough for a brilliant idea.

See, there’s all these celebrities selling hand lotions and body soaps and frozen dinners. Why couldn’t you get a sponsorship like that?

You make a few more hires. Strategic, minimal. Trying to stay as true to the digital nomad lifestyle as possible. You land a deal. Well, your agent lands you a deal based on your last name, but it feels very earned.

You’ll be the public face of Birkenstocks. All you have to do is keep traveling, keep posting to Instagram, and take pictures of your feet.

Finally. Real work.

In Paris you decide dreads will help you be more woke. You’ve taken to reading critical race theory in between work and sipping pumpkin spice lattes.

Let’s be honest: you’re terrified of being cancelled.

When a someone sporting a different skin tone than you sits near you, you smile. You ask him to watch your things when you go to the bathroom, and you feel good about the trust you’ve built in society, bridging racial differences. You return and smile again at him. He doesn’t smile back. He moves to another table.

Progress is slow, you think, but definitely happening. As if in answer, a sunbeam comes through the Starbucks window.

The job is harder than you thought it would be.

You decide it’s time to really get lost somewhere different. You wander over to Egypt, to rest from the hubbub of technology and go into the wilderness of the soul. Of the desert.

Plus, the Birkenstocks and pyramids picture gets you enough buzz to take a little break.

You lay off your social media managers. You look everywhere for a camel, but it turns out everyone drives here, just like everywhere else.

Your Uber driver shows you a picture of yourself on his iPhone. Some headline about firing employees without severance.

Back in your hotel room, you break your digital fast to look up the word severance. You tweet a statement saying it was an honest mistake, that you didn’t know, that it’s been remedied now. This does not make the situation better.

When you go live on Insta to talk the people down, they point out your terrible sunburn, which mostly derails the conversation into mockery.

As much as the Internet hates you, the Egyptian shopkeepers seem to love you. People wave at you on the street, smiling. Everyone speaks to you in English.

You didn’t know it was such a civilized place.

The only problem, really, is that you have to keep buying water bottles, because the hotel manager said the tap water is temporarily not good for drinking.

You could stay here for a while, you realize, adjusting the A/C by the window. You look down on the city and think, really, how small everyone’s problems are—even yours.

Before you check out of your hotel, you make sure to stack all the empty water bottles neatly against the wall. You laugh. There’s enough there to float someone across the Mediterranean.

The next few countries pass by in a bit of a haze. In memory, you struggle to differentiate between South Africa and Nigeria, Greece and Turkey. There was a girl you dated in one of them, but not for very long. Everywhere is starting to look like not-home.

You try Canada, but it just kinda feels like Minneapolis.

It’s at this point that you have another realization. There’s nothing wrong with being a digital nomad in the States.

You don’t tell your parents, but they figure it out from your Birkenstock reels. Your dad calls, tells you, now that you’re back it’s time to get a real job. To work for the family. He knows a guy who can scrub your feet right off the Internet.

You weigh your options. Being a nomad, however digital, has been harder work than you thought. You’ve developed some nasty callouses from walking around in sandals all the time. Was this how Jesus felt?

You’re back in LA anyway, and your dad’s company is just a few blocks from the hotel.

The Uber Lux is a Tesla, and you realize you’ve always wanted to drive an iPad. On a whim, you ask the driver to buy his car. The guy laughs and names a price. You make the bank transfer in front of him.

You pull up to your dad’s office building in style. You’ve put on a suit, loose-collared. Some real shoes. You’ve come full-circle, but with real-world experience now. Who hasn’t taken a gap year to figure some things out?

Plus, the job’s not as hard as you thought it’d be.

I’ve always been drawn into mazes.

I’m all too fascinated by the architects of puzzles.

I like to think of myself as a puzzle-maestra of sorts. Maybe all programmers are: we build codebases to solve for specific, near-invisible problems. Debug, debug.

I used to draw a lot of mazes. I filled my notebook with paths and fake-outs.

In the third grade, my friend’s little sibling said they wanted to grow up to be a boy. At the time, that was possible in my mind. When did I started cementing the walls?

It’s helpful to build boundaries in your application, to separate code by concern. Functions that interact with design over here. Functions that build infrastructure over here. Neat and tidy.

But when code throws an error, you have to root through your whole filesystem to find it.

How do you know where to start?

Error messages are, on the whole, shitty. Meaningless when they reference something beyond your knowledge. Outside the walls of your worldview.

The New York Times crossword puzzles are 15 by 15 squares. Everything neat. Orderly. On time. I love the crossword for its aha moments. The way that each solve hints the next.

Clever, really—designing a system where one conclusion leads so logically onwards.

I too often wish learning in the real world were more like crosswords.

But I tend to prefer mazes.

When I set out to solve a puzzle in code, I always forget I have a starting point.

The problem begins to overwhelm me. I can’t trace where in the stacks of lines it might be echoing out from.

Throughout my adolescence, throughout my college years, throughout my twenties, I was suicidal.

My brain craved escape from the maze.

A tangled bug in my code.

In crosswords, every clue is numbered, down or up. Each one gets a hint. When you’re stuck, you move across the puzzle to another clue—there’s always something to solve, always somewhere to work.

It’s clear how each solve contributes to the whole.

In a maze, you often have to retrace your steps. Maybe it’s more frustrating, especially if you’re using pen, but I see it as more true to life. Retracing still contributes to the solve.

Seeing progress while building an application is much harder. Bugs can cause regression. You might delete hundreds of lines of code trying to isolate the problem.

Sometimes working backwards is the only way through. Often, in mazes, starting from the finish is best.

There’s a tool—one of the first you learn in JavaScript—called console.log().

console.log() displays for you anything you place between the parentheses.

console.log("Help me. I can't get out.")

The result, of of course:

Help me. I can't get out.

At first this talking with self doesn’t feel useful.

console.log("Hi, there.")

Hi, there.

Hi, computer.

You’re the one building the program. You should know what it might say. But sometimes, you run your application and:

Error. Gibberish.

Remember—you’re not coding in a vacuum. The browser is a player, too. You must satisfy something beyond yourself.

So, you Google the gibberish. Everyone on Stack Overflow is especially unhelpful today. No one responds to your Discord thread. You even Bing! it because you heard ChatGPT and Bing! got hitched, but first you have to join their early access program and—

You just want the damn thing to work.

Your brain hurts.

Maybe your body, too.

So, you figure out that the error occurs in one of three functions (if you’re lucky). You add a console.log() to each function:

function one() {
	// do stuff
	console.log("Function 1.")
}

function two() {
	// do stuff
	console.log("Function 2.")
}

function three() {
	// do stuff
	console.log("Function 3.")
}

You run the code again:

Function 1.

Function 2.

Error. Gibberish.

You’ve learned something valuable now. The error happens in function three(). Sometimes, this alone can be enough to figure it out. Other times, three() drops into a rabbit hole. And warrens into more warrens.

Professional solvers can knock out a Sunday crossword within seven minutes. The crossword doesn’t lead to another puzzle. It’s one and done. It gets ever smaller.

Even in a maze, there’s only so many paths to trace. The finishing place is known. It’s just about getting to it.

In programming, complexity grows with the size of an application. For instance, there’s variables. If you say:

let age = 22
console.log(age)

You get:

22

age becomes shorthand for the number assigned to it.

You can even come back to the code a year later and add:

age = 23
console.log(age)

And this time you’ll get:

22

23

age, see, is variable. It changes with the passage of time—or, in this case, code. JavaScript always executes from top to bottom. From the beginning of its life to its end.

There are exceptions, but we’ll get to that.

Much is variable in code. It can get rather confusing. What, for example, does home equal after this?

function moveOut() {
	let home = "a place"

	if (age < 18) {
		home = "Ohio";
	} else if (age <= 26) {
		home = "Indiana";
	} else if (age < 28) {
		home = "Egypt";
	} else if (age <= 29) {
		home = "England";
	}

	return home;
}

console.log(moveOut)

“Well,” you may say if you’re clever, “home depends on age, but age is never mentioned in this code, so we’ll get an error.”

For which you’d be technically correct and thereby have earned yourself a gold star.

But in this example, you can imagine that the value of age is coming out of some calculation elsewhere. Now, the value of home is dependent not just on age but on the calculation age goes through.

What if the calculation is dependent on two other variables? Or if happiness is dependent on home? Or gender dependent on age in a separate file? Suddenly, we’re in a rabbit hole if an error gets thrown. Too many moving pieces.

Too many years going by in confusion.

Enigmatologists take much longer to create a puzzle than solve it. Here, the world is infinite. The boxes don’t yet exist to be filled. Where do you start?

Will Shortz, founder of the New York Times crossword, says it’s easy: “Most daily newspaper crosswords are 15 by 15 squares. So, [for example], I had three 15-letter answers. Planet of the Apes, monkeying around and Sir Edward Gibbon.”

Themes. Construct a helpful narrative.

One helpful tool for programmers is rubber ducking. Sounds more sexy than it is. Basically, when you run into your very last wit, you grab the yellow rubber duck you’ve set on your desk especially for this moment. Cradle him in your hands. You try to explain the bug to him in words only rubber ducks can understand.

This act of translation often causes us to frame the bug as part of a story. A theme.

In therapy I often tried to reframe my life narrative. I hoped that forcing it to all make sense for another human might give me insight into something outside the walls of my knowledge.

The problem and the beauty with rubber ducks is they can only respond with a squeak.

Incidentally, the Times pays $750 for a puzzle—$2250 if it’s a weekend. I couldn’t help but notice both numbers are divisible by 15.

Even in code, I try to make meaning. Arbitrary structure.

Instead of writing let before defining a variable, you can write const for “constant.”

Constants cannot be changed. const as in constipated. Once there’s a value put in, nothing’s coming out.

const age = 26

We can zoom into a moment in time. Stay there for a while. Stop the years from going by.

One constant, however tentative, can often lead to the creation of another. If age is always 26, then the calculations dependent on it might be constant, too.

If a constant like brain isn’t changing, maybe neither is heart.

Creating a puzzle is more like solving one than you might think.

Jonathan Blow is one of my favorite enigmatologists. He’s best known, perhaps, as a video game designer, but I think of him as equal parts programmer and philosopher.

He’s also known for having a truly unfortunate last name.

In The Witness, Blow’s magnum opus, you’re tasked with exploring a vividly colored island through solving puzzles that at first feel as simple as moving a line from one side of the screen to another.

Throughout the game, these mazes grow in complexity, echoing their paths in the game world. In the picture above, for example, you may find the maze in yellow to mirror the paths of the cords on the ground.

”If I were to say anything about reality, it’s that things influence and interrelate and cause increasing situational complexity,” says Blow in an interview for Time. “You think that you have one or two or three simple things, and then you find that the way those interact creates new phenomena or sub-phenomena, and then those phenomena interact with the original things, and eventually you have a quite complex tapestry.”

In fact there’s a puzzle early in The Witness with a shadow cast on it from a nearby outcropping. The challenge is to draw a line from one side of the puzzle to the other, but there are many ways to trace the line. You may, like me, struggle until you realize: if you draw a line that perfectly separates the shadow from the light, it’s solved.

It’s a brilliant twist on puzzles, which when created by humans, are usually all too isolated from each other. It’s a game more about observing than solving.

console.log() is, at the end of the day, just one of the many tools we have to observe code.

I like to think the things we learn in digital can transcend to real life.

In every video game where I was given the choice, I chose to play as a female protagonist.

In The Witness, you never get to inhabit a body besides your own. The first-person camera never interrupts the flow between you and the world.

A world of puzzles, which are certainly more than puzzles. Some enigmas take on real-life beauty.

Throughout The Witness’s 40+ hours, you begin to relate to its creator. Not to Blow the puzzlemaster, but to Jonathan the human. You stop solving puzzles long enough to start solving him.

It’s an indescribably intimate experience. Walking away from the puzzles only to find their creator.

In addition to console.log(), programmers also have walking away as a tool for debugging.

In addition to console.log(), programmers also have walking away as a tool for debugging.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but I can’t tell you how many times I get funneled into the wrong details. Something in the world can jog my mind, can inspire me toward a solve.

When I was in grad school, I loved the schoolwork but hated the teaching. Something about standing in front of students exhausted me to my core. Felt like a fake pathway. I’d put on a button-up and try to lead discussion, all while wondering what could be wrong.

I thought: I’m introverted. I thought: I’m bad at public speaking.

I was too close to the problem.

I rubber ducked with my therapist. I changed my routine. I tried everything.

How do we solve when the solution is invisible? When the problem is invisible?

Retrace, retrace.

I dropped out of grad school. I told people it was the workload that got to me, when, in reality, it was the putting my body into space each day.

I retreated into myself, tried to find the missing piece.

Maybe the most interesting part of The Witness is this: when you get stuck on all the puzzles around you, when you’ve decided to give up, you find yourself in the only place left that you haven’t been pulling your hair out over: the game’s earliest areas.

You reminisce over all the solved puzzles around you, over the time when you knew all the answers.

And in those environments, so often Jonathan has left something peculiar—something that stands out to you now. Something that directly helps with those puzzles you’re stuck on.

We sleep, we dream, we time travel, we wake, we walk, we solve.

I find it interesting that Blow’s first game, Braid, required the player to strategically rewind time to solve each level.

We’ve already talked about how variable code can grow in complexity, but we haven’t touched on asynchronous code.

In JavaScript, we have promises, often denoted by the keywords async and await.

For example:

async function activateCrosswalk() {
	const ready = await signalChange();
	return ready;
}

The code hangs when it sees that await keyword, letting the signalChange() resolve before telling the rest of the codebase that we’re ready to cross the street.

The thing is, a thousand cars can pass by during that waiting period. A bird can shit on a lamppost. Someone else (surely not you) might dart across the street despite the red light.

Asynchronous code is hard to monitor exactly because it makes things happen out of order. As I’ve mentioned, JavaScript normally executes right down the page, top-to-bottom, calling out to other functions on other pages when meeting them. It’s tidy, orderly.

It doesn’t dart across streets when the light is red.

When you ask the code to wait for a promise to be resolved, the rest of the world keeps moving while this one portion stays frozen in time.

When I was young, I thought, I’ll look like her when I grow up.

A lifetime can go by waiting for promises to be fulfilled.

A million points of entropy, a million paths in the maze, can spawn.

async / await code can, of course, return a failure. In fact, asynchronous code is often used to avoid breaking an otherwise synchronous application. If code always runs from top-to-bottom, then any interruption means that the code must stop executing.

I’ll wait for this thing, and if it happens, I’ll do this. But if it doesn’t happen, I’ll do this instead.

Promises broken as easily as resolved.

A function that doesn’t return a value is called void. And they can be the hardest to debug. An asynchronicity, then, can account for entropy in an otherwise orderly system.

It’s far too easy to forget the promises that we made ourselves. To forget what it is we’re waiting for.

I mentioned I was suicidal at one point. I never really gave myself an ultimatum; I just let my brain hang. There was no if this then live, else then bye. Always the general feeling of not wanting to exist.

I fundamentally didn’t know what I was waiting to hear back from the void.

When I was a kid, I drew mazes for my sister. They started, maybe, as doodles in church, but soon I found the need to increase their complexity, adding colored portals to other pages of my notebook. In letting the maze be gargantuan, I didn’t need a solution. I built the maze just to build it.

There’s a way queer children, especially those of us who grow up in abusive environments, manifest out of thin air garments to cover who we really are. Layers and layers. Fake pathways in a maze.

Jonathan Blow would be disappointed in such a puzzle—one designed not just to be difficult, but actually impossible to solve.

The point of a puzzle is, after all, to solve it. A good puzzle stumps you for a bit, asks you to walk away perhaps and come back, but it yields itself eventually.

The kind of maze I’d wrapped myself in wasn’t one that was going to be solved, but rather one that needed retraced.

I needed to walk away and find the creator.

The best way to solve a maze is to start at the finish and move to the start.

It was just me sitting in the middle with the minotaur, cleaning his axe.

Or, rather, I’d become a minotaur of sorts.

A good game, for me, is a fantasy. A way to dress up as someone I’m not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to debug asynchronous code—code knotted around and around itself—is with that simple console.log(). You need more of them, sure, but a carefully placed console.log() can yield a lot of information.

It tells you in what order things are happening. The asynchronous code could be reaching out to other websites for information, and those actions take variable amounts of time for each run of the code.

It’s that talking to yourself, observing carefully the order in which things occur:

wore a suit

unhappy

got called pretty

happy

My life and my fantasy were swapped, see.

In my fantasy world, I dressed like a boy. I kept my hair short. I tried, more than anything, to be gentle, and, more than anything, failed.

There was a walking away.

But there was also a promise returned.

To find the girl penning the maze.

A moment of solving for a variable, like name, so dependent on everything else.

A simple matter of filling in the final, 5-letter clue:

alice

Let me explain.

I needed to make sure my blog wasn’t gonna be a pain in the ass

Here’s a sample of what my last blog post looked like, inside the code editor:

As a writer, this was annoying the ever-loving shit out of me. I’d draft my blog in a nice writing tool (Notion), and then I’d copy/paste it into the code editor and have to add all these little HTML markings (the ones in green) plus manually create the links to other webpages.

To make it worse, this had to become the home of my working draft, which made it difficult to make significant content edits or share for feedback before publication.

And after publication, each time I spotted a typo, I had to redeploy my entire site to fix it. It was a hot mess.

Now, I hear you tech folks saying, okay, so use a content management system (CMS). But you have to understand: As a writer, I really hate CMSeses.

I needed a solution that allowed me to draft, edit, collaborate, and publish all from the same place.

But hold up. First, let me tell you more about why avoiding repetitive tasks like this—even if it means climbing over a mountain—is so important to me.

Making sustained creative efforts with ADHD

I used to talk about my ADHD a lot.

As I moved into the freelance, professional sphere, though, I deemphasized this part of my story.

See, clients need to feel like you’ll complete the work. Unfortunately, prevailing ADHD stereotypes tend to cast me as someone who, while highly creative, can’t focus my energy.

If I’m being honest, that’s a mantle I’ve too often worn myself.

The thing is, capitalism makes me, as a person with a neurodiverse brain, feel very incompetent. Corporations reward repeated effort and don’t often have ways to measure sparks of innovation.

In a team setting, I’m the person you want brainstorming and finalizing your project. It’s the middle that’s tough—that’s where the repetition takes place. I’ve already visualized the idea with the client, but now making it can all too often feel like rehashing the same mental territory in slow motion.

ADHD is, at the end of the day, a lack of dopamine. It’s just not as available to my brain as a neurotypical one. What this does mean, though, is that if I get interested in something, I will hyperfocus it to completion—there’s no other more-dopamine-inducing tasks to interrupt me.

I’m vastly oversimplifying, but that’s the crux of the problem. The longer a vision takes to execute, the more I might resort to:

Caffeine ☕, medication 💊, procrastination 🐨, and general stimming 🐒

Stimulants connect neural pathways that are often broken for ADHDers. Caffeine, far from making me hyper, more brings me into a state where I can suddenly get the dishes done.

Sounds great, but what’s the catch?

Well, all the same things you might hear from a neurotypical person: caffeine affects sleep, anxiety, and can have some nasty physical withdrawal symptoms.

Perhaps most importantly, caffeine’s effectiveness completely wears off on me if I drink it every day. I also find that the day after Espresso Getting Shit Done^TM tends to be . . . horrible? Maybe it’s interruption of sleep patterns or just some chemical thing, but I definitely get caffeine hangovers.

I know, I know—time-released medications exist to stimulate the brain in a much more consistent way. One of the most frustrating parts of ADHD, for me, is when I can’t commit to a task I know will help me meet my goals. ADHD meds—amphetamines and otherwise—are good products that help a ton of people not just survive this corporate world but actually thrive accomplishing what they want.

So I tried meds for a long time. When I first got on Vyvanse, it was life-changing. All the pent-up ideas in my brain could suddenly be communicated, could escape to the page. I played piano and understood for the first time why my childhood teacher always said I was out of tempo.

Time moved linearly, and I was participating in its stream in a way I’d never before related to chronology. I took prescribed amphetamines for about 9 months before I decided to stop.

I had a few experiences that led to this choice:

1. The medication wore off over time. My first month was great, but later months had exponentially less effect on my brain. Bumping up my dosage somewhat worked but fucked my sleep. I could only go so high.
2. I lost access to my medication for a few days because of a healthcare failure. That week was one of the foggiest, most helpless experiences I’ve ever had. I remember not being able to engage with any activity whatsoever.
3. While working at Starbucks, I couldn’t help but notice that medication was the only way I could focus enough at my job. But when I got home and wanted to do my own thing? The meds would wear off and I’d be back in brain fog. Double depresso.

Actual footage of me withdrawing from meds:

I have so much respect for those of you who have done the extreme work it takes to balance medication. It just ended up not being for me. As much as meds initially empowered me, they also took too much of my independence.

I decided instead to take a look at my life and try to make some serious changes—to adapt my intellectual life to the brain I have and love and not the brain I was jealous of in others.

Some pretty major life changes

Look. What follows is my own story and what has kinda mostly worked for me. There’s a couple things I need to make clear:

• This isn’t life advice. And I’m certainly not about to start selling organic remedies for real neurodiverse brains that can benefit highly from real medication, science, and professional therapy.
• I write as if I have things figured out. Call it pretentiousness I’m still working to shake. I do not have things figured out.
• I hope parts of my story, as I share them here and in future posts, can be the beginning of conversation and not the end.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the time I up and moved to Egypt.

My freelancing had finally turned into a source of enough revenue for me to throw in the apron at Starbucks. (Not gonna lie—I kept the Sharpie.) I knew, if I was gonna make a self-motivated career work, that I needed to adapt.

Egypt wasn’t a random move, and I can talk about more of the reasons in another post, but suffice it to say for now that I needed an adventure.

I also focused on building up my brain. Others might say building up their business, but for me, I always knew the war with freelancing would be on the inside. I was my biggest threat of failure.

So, I began to change some things:

1. I stopped putting pressure on myself to accomplish work every day. I did what I could in day (sometimes nada), and I relaxed when I was out of brain smoothie. This grew into a feeling of abundance: of rest, of energy, even of motivation. Pouring into myself led, weirdly, to way more productivity than pushing myself.
2. I started adventuring more. Even before the pandemic began, I’d been reticent to see the world outside my home, but I decided that I was depriving my brain of interest by not going out into the world. This meant living in a brand new country, sure, but on a more basic level, it also meant taking a little time near-daily to explore the city I lived in. Stimulating my brain and body.
3. I let my brain choose how it wanted to accomplish work. In the past, I’d shamed myself (or been shamed) for the roundabout ways I finished tasks, often changing goals several times in the middle. Instead, I embraced nonlinearity. I still worked on deadline, but I stopped caring if a workday turned into a ten-hour deep dive into a new Photoshop trick to get a clients’ photos to look cohesive. Taking the scenic route taught me, over time, that I was far better at getting stuff done than I thought.
4. I made sure to choose projects where I didn’t know how to do some of the work. I’d always known I love learning, but I didn’t see myself as a learning-motivated person until more recently. I started getting work done by scaffolding learning throughout the project. Conversely, where possible, I stopped taking on work that wouldn’t teach me anything new.

Which all leads back to where we started: my blog solution. Remember that problem?

Conventional tech wisdom says: use a normal CMS that’s already built for this kind of thing. There’s plenty to choose from.

Alice wisdom, though, pulled me in a different direction. Learning how to make my own tool, and then customizing the hell out of it, felt fun.

See, “harder solutions” aren’t harder for ADHD folks if they’re the more fun path. We can climb any mountain that continues to interest us. It’s the repetition of the highway that brings us down.

So I built a janky thing

I’m writing this blog in Notion, my favorite tool for writing and organizing my thoughts.

You get it. I’m a Notion fangirl. And I was thinking: why switch tools if I don’t have to?

Last year, Notion released their public API, a term which developers use to mean hot damn I can glue this to anything now.

So, I spent some time learning, more time coding, and most time cursing, and I made, well, this.

This thing you’re reading. It’s all typed in Notion. I even have my images in here, right in the order I want them, just by dragging them from my Photos app.

Okay, I’ll stop with the window-ception.

This workflow is already a huge win for me, and I’ve also added:

• Autogenerated table of contents at the beginning of each blog post based on written headers.
• Image alt text (for accessibility with screen readers) generated off of the captions I give images here in Notion.
• Full GIF, emoji 👏, and video support.
• Some custom additions that Notion doesn’t even have like ^superscript and _subscript. (Literally added these just for the ^TM joke earlier.)
• Blocks inside Notion that don’t get published to the site, for taking notes and working on redrafting content.
• And more under development!

The best part about this janky solution is that, even though there’s still bugs, the solution is mine. I know its flaws, and I know how to stretch it and work with it.

And my favorite part? You can work with it, too.

I can invite guest writers to my blog, who need only to draft their writing in their own Notion account, in the very easy-to-use editor, and then share that draft with me to add in the blog. The original author gets to keep access to their Notion draft and tweak it as necessary, which is reflected on the live site.

I’m really looking forward to building this accessible solution out more and collaborating with you. If you’d like to be featured on the blog, just let me know!

Real quick: that section for all the tech people who clicked here excited about Notion CMS tips and tricks, or, a conclusion of sorts

I’m sorry if I clickbaited you. There’s no technical explanation here. I wanna make one soon, I swear. But this blog post is so long already, and it’s like 11:14, and I gotta get to bed.

For now, go and rest your brains. You’re probably overworking.

Much love,

Alice

But now I’m officially launching. So, what’s new?

Why is there a new site?

I started this site in Summer 2022, after hitting the creative limitations of a heavily Frankensteined Squarespace template. It had custom components and styling just glued willy nilly and was looking way too similar to my brain.

I’d been custom-coding client sites for a while, and I wanted to give myself a similar fresh start. I made a huge wishlist, died of overwhelm, and resurrected myself by circling the 10% of things on the wishlist that actually needed to happen for a functional site.

So, I wrote the 1000s of lines of code sometime between navigating a move to the UK from Egypt and starting a new job as a Content Engineer at Vercel. Now I’ve finally used enough weekends and espresso to call it ready for visitors.

That doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, mean you won’t find bugs. I’d really appreciate any feedback on broken shit; you tech folks can log an issue on Github, and the rest of you can spam my various inboxes.

Please make the issue sound like the end of the world, as this increases developer velocity.

Nerding out about design choices

I want a site that makes people smile.

I love a clean-looking application, but boy am I tired of Apple derivative. I think I can count on one hand the fonts I encounter in a day.

And I’m not saying that’s bad, but I definitely want something that lets folks take a break from the rest of the Internet, even if some of those risky designs don’t always work out at first.

The biggest departure from the norm was combining my homepage and menu into one. When you land on the site you have five options. This is risky from a UX perspective: will users bounce off the site because of choice paralysis? But I also come at it from a games philosophy background: when you offer someone a simple choice, they become more invested in the journey to follow.

The real trick, then, is to make sure the choice feels as clear as possible:

• Curious what the site is? About.
• Came here to work with me? Commissions.
• Want to read the blog? …Blog.
• Just wanna chat? Connect.

“Studio” is the option I struggled with. I knew I wanted my own creative work to have a dedicated section, but since my work doesn’t fit into one medium or genre, I needed a word to encapsulate it. I still think it’s more confusing than the others, so if you have any suggestions, I’m open.

The rest of the design, then, needs to tell the user that the choice is super low stakes:

• Pastels, to me, scream relax. Er, say relax soothingly. While I have a dark mode planned, and I’m definitely still developing the site’s visual identity, I feel like the homepage and tops of each landing page give me the palette I’d like to smear over the rest of the site.
• Shape language is another aspect of the site that I want to push. It’s clear on the homepage but quickly lost elsewhere. This will just take time and technical skill. Working with the shapes on the homepage wasn’t an easy programming task (as anyone who’s worked with clip-path might know). I need to find more efficient ways to translate weird shapes to all screen sizes.
• Animations really tell the user it’s okay to have fun. However, animations can just as easily confuse when done poorly. It’s a constant balancing act of fun vs. annoying, and I’ve been on too many sites whose overwrought animations make me disengage with content. I’m definitely still finding what works, and as the person who uses my site the most, I’ve edited animations to be faster far more frequently than slower.

Luckily, in all of this, I have so many great inspirations to look to. I’m constantly on tech Twitter and Awwwards harvesting new techniques. Despite what I’ve said above about sites feeling stale, we live in a wealth of ideas, if you know where to look. I’ll write more about inspirations in the near future.

What to expect from the blog

I’ve been even quieter than usual the past two years on socials, besides the occasional illustration. While there’s a lot of personal reasons for that I hope to write about later, I can safely say now that I’m going to be breaking that silence.

For me, the blog is a space for less edited content than my studio work, which tends to ferment for literal years. It’s a place for me to be me in a very unpolished way, which enables me to engage with my communities without so much pretense.

And I have a lot of communities. I’m passionate about the worlds of web technology, gaming, literary fiction and fantasy, music productions, digital art, poetry, movies, and so much more. Despite all the best advice telling me to pick a niche, I don’t feel the need.

I will, however, develop a categorization system for the blog, so you can easily find content that interests you and skip the rest. That also will help me to write specifically to each audience.

Finally, I’ll be using the blog to keep you posted about studio releases, website updates, and other life changes. I’ve also played with the idea of a newsletter, but maybe that’s too 2010s. Let me know what you prefer!

Waxing philosophical about creating in public

For those of you who were readers of my old site, you may be asking, “Why did you take down all your writing?”

To which I honestly answer, I haven’t coded that part of the site yet.

But it’s also given me a chance to think, deeply, about what I’ve created and where I want to focus my efforts moving forward. About how I want to draw attention to the content I’ve worked so hard on.

While more formal publication has been (and will still be) in the cards for much of my work, I’m also motivated to create my own distribution method to best serve the content.

What do I mean by this? My poems often have long lines or tricky formatting. I’ve sometimes photoshopped stories to creatively destroy the text [link to the Tinker]. While journals have graciously accepted these experimental pieces, I have seen a lot of compromises made to fit the works in print or on the web.

Also, I don’t want to share work when it feels stale to me. Writers often wait years before seeing work accepted, and longer before it’s actually published. Often many years. By the time the readers engages, the author has moved on.

I want to engage with you on work that’s coming from where I am now. Yeah, that’s way more vulnerable, but it also allows me to learn and better my art.

I’m planning to take this a step further in my studio, too: I’m going to publish both finished and unfinished work here, gaining valuable feedback from my very digital community. I’ll mark clearly which is which, so you can decide how you wish to engage.

All this to say that right now you can head over to my studio and see, well, a whole lot of teasers. If you’re interested—great, go read! If you want the tl;dr—lots o’ content coming very soon.

Final thoughts

More than anything, I want to convey how much of this—the site, the content, the very act of creation—is a process with which I’m going to be more transparent. I’m so tired of writing things and not sharing. Of learning and not teaching. My professional life has taught me how to work more in public, how to worry less about perfection and care a lot more about spreading knowledge. How to accept feedback earlier and save a whole bunch of time and effort.

So, expect jank. Expect broken web pages. Expect creative work that has its spark buried under too much text.

But also expect some great things. I’ve always loved rising to a challenge.

It's a peculiar place to be, really. One the one hand, I like to believe my thoughts are valuable to the world, worth sharing out to the endless black hole of social media. One the other hand, there's value in journaling for oneself and keeping those thoughts private, out of the hands of anyone who might misunderstand.

Lately, some things have happened in my life that make me comfortable being a little more raw. I've started working at Vercel as a Content Engineer, an odd sort of mix between developer, writer, and marketer. I spend my weekdays researching the tech world, forming complex opinions, and then distilling them down into company-appropriate language.

There's nothing wrong with that. I actually quite like my coworkers and my job. But I do find myself with a lot of extra opinions that have no place to go. Opinions that tend to range from the creative sphere to the technical to the philosophical and back again all in one sitting.

Which means they're not really appropriate to publish anywhere but my own blog, where you, dear reader, can choose to plumb the depths or skip it entirely. I like the idea of writing a bit where I'm not beholden to any rules. Where I can say fuck in the same sentence I wax all too eloquent about a recent graphic novel. Where I can be me.

So, stay tuned. Like a lot of things on the site, I'll be developing this for a bit before I release content. Just because I get to be myself here doesn't mean I won't be editing.