Finally done with my finals! Earlier this morning I was flippin’ out at all the stuff I have to do before Tuesday, but now, with one less thing off my load, I feel better!

(Actually, I also dipped out on my writing group and another appointment, but!)

The point still stands that this morning, I was crying while getting my hair done (which freaked my brother out, lol. “Why are you crying? Your hairs gonna be fine!” said he.) But now I’m relieved. So the lesson is dump more stuff when you find yourself crying at the hair salon.

You might have thought I’d say BEFORE you cry at the hair salon, but don’t worry about that. As an almost psychologist, I can report that hair dressers, as a population, are highly neurotic. Anxiety, depression, mood disorders, personality disorders, addiction… those are the good stylists that you’d want doing your hair. All that to say, if you break down at a salon, you’re in good company, so don’t worry about it.

Or maybe I just don’t mind breaking down in public. Maybe that’s been what the last three months have been about teaching me. There has been a lot of crying—big crying—in public, around strangers. And I think I’ve finally let myself off the hook for it.

I think I’m ready to be a bit of a fuck up.

I think for… ever, at least in my adult life, I’ve always subconsciously thought: What can I bring to the table? How can I be a better friend/girlfriend/daughter/student/protege? How can I make sure everyone knows I deserve to exist? How can I make sure I can never NOT be loved?

But… I think I prefer the excitement of imperfection over the anxiety of near perfection. Being excitable and passionate and energetic and overly sincere are strengths. And I don’t mean that in a generic, turn your negatives into positives way. I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that my ability to be an obnoxious hater and debate my friends about stupid shit like X-Men ‘97 makes my life more fun and exciting. I think writing juvenile blogs and taking really bloomy pictures and posting my doodles and pixel art is just… more fun than not doing it. Eating half a watermelon is more fun that not eating half a watermelon. Going on vacation is more fun than being afraid of dying on a plane and leaving my life unfinished/unproven/imperfect. But being really scared and crying on airplanes is kind of fun, too. It’s big feeling, and I appreciate the sympathy from strangers, to be honest.

But I think I just want life to feel bigger, like it did when I was a kid. So this is one path to try.

I feel like I live in fantasy most of the time. 

I recently had a big media fast for an addictions class. I was off social media, YouTube, and video games for 3 weeks. A pretty long time compared to my usual fasts.

I thought I’d naturally become more productive during this time, but I mostly just watched TV and read an ungodly amount of fanfiction. When I exercised, I listened to music and just zoned out.

By the end of the process, I found myself inexplicably sad and unsettled.

Now, this isn’t the only thing happening during these three weeks and weird shit happens in summer. I haven’t seen my friends in a few months, and I feel disconnected and unimportant to other people’s lives, which is the reality of things. The world does go on without me, it turns out. It’s a blessing (the literal weight of the world has never been used as a metaphor for anything positive), but it challenges the way I view relationships. 

I pride myself in being supportive. If I love you and you need any-damn-thing? I’m right there. I think that’s an admirable quality, and I take pride in the fact that I can whole heartedly cheer for other people’s victories without any residual resentment. (As a side note, as someone who lives mostly in fantasy, I think I tend to view my friends and loved ones through a lens of potential that has yet to be realized, so seeing them move in any way toward what I envision for them is not only satisfying and easy to cheer for, but a relief to some strange part of my mind.)

But I also think it makes me feel safe. ‘Cause love alone, as an inactive force of nature, is pretty weak in the end, right? (Like, it’s not enough to love the dog. You have to pet the dog. That’s what I mean by active or inactive). Love doesn’t stop terrible things from happening. It’s not even guaranteed to everyone, so it’s unjust on top of everything else. But most importantly, there’s no love large or meaningful enough to fix everything I hate about myself.

So I’m also trying to be in a new way. A way that accepts people at their baseline and doesn’t wish them past it. It’s kinder, I think, since it doesn’t push my ideals onto other people. But it also feels colder. Unnatural. Maybe it’s a part of dropping that “cute phalanx”—standing on my own two psychic feet instead of kneeling under my shield. All that to say, I’ve been battling my perfectionism on a whole new front. And all my soldiers are really whiny and probably won’t even write an important mid-20th century literature at the end of it.

But what does perfectionism have to do with my fantasy issue?

No idea. It’s only that I noticed just how much time I spend on useless fantasy on top of everything else. Not to be confused with guided fantasy that I use for writing. Or active fantasy (Jungian stuff). I’m talking about world-saving God-like fantasies. Fantasies of success, fantasies of pouring unlimited money on everyone’s problems, fantasies of having some skill and using it to gain unlimited superficial admiration.

Honestly, they’re perfectionist fantasies about control—controlling the human race, my circumstances, how I’m perceived, other people’s problems. While these fantasies are fun, I don’t think they’re helping.

Fantasy is necessary for someone like me, but the thought of even changing that is daunting. I feel like, to be a good counselor, I need to know this stuff about myself, but is change necessary in ever facet? Or is this just another facet of my life for me to obsess about and try to control? Where does self-awareness meet self destruction?

I’ve recently decided to keep things less cute. Cuteness has been my social phalanx for many years, but it’s also an anxious defense mechanism. Cute or not cute was a binary shortcut for self worth allowing me to hide my innards from people who have no time or inclination to understand them, but I think it’s been holding me back for awhile.

Cuteness served a purpose once, so I don’t write it off, but I just don’t want it to be the default way I stand in the world. With this new mindset, aesthetics need only be for fun, which is what they should be in the first place. It’ll take practice, but true connection is too valuable to miss out on, and I will miss out if I chase superficial validation. I think it’s worth the effort to change and find out.

Well, the month started with a physical and mental injury that I won’t go into detail about other than to say they both started with a little twinge of pain before exploding into something totally immobilizing.

I’ve taken my pains as a good excuse to not write. Instead, I’ve started thinking about my website.

I love the revival of the “old internet”. I love how honest personal websites were. The aesthetics ranged from so minimal it was just font on a blank background to unnavigable glitter bombs. People blogged about deep and trivial things and made shrines—I forgot we called them shrines!—to their interests.

I’ve become terribly nostalgic about it. I love that the early internet’s dominant culture was one of creation. No one had to share. Very few people were making money off their websites. But people put stuff out there because that’s what was done. If there was any art you were even slightly interested in, the internet was the place for it, regardless of quality. And if you didn’t have anything original to post, you made a fan site, or you curated a bunch of sites about a topic you liked. A personal site could be one or all of these things.

I miss everyone casually blogging, too. With strangers' blogs, there was a fantasy of a person and a life behind it. With friends' blogs, there was a depth and humanity that I rarely got to encounter when we just hung out. But blogging turned to vague posting, and then lifestyle-curating, and then engagement baiting. Personal websites did have a few toes dipped in those pools, but these days we are underwater.

I keep a diary. Several, really. I like looking back on time in an organized, linear way, but I also just like making stuff spur of the moment. I may or may not stick with a format or commit to learning to draw or make collages, but I think it’s the promise of spontaneous, personal creativity that appeals to me. 

But when I try to post online, that feeling goes out the window. 

Somewhere alone the way, I ingested the idea that social media accounts need to have a niche. Predictable content is required if you want it to grow. No one wants to follow a poetry account and then be suddenly inundated with mediocre pictures of a garden. What you create is about the potential audience that wants it.

That’s all well and good, but I always get caught up in this web of, “What kind of specific, niche content actually represents me? What do I want to commit to making that will allow people to understand me deeply as a person?” Not everyone wants, needs, or desires to be deeply understood by people who happen across their socials, but I feel like that’s the only appeal social media has for me—the opportunity to connect to other people despite the limits of physicality. A way for people to know me without being stopped by shyness or etiquette or time and space.

And after a few days of admiring the early internet, I think I finally understand my struggles. Nothing represents me. No one thing I make, no one aesthetic, no one artistic medium. I am pictures of flowers and pixel art and writing and amateur stabs at different aesthetics and low quality videos. I’ve always admired people who have callings, who are good at one thing and seamlessly transition from amateur to professional as they age, seemingly never agonizing over the best way to get the maximum amount of fulfillment out of their life before it’s over.

I am not that person. At any given moment, I’m writhing in existential dread. I want to connect with others in a deep and meaningful way through writing, but I want to be more than that, too. I want to express the part of myself that gets excited about new things. I think people should know that I can be kinda corny, or an obsessed nerd. I just don’t want to be this flattened, consumable thing that churns out fiction, even if that fiction is good or somehow gets popular one day. I want to make real contact with this nebulous, once human entity that is the internet. Because it contacted me first. And it gave me things. Feelings. Information. Experiences. All things I treasure.

I think the best way to share that idealistic and improbable vision of my digital self is a website. I can keep things organized while also feeling like I’m representing a more cohesive collection of self. And if I feel like it, I can always make a bunch of accounts for all my weird niches on social media later.

That’s where I am with my digital identity right now. And now that I’ve written all this bellyaching and idealizing of the internet, it just feels like an elaborate ruse to keep myself from doing the work I’m really meant to be doing, which is editing Eulily. But I can have hobbies. At least 1,000 of them, since that’s how many pages squarespace allows you to have. 

C.E.

“The Year of Adventure.” That’s my theme  for 2026. I’m doing two adventurous things that will require great strength and bravery, so I might as well go all in!

My flagship adventures are self-publishing a book and going on a school trip to the Netherlands. That might seem basic to some, but I’m a cautious, arguably paranoid, definitely neurotic, individual.

I’ve never traveled without friends or family before. I won’t be totally alone because I’ll have my classmates and a professor, but I’ve never met any of them. The details about the trip are also pretty vague—I’ve gotten no information about it other than a bill. If I didn’t know this trip happened every year, I’d be worried. But I’m not worrying. I’m being adventurous, see? 

The book though, that’s an adventure. I am afraid… Not because I’m sensitive about people reading my work. I don’t think I’m scared of wasted effort, either, ‘cause what else would I be doing? I think, to know the root of my fear, I need to know my goal. And my goal is… to make someone feel about my book the way I feel about other peoples books. I want to move people, make them feel things. I don’t know if I can succeed in that and that’s where the fear comes in. I’m also afraid that a deadline will make me glaze over areas of weakness that I might have caught otherwise.

I am scared, but I think I can live with the uncertainty. I read once that discomfort is good for your brain. At the very least, it forms character. It's not like I’m seeking out cannibal dinner parties or ax-murderer camping trips. Travel and publishing are healthy, every-day kind of horrors.

Happy new year!

C.E.