happy wednesday, i guess.

i didn’t feel like doing anything today. and i know, i know, that these days, the unknown and uncertain ones, are the most important days of my life. of anyone’s life. but they’re hard. they’re unclear. no matter how many five-year goals i set, no matter how many clarity prompts i answer in my journal, it’s still fucking unclear.

have i already written about this? the feeling of standing on a tiny boat that won’t keep still. i felt it even when i had a succesfull, stable job. this feeling, being clueless about the future, anxious about it, keeps coming back. and from the moment i wake up until i go to sleep, a single day holds all of it: moments of sadness, small annoyances, and then sparks, inspiration, something close to bliss.

in '“my liberation notes”, the main girl says that if she adds up all the happy, blissful moments of a day and they come to five minutes, she lived well that day. i think about that a lot. and sometimes i add up my little moments of calmness and content and even joy and if they mad five minutes i am grateful for that day.

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i think life itself is quite simple, and most of us love to complicate it. it’s sad and it’s beautiful, these moments of now. i live in an apartment i don’t like. i drink instant coffee i don’t like. some days i feel like this isn’t the aesthetic, isn’t the life, that fits me, and i get sad and i self-sabotage. and then a moment like this one comes, when i don’t care. i really don’t care what’s outside. i find my own thoughts interesting — though that isn’t entirely healthy either. sometimes we should leave ourselves alone. stop digging. stop circlicng in the same loops over and over. go outside, touch grass, hug trees, talk to people and actually connect, help someone, find a new angle to look at things from.

most people write about these seasons — uncertain, waiting, stagnant — after they’ve come out of them. after it led them somewhere shiny and high, and they can say that without the hardship they wouldn’t be who they are now: stronger, better, deeper. and people like hearing these words from someone who made it. not from someone average, still struggling through the same uncertain days.

but i want to write to you from inside the uncertainty. i want to be that average person who reminds you.

i was actually planning to write a comforting essay. the kind that feels like a hug from an old friend — the warm, tight, long embrace that says you’re not alone in this. i don’t want to write to teach you anything. i want to write to be there for you and comfort you, the way only words can from this far. to send you kindness in its simplest form, and to pray for you. sometimes i feel like i have so much love to give, the platonic one, like an older sister maybe. it may all sound naive, performative even, pretentious. but right now i want to hear these words myself, and give them to whoever needs them.

so, in this moment of uncertainty, whatever you’re going through, even if you blame yourself, even if you want to quit, even if you have no energy left to fight, it’s okay. it’s okay to quit. it’s okay to not be perfect; no one is. it’s okay to give up, to run away for a while. it’s okay to feel the feelings you’re afraid to feel, and to accept them. it’s okay to feel shame for your past, and i think it’s brave to feel shame.

in june i wrote that resistance is the work, i still believe it. but some seasons you don’t have the resistance in you, and putting something down is not the same as giving up on yourself.

i want this world, and the people in it, to be kind to each other. to be happy, more forgiving, more accepting.

even if you don’t come out of this more successful, more beautiful, wiser — it’s still okay. there’s no way you won’t learn and grow from these times anyway. but one thing for sure: stay aware, stay present, no matter how much you want to escape this reality. and in those moments, if words could hold someone, these would be the warmest hug i could give you.

the uncertain season is the hardest one for me. but it’s needed, i know.

yesterday i was watching we are all trying here and got inspired to write, so i took screenshots of their dialogues and monologues. the line that touched me was about writers and their “disgusting hope of being seen”, when life falls apart, they write one beautiful sentence about it, and they’re happier about that sentence than they are grieving what actually happened.

i thought about this while writing. maybe that’s me too, taking a hard, unclear wednesday and turning it into something pretty. i don’t know. but i still mean everything i write. i once said i didn’t want to write only when i’m sad or down, and yet these are the times writing helps me most.

i just want to say that you’re loved. you’re enough, simply because you were born into this world. you’re wanted — in some spiritual way, you were meant to live this life. and i’m glad you’re trying, as much as you can, and living.

it’s still wednesday. the apartment and the coffee are still the ones i don’t like, and nothing is clearer than it was this morning. i still feel like i’m standing on a tiny boat in unstoppable waves. but writing this to you was one of those five minutes of mine. so maybe, a little, i lived well.

and if you’re feeling the same, standing in this void of uncertainty right now, wherever you are — i can’t reach you, but i can write to you. so let this letter be the hug, the kind a friend gives when there’s nothing left to say, warm and long, until the waves feel a little calmer. and tonight i’ll pray for you — that your dreams find their way to you, one by one, even the ones you’ve stopped dreaming.

it is similar to turkish gönül, for heart, soul, spirit. not the physical organ, that’s kalp, but the emotional and spiritual center of a person. gönlü genç, young at heart. gönül almak, to win someone’s heart back, to console them. but when turks pay attention, they use a different word: dikkat. so even though we’re all in the turkic language tree, there are small nuances like this. now i am curious how kazakh, uzbek or other turkic languages say pay attention.

and that realization stayed with me, even though i’ve been using it for my whole life, especially in work, in the context of attention problems of students. so it never made me even think of the word itself. and i just realised that the english word i never thought about deeply, attention is actually ad + tendere, latin for toward + to stretch. to pay attention is to stretch yourself toward something. even english, without meaning to, ended up close to what it is in my language.

so now i see it in a different light, context has been updated, it is really essential, because if paying attention means turning your heart toward something, then the question isn’t really what do i focus on. it’s where does my heart go all day. it is also fun that we use turning your attention not paying or giving, it is like turning your whole body when you talk to someone which is a sign of respect and attentiveness.

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our attention is everything. we pray for an hour a day, and watch tv for hours, and scroll for hours, and work for hours. does that mean we’re slaves to everything, starting with work, capitalism, media? companies are doing everything they can to get our attention. back in 1971, the economist herbert simon already wrote that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. the more there is to look at, the less of us there is to give it to.

now even i am writing this to get your attention. of course it’s nice to just write and post it to the void, but now that i got your attention, you relating to the things i wrote & felt and your “көңүл” like i mentioned, i want to get it again, because i don’t want to feel like my effort, focus and attention is wasted, gone for nothing. however, even if i don’t get any attention, i will still post more, because i am learning to separate my ego from my success or online presence or likes. i mean i’m here competing with so many interesting creators, and sometimes just the algorithm. we all are…

so we’re all competing for each other’s attention, and yet i give mine away so easily. i’m an avoider. when reality gets too heavy, i don’t sit with it, i give my heart to random things just to cope. there’s this big project with a friend, a colleague, that i’ve been avoiding for a while now. i’m afraid of it, so instead of sitting with that fear, and actually doing it, i give my attention to anything else. i’m not giving my attention to these things because i love them. i’m giving it because sometimes it’s easier than looking at my own life.

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think about giving your heart and soul to something. would you want to give it to random reels, or tiktok gossip, or brainrot content? wouldn’t you want to give your heart to something meaningful, something you value? do you even know your values, the ones that shape your life? do i?

scientists estimate our senses take in about 11 million bits of information every second, and we consciously process only around 40 or 50. so much of what reaches us never reaches our awareness. it just goes somewhere underneath, and we don’t even know or choose it.

and it isn’t only content or external. it’s our own thoughts too. harvard researchers found that we spend almost half our waking hours thinking about something other than what we’re doing, and that a wandering mind is usually an unhappy one. their data even suggested the wandering came first, that it’s often the cause of the unhappiness, not just something we do to escape it.

mine wanders to the same places. i still sometimes have a victim inner voice, less now than before. when things don’t go my way, i start hearing things like see, you’re unlucky, the world is against you, if only you’d grown up in a more understanding society, bla bla bla. and i’d give my attention to that voice for hours too, analysing it, fighting it, trying to argue it down.

there’s a famous experiment inspired by a line from dostoevsky: try not to think of a white bear. people told not to think about it ended up thinking about it more than once a minute. and when they were later allowed to think about it freely, it came back even stronger than for people who’d never suppressed it in the first place. the resisting actually fed it.

last week i had those feelings and negative thoughts again, and instead of analysing them like i used to, i just accepted them and felt them. and they really went away. those thoughts don’t determine me. i wrote about this more deeply in my emotional regulation post, the accepting, the labeling, the whole mechanism of why naming a feeling helps us.

this is also most of what meditation is, i think. not clearing your mind, not becoming a different, calmer person. just noticing. you sit, your mind wanders, you notice it wandered, and you come back. that’s the whole point. richard davidson’s lab found that after three months of this kind of training, meditators got measurably better at catching things that would normally slip past their attention entirely. their brains learned to let go of one thing fast enough to notice the next. awareness itself is trainable. noticing is trainable.

just try getting better at recognising your pattern, and that voice will grow smaller and smaller, and maybe one day go away completely. i write these things because i want to be aware, and i want my readers to be aware too. without judgement. just be aware of what your inner voice is, where you give your attention, what values you have, what gives you energy and what drains it. these are the things we can do, and then we can start living aligned with them.

being attentive isn’t only about defense, catching a bad thought before it drags you somewhere. it’s also what lets you really see. you can feel humiliation, frustration, sadness, deep in your own ego, and then you get distracted and see how beautifully a bird is flying. if you really watch it, track it, you realize there are bigger things than your tiredness, your hurt. now you’re not trapped in the cage of your own ego, you’re connected to the world again.

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the philosopher iris murdoch called this “unselfing”. she wrote about looking out her window anxious and resentful, then noticing a hovering kestrel, and her whole self-preoccupation disappearing into it, nothing left but the bird. she described this kind of attention, in her 1964 essay the idea of perfection, as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”

and it’s not only the about hard days. the good, ordinary moments need our attention too, or they just pass by. psychologist fred bryant spent decades studying something he calls savoring, the capacity to notice and stay with a positive moment instead of letting it pass by unattended. his research links it to real, lasting increases in happiness. it’s not about more good things happening to you. it’s about how much heart you give the ones that already exist.

but to get to that point of attentiveness, we first need something else: boredom, and doing nothing. this might be the hardest thing in the modern, capitalistic world. i wrote a whole essay on this, the difference between rest and numbing, real rest versus fake rest, and how even our rest gets hijacked into something productive. the ability to sit in deep boredom, actually doing nothing, is a superpower precisely because of that.

this isn’t the wandering mind from earlier. that drifts off and makes us unhappy. this is the opposite: fully present, doing nothing, nothing productive. sitting in a park with nothing to do and actually being there for it. one study had people copy numbers out of a phone book, pure boredom, before asking them to brainstorm uses for a paper cup. the bored group came up with more ideas than the group that skipped it. “boredom always precedes a period of great creativity,” robert pirsig wrote, and i see the truth in this, because the days i actually let myself be bored helped me come up with different ideas.

to live a full, full life is not about productivity, which i only realised recently. this is what i mean by attention being the heart turning toward something. it’s not a technique, it’s just where you let your heart be. then the mundane starts to feel magical, and noticing it, i think, is closer to actually living than most of what fills my days. instead of flowing, running through life, we need to stop, pause, to notice the life outside of us.

attention also decides who and how we actually connect with. some people really see you. they’re the ones who remember what you told them three months ago over coffee, something small you’d forgotten yourself, and that’s exactly what makes their gifts the best, their presence feel like something magical. some of my cousins can’t stand their spouses anymore because they’re constantly on their phones. and when you’re constantly on your phone, you don’t even notice the things you once loved about that person. even a movie or any content. if i’m half-watching something while scrolling, i still get the plot, the main points. but i don’t love it. and when i rewatch it, fully in it, i have a totally different opinion of it.

what you focus on, what you pay attention to, grows. that’s why we should be more mindful of what we give our attention to.

so where does your attention go?

how i’m practicing being more attentive

1. i stopped analysing my inner voice for hours and just let it be felt instead. accepting it made it better than arguing with it ever did. i am just present, attentive, aware.

2. i noticed where my attention actually goes, not where i think it goes. random reels, tiktok, brainrot content seem to drain my energy, and none of it was ever about loving those things.

3. like i mentioned, i am trying to separate my ego from the numbers. i noticed when my attention was on how many people saw and liked something instead of the thing itself, and how much worse it made me feel, chasing something i couldn’t control. now i’m focused on the process, on how much i actually love writing.

4. sometimes i just sit in a park and notice things. the color of the leaves still on a branch versus the ones already on the ground. middle school girls doing each other’s makeup, laughing on the next bench.

5. sometimes it’s walking without my phone, just watching where my feet land, watching the trees, the sunlight, feeling the wind.

6. sometimes it’s deep reading, an actual book, with my phone far away. no skimming, no checking anything between pages, just staying with writer’s thoughts for a while, taking notes when i get distracted.

7. sometimes it’s an evening with family or friends where no one reaches for a gadget, and i actually see the people in front of me instead of half-seeing them between scrolls.

көңүл буруу. turning your heart toward something. every day my heart turns somewhere, whether i choose it or not. i just want to choose it more often.

i want my attention to go to the things i love: writing, reading deeply, researching, learning. and the hardest thing for me, executing.

i will write more about the attention economy next time, and dive deeper into the neuroscience of it. but for now, please leave your thoughts. i’m interested in what you give your attention to.

p.s. if you want to join a community of like minded people, i started a small reading club on patreon. we read one book a month, talk about it, and try to show up consistently. come join us ♡

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“don’t cry. you’ll cry when i die.” that’s what my mother would say when i cried as a teen, and i cried a lot. i was a very sensitive kid growing up. then my teacher would say her own version: only the daughters of spoiling parents cry.

i had no idea what it meant to validate a feeling, or that a feeling could be valid at all. i grew up in a household that was busy, lukewarm, emotionless, or that only showed the “good” emotions, and even those had rules. the good ones were merely respect and kindness it seemed to. affection, open love, even happiness that was too loud, was seen as shameful, almost vulgar. when i was a baby, my grandparent would get angry at my dad for being affectionate with me. so it wasn’t only the bad feelings that had to stay quiet. it was most of them. and when i got angry, i heard don’t be loud. don’t overreact.

so naturally, showing any kind of uncomfortable emotion was seen as capricious. a spoiled trait. but i was still sensitive, still angry, and i still showed that i wasn’t okay, only when it was already too much, when it spilled over. and every time, i carried the same deeply rooted feeling of shame: something must be wrong with me.

then i grew up in an all girls boarding school, and some girls around me were even quieter. they kept their hardships inside and let them fade there. others would rebel or cause problems, which were dealt with quietly. this is how the average person grows up in our society, where public opinion and performance matter the most.

the first time i heard the words emotional intelligence was when i started studying psychology at uni. that there are no good or bad emotions, only signals. and that by learning to regulate them, you could change almost everything. impulsive spending, instant gratification, overreacting, self-sabotaging: all of it was somehow tied to emotions, to feelings that never got resolved.

in my previous essays, i wrote about knowing your thoughts. this one is about what comes after, regulating them. i almost wrote controlling, which tells you a lot about where i come from. i’ll get to why that word is wrong.

knowing is not the same as doing

so here i am. i know all of this. i studied it. i can explain the amygdala to you in four languages. and last saturday, after a whole day of bedrotting, i opened my journal, because that’s where i’ve always taken my feelings, and wrote:

day n of being sad. unmotivated, down, apathetic, not interested in anything.

then, like always, i wrote a goodbye letter. my journals are full of them, to shame, to regret, to whatever hurts too much to feel. i forgive it, thank it for the lesson, close the page. this one was to regret, which kept coming back no matter how many times i let it go:

countless ink, countless paper, countless tears, wasted on you. but you keep coming back, as if nothing happened.

and somewhere in the middle of it, a harsher voice showed up:

ungrateful. like a kid. like a spoiled adult who can’t see how many blessings she has.

i could name all of it, date it, explain where it came from. none of that knowing got me out of bed and do what i was intending to.

i used to think that was a failure of awareness, that if i’d really known it, it wouldn’t have happened. so i did what i always do with a problem: i studied it deeper, better. and decided to write about it, it is the best thing to learn something and remember it for a long long time. even though i already knew most of the techniques and exercises and prompts. my problem was overthinking and overrationalizing. i would sit with my feelings, detaching myself and rationalizing them for hours, without ever fully feeling them.

it looked like processing, from the outside and from the inside too. it took me a long time to see it as the same old rule, grown up. as a child i was told don’t be so sensitive. as an adult i told myself be reasonable. both meant the same thing: don’t be in it.

for most of my life, regulating an emotion meant not showing it. keep your face still, keep your voice down, deal with it later, alone, ideally never. people called it being strong, and it worked, in the sense that nobody could tell. but stanford psychologist james gross tested exactly this. people watched upsetting film clips; some were told to hide their reactions, others weren’t. the ones who hid it didn’t feel any less. their faces went quiet, but their bodies showed more stress. hiding a feeling doesn’t make it go away, it just adds the work of hiding on top.

my goodbye letters were the same thing, just on paper. and of course regret kept coming back. in daniel wegner’s famous white bear study, people were asked not to think about a white bear, and the more they pushed it away, the more it came back. trying to keep something out leaves part of your mind checking whether it’s gone, which keeps it even closer.

and to my unpleasant surprise, the thing i love most, thinking, overanalyzing my emotions, doing the work on my thoughts, can backfire too. psychologist thomas borkovec spent years studying worry, and noticed that it happens mostly in words rather than images. in one experiment, thinking about something frightening in words seemed to dampen people’s bodily reaction to it. his conclusion was uncomfortable: overthinking works partly as avoidance. while you’re busy talking about the feeling, you don’t have to be inside it, and because it feels productive, you never suspect you’re making it worse.

i am a why person. i could spend a whole evening on why, with a pen in my hand and a psychology degree’s worth of vocabulary. why am i like this, where does it come from, what does it say about me. and meanwhile the feeling itself just waited, unfelt, for me to finish my analysis.

the opposite of all this hiding, suppressing, rationalizing, as i slowly learned, isn’t exploding. it’s acceptance: letting the feeling be there without arguing with it, shaming it, explaining it, or rushing to close it. it sounds passive, but it’s surprisingly hard. it means noticing where the feeling lives in your body, the tight throat, the heavy chest, the heat in your face, and staying there with it. not asking why. not deciding what it means about you. i thought i’d been doing this for years. but i’d been just sitting next to my feelings, taking notes, analysing and even judging.

and sitting with a feeling isn’t the same as drowning in it. drowning is when the feeling becomes the whole story, when one sad day turns into day n, and then into this is just how my life is now. somehow i managed to do both: hide from my feelings for years, and then, when they finally got through, sink into them for days. sitting with it is somewhere in between. the feeling is there, fully, and so am i, present with it, processing it, and letting it move through my body until it passes on its own.

name it to tame it. this is usually the first thing anyone learns about emotional regulation, and for good reason. in 2007, ucla psychologist matthew lieberman found that putting a feeling into words calms the amygdala, the brain’s threat detector. a few years later, he and his colleagues tested it on people afraid of spiders. they stood near a live tarantula, and the ones who said their feelings out loud, i’m anxious and scared of this ugly spider, calmed down more and got closer to it a week later than the ones who tried to distract themselves or think about it differently.

but naming only works if you have the words, and a lot of us don’t. the words i grew up with weren’t names for feelings, they were loud, spoiled, overreacting. they measured how much space a feeling took up, never what it actually was. so i learned the volume, not the feeling. and what everyone called overreacting was usually everything i hadn’t let myself feel, coming out at once.

that’s why i think emotional literacy should be taught as seriously as reading. most of us can name all the kinds of coffee, latte, cappuccino, americano, espresso, raf, mocha, macchiato, frappe, cold brew, iced latte, bumble coffee but only three feelings: good, bad, tired. the more words you have, disappointed, lonely, overwhelmed, ashamed, jealous, the easier it gets to know what’s actually happening inside you, and what to do about it.

so what does regulating actually look like, if it isn’t hiding or explaining?

harvard psychologist alison wood brooks had people do things that make almost anyone anxious: sing karaoke in front of a stranger, give a speech, solve math problems under time pressure. before starting, some said out loud “i am calm,” and others said “i am excited.” the excited group did better at all of it. anxiety and excitement feel almost the same in the body, fast heartbeat, heat, alertness. telling yourself to calm down asks your body to switch all of that off, which it can’t do on command. telling yourself you’re excited just helps you to read the same feeling differently.

this is called cognitive reappraisal, and i wrote about it in how to crave doing hard things. i used it for work, for the boring, important things, but never on the feelings i’d been taught were too much. those, i only knew how to calm down.

and this is why controlling was the wrong word. controlling is what i’d been doing my whole life, holding it down, keeping it still, keeping it far away. regulating is more like listening to what the feeling is trying to tell me, and then choosing what to do with it. the thing i learned at uni and never really believed: there are no good or bad emotions, just signals.

but i want to be careful here, because it’s easy to turn this into one more thing to fail at. now i’m not only sad, i’m sad and also regulating it wrong. i could see it in that saturday entry. spoiled. my teacher’s word, twenty years later, in my own handwriting. i answered it by writing that i’m grateful, i’m blessed, and i meant it. but the sadness itself never got heard. it got called a lesson i failed, and something nicer got put on top of it. same as keeping my face still, just in words.

how i’m learning to regulate my emotions

1. feel it in the body first. when something hits, notice where it is, a tight throat, a heavy chest, a hot face, and stay there for a minute before you start explaining it. and if you’re at work, or at a family dinner, and it’s not the moment, that’s okay. quietly notice it, i’m hurt, and come back to it later, when it’s safe and make sure you actually come back.

2. build your feelings vocabulary. instead of “i feel bad,” try to find the exact word: disappointed, jealous, lonely, scared, embarrassed. “i feel bad” tells you nothing. “i feel hurt because i wasn’t invited” tells you exactly what’s going on. if you get stuck, a simple feelings wheel helps more than you’d think. and actually reading helps a lot. novels are full of feelings described from the inside, with words most of us never use out loud, and you get to practice understanding someone else’s inner world, page by page. a meta-analysis of 14 studies found that reading fiction gives a small but significant boost to how well people understand others’ thoughts and feelings. the more feelings you’ve seen named on a page, the easier it gets to name your own.

3. keep a small mood journal. a few lines, once or twice a day, while the feeling is still there or fresh in your memory:

   • what am i feeling, or what did i feel?

   • where do i feel it in my body?

   • what happened right before?

   • how strong is it, from 1 to 10?

   • what does it need from me? rest, food, a person, a walk, a cry, a boundary?

   after a couple of weeks, you start seeing patterns: which days, which people, which hours.

4. once a week, dig a little deeper. look back at your daily notes and pick the moment your reaction felt much bigger than what happened. then ask, with curiosity instead of judgment, the way you’d ask a friend:

   • when have i felt exactly this before? how old was i?

   • what did i need back then that i didn’t get?

   • whose voice is this, mine or someone i grew up with?

   what kind of why matters more than we think. research by edward watkins found that “why am i like this” keeps people stuck, while “what does this remind me of” helps them move.

5. take care of the basics, and tell someone. feelings are much harder to hold when you haven’t slept, eaten or moved. after one night without sleep, the amygdala reacts about 60% more strongly to upsetting images. and on the bad days, tell one person, even one sentence: i’m having a hard day. we were not built to handle everything behind the doors, quietly, and alone.

of course, i haven’t figured this out fully. i still reach for the pen before i let myself feel anything, and some days i still hear don’t be loud, it’s not that serious, we can do better before i even know what i’m feeling. but sometimes now i let the feeling come first, and the explanation later.

i’ve written so many letters to my feelings, because somehow i only want to write when i feel the worst. i don’t think i’ll write them like that anymore. i’d love to write more on the days i feel amused, enchanted, blessed too.

that’s also why i want to take my daily gratitude journaling seriously, not to cover up the hard days, but to train my brain to notice the good ones. our brains are wired to catch what’s wrong much faster than what’s right, so noticing the good takes practice. in one study, people who wrote down a few things they were grateful for each week felt better about their lives than those who wrote about hassles or neutral events.

and next time regret comes back, as it always does, i’ll let myself feel it instead of suppressing it, because suppressing and ignoring has never led me anywhere good. maybe the work isn’t making it disappear, but letting it stay for a while when it does.

for my dearest readers, i would love to ask: what were you told about your feelings growing up? do you still hear it? and whose voice is it, most of the times?

p.s. if you want to join a community of like minded people, i started a small reading club on patreon. we read one book a month, talk about it, and try show up consistently. come join us ♡

i noticed it most in my creative work, the things i do just because i love them. which is strange, because no one is forcing me to do those. and it got stranger when i realized i wasn’t only avoiding what was hard. i was pulling away from the things that were actually working for me.

so, self-sabotage. i wanted to write about it because it kept getting in the way of posting here, which feels a little ironic now. it also sits right between two things i’ve been circling: metacognition, and the emotional regulation piece i’m still working on.

in may, i decided to challenge myself one last time (not the last, of course): i would take substack seriously and publish 3–4 essays a month. before that, i had 5 posts in 2 years and 14 subscribers, sometimes dropping to 13, then back to 14 again. then it started. i started posting consistently, and the results were better than i ever imagined. in a couple of weeks i had 100 subscribers, which hadn’t even crossed my mind, then 3,000, then 4,000 and even more. oh my god, is this even real? two of my posts, i want to do everything, but i do nothing and how to crave doing hard things, even went kinda viral? i started seeing them recommended here and there, not believing it, and the comments, people relating to me, and so on and so on. what i thought were my worst days started turning into my best pieces. may and june were perfect, three posts each month, and more readers were finding my work. every one of those pieces left me feeling lighter, free, like i could do anything. august also started well, i remember being so content and happy with my consistent posting and how it affected me that i wrote this draft in my journal.

august 6, 2026..

everyone should make shitty art, in my case, shitty essays. i just wrote and shared this post, and if you look it up, or just skim through, or even read till the end — it’s useless. like, no one, literally no one needs it. maybe someone who has also failed at life will find it relatable, but still, it’s pointless, in my opinion.

but i posted it anyway. why, you’d ask? i could have shared better things, like neuroplasticity or metacognition, following my successful article and essay. but i went with this one: first, just to put it out; second, to release my creativity. yes, this is my therapy. writing itself heals.

i realised it fully when i published mid-year reflections. that was my 6th piece after i decided to take substack more seriously and show up consistently; before that, i’d post one every two months or even less. the day it went out, i finally understood the saying that you feel stuck, stagnant, sad, lost, everything in between, when you don’t express your creativity. like it rots inside and leaks through our thoughts and body, even makes us sick.

after continuously putting my thoughts out into the void — like i didn’t have followers; i just checked, and i actually had 24 then, about 100x fewer than now — i felt so good. so free and relieved, like both my body and mind had let go of a tension that had been there forever. i was so happy that i didn’t even notice the 40°c scorching heat at 2 p.m. while i was walking to meet my friends. that was when it hit me: aha, so this is what i’ve been missing my whole life?

so i decided that i’d write just badly and publish anyway. and somehow the “hard things” essay got lots of love from you. it was such a pleasant surprise. i was like, wow. people are actually reading. now that i have more subscribers, it’s scarier to hit publish, but i still did it with this one, and then immediately got urge to write this in my journal. it’s honestly not a good piece; nobody needs it, and this isn’t me being humble or anything, i’m just being realistic. then i got the urge to write again, because writing is the freedom i yearned for in my life. it makes me happier, braver, and gives me more clarity.

i don’t earn anything from here, even though i’d like some extra cash, because stripe isn’t available in my country, and sometimes i think it’s a blessing in disguise — even though part of me wants to quit everything and just write, and write to live. i remember a study i read long ago about creativity and money.

plus, i love finding aesthetic pictures on pinterest and making collages. sometimes i just use old photos i took with friends, if they’re pretty enough, so it helps me use my visual side too. anyway, i got randomly inspired. maybe i’ll share this before the one i’m currently working on, about metacognition (it’s out now: thinking about thinking) — my favorite word since i first learned it in cognitive psych class. thinking about thinking. it’s dramatic, like i’ve always loved.

now, to get more inspiration and audacity, i’ll read erifili gounari, my substack favorite. i looked through her archive, and she published six in one month. omg. i need that passion and consistency.

a whole essay about posting badly and being consistent, and i never hit publish. for a month… then it began. yaayy.

it shows up mostly on good days, when i sense i’m getting closer to my goals. the first thought i caught: your themes aren’t serious. and now 2,000 people are watching you be pretentious and performative. these topics have been written and thought about a billion times. then i stumbled on a note saying substack is overflowing, that people pop out a post a day, a week, and that real writing should come from inside, from a deeper problem. that was all i needed. i felt justified. it was totally okay now to write “more seriously,” but less often.

then the thought i feared the most came through: substack isn’t even monetized in your country. you’re wasting your potential, playing games, when you should be preparing for job interviews. at that time i had just quit my job, because i didn’t like it.

that’s how i talked myself out of the thing i love. the bad news is that it doesn’t only happen with writing. i sabotaged a job interview. i undermined a project i’d been working hard on, one i am sure was good and helpful.

so when this happens i do my thing, just go and study it, at least i catched those thoughts and limiting beliefs, now go to the rabbit hole.

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i found the study i mentioned above. teresa amabile had 72 young adults who were actively involved in creative writing each write two short poems. before the second one, some filled in a questionnaire about their intrinsic reasons for writing, others about extrinsic ones. the poems written after thinking about the extrinsic reasons were significantly less creative than everyone else’s. and “extrinsic” meant exactly what you’d think: rewards and approval, the external things writing gets you. a few minutes of thinking about what writing gets you was enough.

so the “you’re not even monetized” thought only pretends to be about money. what it really does is make me look at writing as a transaction, and apparently that alone is enough to make it worse. in august i called it a blessing in disguise. i didn’t know yet it would become the exact thing used against me.

and why does it arrive on good days? there’s a classic experiment on this. college students solved either solvable or insoluble problems and all got success feedback, so for some the success felt accidental rather than earned. before a retest, they could choose a drug that supposedly enhanced performance or one that supposedly impaired it. those whose success felt accidental were the ones who preferred the performance-inhibiting drug, presumably so a probable failure could be blamed on something outside themselves. (in fairness, it held for the men, not the women.) psychologists call it self-handicapping. you ruin your chances before anyone can find out whether you ever had them.

fourteen subscribers to four and a half thousand in one summer. it felt more like an accident to me, even though i would never have gotten there without putting out my thoughts.

jung has a name for the part that does this. the shadow is the parts of ourselves we label undesirable, or think society will reject — unmet needs, aggressive impulses. we split them off, we suppress them, but they come back unpredictably, as outbursts, mental blocks, or physical ailments that wreck our plans. in aion he wrote that when an inner situation is not made conscious, “it happens outside, as fate.”

so i started looking for mine, the thoughts i mentioned earlier. there’s a sub-identity sitting in my head, undermining me and protecting me at the same time. it’s like a rebellious teenager. because i had some good-girl syndrome growing up, and my parents had really high standards, as a grown-up i'm rebelling and wrecking everything for myself. some of the automatic thoughts, the limiting beliefs, i uncovered:

don’t get too excited. after the good comes the bad. we have a kyrgyz proverb, or just a saying older people use: “көп күлбө, анан ыйлайсың,” which translates to “don't laugh too much, you'll cry after”. don’t be arrogant. don’t be too happy, too loud if you’re more privileged, luckier — уят (it’s something between shame and conscience). this also built the fear of success in me, which i think is worse than fear of failure. it made me play smaller, try to be average, unseen.

so i found them. now what? unfortunately, there’s no magic pill. it takes a lot of inner work, execution, stepping out of my comfort zone, deliberate discomfort. but here’s what i am doing, and what you can try with me.

1. write it down until you hit the core.

journaling is how i found the teenager in the first place, and there’s a reason it works. in james pennebaker’s first expressive writing study, students wrote for 15 minutes on 4 consecutive days about the most upsetting experiences of their lives, while a control group wrote about superficial things like their room or their shoes. the ones who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings went to the health centre less often in the following months. but the important detail is that the students who wrote only the facts of the trauma didn’t improve. you have to write the feeling, not just the event.

try this: the downward arrow. write the sabotage thought exactly as it sounds in your head. then ask, and if that’s true, what would it mean about me? write the answer. ask again. keep going until you reach something that stings. that’s the core fear, not the thought you started with. mine went: no one needs this essay → then i’m wasting my time → then i’m wasting my potential → then i have no potential → then i don’t deserve love.

2. ask what it’s protecting you from.

self-sabotage is usually a coping mechanism, a way to avoid a feeling we don’t want to have. i’m reading the courage to be disliked now, and adlerian psychology says something very uncomfortable: the fear isn’t the cause, it’s the tool. the young man in the book who never leaves his room isn’t trapped by his anxiety; he creates the anxiety so he doesn’t have to go out. so instead of asking the teenager inside me why are you afraid, i ask what do you gain when i don’t publish?

try this: finish the sentence “if i don’t do it, at least i won’t have to…” three times, fast, without editing. my first answer was: “if i don’t prepare for the interview, at least i won’t have to blame myself for failing”. the answers are usually more honest than we’d like.

3. meet the shame with compassion, not a whip.

my self-sabotage comes from shame, so beating myself up for it just feeds it. i used to think self-compassion was lame. then i read this: compared with a self-esteem boost, self-compassion produced stronger motivation to improve after identifying a personal weakness, and more studying time after failing an academic test. being gentle with yourself after failing made people try harder, not less.

try this: pick the thing you sabotaged most recently. write about it the way you’d write to a friend who did the same thing: what happened, why it makes sense that they did it, and that plenty of people do exactly this. and then apply it to yourself.

4. decide before the good day comes.

the rebellious teenager shows up when things are going well, so that’s when i need a plan already in place, not willpower in the moment. psychologists call these if-then plans, or implementation intentions. in a meta-analysis of 94 studies, forming them had a medium-to-large effect on actually reaching goals. it’s the “act despite it” i kept writing in my journal: no matter what happens, i'll work on my essays in the mornings and publish them. at least three a month, no matter what.

try this: write two or three if-then plans for your specific sabotage thoughts. mine: if i think “no one needs this,” then i publish it the same day. if i start checking the numbers, then i close the app and start the next draft. and underneath them, the one i wrote in capitals months ago: IGNORE THE END RESULT. the only thing i’m measuring now is whether i hit publish, not what happens after. i control only the effort and the progress; the results are not mine.

so here’s where i am. i know what to do. i’ve known the whole time, which is exactly what this essay is named after. knowing what you know is only half of it; acting on it is the other half, and that's the part that matters. so i want to approach this with curiosity: why did i have these thoughts today? what does it tell me? what is it protecting me from?

two topics are closely related to this. the first is emotional regulation: yes, we're avoiding, protecting ourselves from difficult feelings that may hurt us. the second, the one i have the most trouble with, is the gap between thinking and execution. i'm learning to close it, and i'll write about it properly once i've actually finished my real projects, not before. for now, i did one thing i'd wanted to do and thought about for such a long time: i opened patreon before i felt ready.

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to understand what it is, first, we should know the first-order cognition—the automatic thought process. when we live on autopilot, doing simple tasks without much thought, it just comes naturally and easily. we navigate everyday routines the way we always have; our brain saves energy by turning most tasks into habits. it’s when we have an immediate emotional response, or execute an automatic action. essential for survival, but we can’t rely on it for everything.

metacognition is the second layer. the shift from being the experience to observing and controlling it. someone replies to you with one word and you feel a flare of irritation—first layer. noticing that you’ve been irritated since this morning and this message probably isn’t the reason—second one. i was inspired by this brendan conway-smith lecture on understanding and controlling your mind to write this.

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if you speak more than one language you already know how it feels. picking the right word, adjusting for who’s listening, catching the exact moment something doesn’t translate the way you meant it to. you’re not just speaking, you’re watching yourself speak.

in school i had a classmate who barely studied and did well, and a friend who studied for hours and did average every time, semester after semester. the first ones looked like talent or raw intelligence. it wasn’t. she knew exactly where she was weak—she’d say things like i’m fine on the theory but i always mess up the dates—and she’d go memorize the dates. the second one read everything from the beginning, in order, for hours. she would wake up at 4am sometimes to study. no i understand that the first classmate who we called lazy but smart was actually using metacognition.

john flavell named this whole area in 1979, and it’s split into two parts: knowing how your own mind works, and doing something with that knowledge. the second part is where my studious friend fell down. she had idea what were her blind spots and strengths, but she didnt act upon it and studied everything. while the other friend knew her weaknesses, strengths, when and where she could focus the most and used that knowledge strategically.

so knowing yourself isn’t enough. acting on what you know is the part that counts.

and this isn’t only about studying. using metacognition in daily life makes things easier and more productive—you waste less time on approaches that aren’t working, you make fewer decisions you have to undo later, and you spend less energy on problems that were never there.

my avoidance is a good example of that last one. i decide, before starting, that something is going to be awful; an email i’ve been avoiding, a phone call, a conversation i know is coming. the dread builds for days and feels like correct information. then i do it, it takes eleven minutes, and it’s fine.

what should happen next is that i learn from it. mostly i don’t, because usually i never get to the eleven minutes. i put it off, so the prediction never gets tested. and from the inside, avoiding always looks like it worked, you avoided something, nothing bad happened, so avoiding must have been right.

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these patterns have a name. therapists call them cognitive distortions: habitual ways our thinking bends what’s actually happening, usually in the same few directions. everyone uses them. they’re just the automatic layer producing conclusions faster than anything can check them. these three are i see constantly.

black-and-white thinking. everything sorts into two categories with nothing in between. one meeting goes badly, therefore i’m bad at my job. one lie from a loved one and he is immidiately bad person and vice versa. two boxes are easier to hold than a spectrum and complexity.

catastrophizing. one small piece of evidence and the mind builds the whole disaster from it. a message goes unanswered for three hours, so they’re angry, so something’s wrong, maybe an accident happened. it takes about a second, and your world is ending.

mind reading. deciding you know what someone thought of you from a pause or a tone. this is the one i did the most. and the few times i’ve actually checked, they were thinking about something else entirely.

what these have in common is speed. each one gives you a finished conclusion with no working shown. you can’t argue with a thought when you are inside it, because from in there it doesn’t look like a distortion. it looks like a fact. to argue you should move one layer up, distance yourself out. check it from outside.

practices to improve metacognition

1. explain it out loud to someone who can interrupt. reading something and nodding gives you the feeling of understanding it. explaining it to a person who can stop you and ask what you mean gives how much you actually understood it or a quick discovery that you did not at all. the interruption is the important part—without it you skip over the gaps and never find out where they were.

2. write it down. a thought in your head feels vague and unclear. sometimes as a fact and undeniable. on paper it becomes clear, arguable. sometimes you start seeing the patterns of your thoughts, journaling can even help updating those patterns for more healthy ones.

3. wait five seconds. between the feeling and the response. not to calm down, just to delay. the automatic read arrives instantly and the checking arrives a beat later, and most of my worst responses went out in that gap. the delay doesn’t make the feeling correct or false. it just means i’m not acting on the first version of it.

4. run small premortems. this one comes from gary klein, who studied decision-making in fire crews and emergency rooms and found that asking "what went wrong" afterward almost always comes too late—by then everyone has the story. so you do it in advance instead imagining you already finished the important task you are planning.

   if this goes badly, where exactly does it go badly? for example, before a difficult conversation the answer is usually something like i'll get defensive when she brings up that timeline, and having that sentence ready changes what happens when she actually does.

   this one is hard for me, because i slip into rumination easily. the difference is that a premortem ends.

5. don’t treat friction as a verdict. feeling strained while learning something isn’t proof you aren’t capable of it. the methods that work best; testing yourself before rereading, spacing things out, mixing topics. these all feel worse while you’re doing them, which is why most people don’t use them. researchers call these desirable difficulties. that doesn’t mean every struggle is useful. sometimes an explanation is just bad, or you’re tired. it means the feeling can’t tell you which, so don’t let it decide.

metacognition is used everywhere, especially in high stake places. leaders auditing a strategy before the market does it for them. athletes’ abilities to notice, monior, instead and adjusting their thinking during the game, under pressure. it’s also important in what people call agency—being the one making decisions and controlling their lives instead of being controlled by it.

and it isn’t overthinking. overthinking is running the same thought again and again, feeding itself. it feels like working on the problem but it’s just producing more of it. metacognition is stepping out and looking at the loop instead of adding another lap; why does this keep coming back, what is it protecting, has it ever been right.

i still don’t have it easily. the automatic read shows up as convincing as it always did, and most days i notice it after i’ve already acted on it. the difference is that i notice at all now, which is more than nothing.

next i want to write about emotional regulation, which is the continuation of this one.

i failed my parents, my relatives, maybe my teachers and old colleagues and bosses — their idea of my supposed life plan. (they actually don’t care)

only now, fully accepting it, i am happy in a calm and quiet way. not the happiness we chase and hope to feel and catch even for a couple of seconds.

at 4 i told my parents i would rule the world; they thought i’d work somewhere like the un. at 7 i was the smartest in the class. at 14 i was so good at math that my math teacher chased me down the school hallway and told me i had to become a math olympiadist (we had those saturday advanced math courses, with the idea of going to the city olympiad, then the country one, then the international one). at 18 i was fine, but still very ambitious — the lazy kind, which is the worst. but i had my whole life ahead of me, full of perspectives and opportunities i knew were rare.

then at 22 i had my first big adult problem; some family issues and got depressed. (at that time i didn’t know it). i was not ready for that at all. i felt so lousy. my confidence dropped so low, beyond the plinth, and i was so insecure. but thankfully i still had my friends and a supportive family. from the outside i looked like i was living the best life — working at an international company, new but full of opportunities, and working alongside my friends from school and uni. i worked there for four years and quit during covid, because it felt unbearable. i didn’t want to do anything. it felt like this was not the life i wanted as a kid and as a teenager. i remember my friend saying that at 15 she would have hated her 25-year-old version. she thought she’d be in her best era, working at a high-paying, cool organisation, wearing fancy office looks, being all independent and confident. i was also having the same thought: “this is not what i have dreamt of”.

in those years after i quit, i felt like i was drifting on a tiny boat—so small that i felt every single wave. like i was constantly swaying back and forth, unable to find steady ground beneath my feet. now looking back i understand that those years were crucial, because i found out so much about myself and the world and human psychology (more than in my degree), our cognition, even though they seemed like the worst years of my life. no stable job, no family of my own, no car, no apartment of my own — which most of my peers already had. my parents gave up on me, only hoping for the best, because i had that one nervous breakdown, and now they’re afraid it will happen again.

when i thought i was stuck, while everyone else was moving forward at the fastest pace possible, i actually wasn’t stuck. i realised a lot of things. i was growing, it just wasn’t visible.

i only now fully see that all those pre-covid years i was living for others. for ovations, for admiration, for love — to please everyone but me. i wanted to be cool, effortlessly chic, to have good hair and skin, to sound smart, to look smart in a black turtleneck and glasses. read difficult books. post rarely on social media to look mysterious, and only post the glamorised version of office work: when i was conducting those hard and complicated researches and assessments, when i was in a meeting with colleagues with some fancy-looking infographics on a ppt on the projector. and the list goes on. i wanted to be admired by my cousins, and i wanted to prove wrong my aunts who said i spent a lot of my dad’s money studying in a foreign country — because i’m the smartest and the coolest in the room.

you see the pattern. i was living for others, not for myself. which is common in central asian communities, or asian ones in general, when the whole village is responsible for you. i grew up being looked up to. everyone knew my grades, my ort and sat scores. i was talked about a lot for not being good enough at housework and chores, the way a girl should be. and, i was the girl who would cry over a b if i got one instead of an a+. all my life was a mere performance. i had never even thought about or analysed what i actually wanted deep down. i only wanted to be admired and appreciated and inspiring. and all of that stacked up for years, until i broke down.

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now i finally understand — even though i thought i understood everything a decade earlier — that this is actually my life and no one else’s, and i’m the only one accountable. i have no one to blame, and no reason to victimise myself. i choose the way i want to live. and it’s okay if i don’t want the textbook life journey. nothing is perfect, and neither am i. i can be whoever i want, whenever i want, wherever i want (of course some of these are not fully in my control, but you get the message). my path can be different. not linear, not clear or formulated. it can go in circles, in chaotic and tangled lines. i can, and i have to, make mistakes and start over. it is never late to start over, we can start at july, on thursday on 24th at 56, and it’s not too late.

so here i am, paving my own path in an unknown forest, making the best path for myself. to experience life, to live fully without limits in my head, with belief in myself, according to my values. i will live this life for myself, create my own journey, make mistakes and learn and grow. and eventually it all becomes a story.

and in the meantime, this is what my little happiness actually look like:

i write in the mornings. i drink my coffee slowly, and i don’t rush it. i chat with my sister and brothers. i go on long walks alone or with my friends. i meet up with my girls in cute coffeeshop, we talk we cry till 1 am and it makes us feel alive and full and content.

rain on a hot summer day makes me happy. watching moving clouds and making up stories in my head makes me happy. an iced coffee after a long walk makes me happy. spending time with my loved ones make me happy. none of this is what i was chasing at 22, and all of it is what actually fills me.

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and the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me: every time i post an essay here, and someone reads it, i feel so grateful and so blessed. it isn’t the ovation i used to want. it’s quieter than that, but it’s so much better.

this is the calm and quiet happiness i meant at the beginning. from the outside it doesn’t look like anything at all. it will look boring to others, but it’s mine.

and if you’re reading this and you think you’re behind — you’re not behind. there is nothing to be behind of. the timeline you’re measuring yourself against was written by other people, for other lives, and nobody ever asked whether it fit you.

you are allowed to take longer. you are allowed to go backwards for a while. you are allowed to be 25 or 30 or 40 and still be at the very beginning of something.

the years i thought i was wasting were the years i was actually becoming someone. you just can’t see it while it’s happening. you see it later, and then you’re grateful for the blessings. i wish i could see it earlier, now i am trying to be present.

so please be gentle (but don’t forget to embrace discomfort that worth it) with yourself. you’re not late, you’re just on your own clock.

— the end —

a small note. every time i have a thought, or an idea, or a feeling i can’t name, i go looking for research that relates to it. it’s an old habit of mine. so these are the ones i found for this one.

• the feeling of being behind has a name. the developmental psychologist bernice neugarten called it the social clock — the culturally agreed timetable for when you’re supposed to graduate, get the job, marry, have the children, own the apartment. what her work suggests is that the distress usually doesn’t come from the life event itself, but from its timing: from being “off-time” compared to what everyone around you expects.

• jennifer crocker and connie wolfe’s work on contingencies of self-worth describes exactly what i was doing: staking my worth on external things — approval, appearance, being the smartest in the room. it works beautifully as motivation, but it leaves you fragile. in one study of 629 first-year students, those whose self-worth rested on external things were more likely to develop depressive symptoms over a single semester.

it’s like we all know these things, but knowing is not enough unfortunately. we should act upon it.

sources, if you want to read them yourself:

• neugarten, moore & lowe (1965). age norms, age constraints, and adult socialization.

• peterson (1996). the ticking of the social clock: adults’ beliefs about the timing of transition events.

• crocker & park (2011). contingencies of self-worth.

• frontiers in psychology (2018). contingencies of self-worth on positive and negative events and their relationships to depression.

• cogent psychology (2024). marriage timing and depressive symptoms: insights from social clock theory.

• sharon (2016). markers of adulthood and well-being among emerging adults.

i remember how our middle school and high school life was run by different regimes. one era we were disney channel–obsessed, the next we’d be converted to k-pop. we’d style ourselves like our favorite characters or pop stars, look up their latest outfits, save the images, analyze them, put them on the next shopping list. sometimes we would even act like them.

as boarding school girls we also absorbed our friends’ style, started speaking and acting like them, because those were the teenage years, the age of forming individuality, and sometimes, we’d swing to the opposite: gatekeep our playlists, our favorite movies, trying to be independent, as individual as we could manage. trying not to be like anyone else.

then at uni. we had this class, psychology of learning, and it was my favorite because of the professor. he’d just talk and talk, throw out a question, discuss, and he also encouraged us to ask more — ask questions, don’t hesitate, he’d say. we had another teacher, for contrast, who’d sigh and say google exists, don’t ask dumb questions. so we got the idea of which rooms were for thinking out loud and which ones weren’t early on.

one day the learning psy. professor asked the question we got asked already, a couple of times when we were taking philosophy 101 and a semester of history of psychology: do we have free will? not in the shallow sense — yes, we live in a democracy, we’re privileged enough to choose what we want, technically that’s a kind of freedom — but in the harder sense: are the choices we make actually ours, or are they just the output of everything we’ve absorbed for years, some of it encoded even earlier than that, in our genes?

we discussed it for a while. i don’t remember how we got there, but we landed on something like: only when we accept we don’t have free will are we actually free.

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i’ve been thinking about that again lately, mostly because of ai. when my older colleagues first discovered ai chatbots, they’d be in awe — omg, it banters with me, it acts sly and lazy, just like a real human. and the old question resurfaced in my head. if growing up we soaked everything up like a sponge, wired some of it in deeper than we can consciously account for, and now act according to those stored bits — are we really so different from an ai that was fed a mountain of information and now acts like us? it even simulates having feelings, says yes, i understand what you’re feeling, sometimes convincingly enough to be mistaken for a mental health professional.

i hold a pile of contradicting thoughts here; we process information, sure, but we have emotions — except emotions are also processed, by the limbic system, they’re also just signals — except no, emotions are more complex than that. what about morality, then? people had to teach language models what’s good and what’s bad. but we do the same thing, we teach kids what’s good and bad. (but i think people are born innocent or good? — i don’t even like sorting people into good and bad, but the argument forced my hand.) thinking in circles does no good on a question this tangled, which is usually my cue to go read and dive deep into a rabbit hole.

the rabbit hole gave me a name for what i was doing. psychologists call it anthropomorphism — our tendency to hand human minds to non-human things. we’ve always done it, to ships and storms and cars that won’t start. we do it because we’re social creatures; it’s how we understand the world, how we make an unpredictable thing make sense. and sometimes it’s how we make up for our need for connection.

however, we do all of that processing inside a body. a body that gets cold, gets hungry, wants to be held, can be hurt. an algorithm has none of that. i used to think that was the whole answer — that sure, we run on absorbed patterns too, but ours come with something at stake.

it’s why the same childhood can be completely different in siblings. one of us flinches at something the other didn’t even register. when i bring up things my mom said to us as kids, she tells me everyone did that, that i was just too sensitive. maybe. or maybe some of us are just wired with more sensitive filters than others.

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so as organisms that process life in unique ways, we used to be so creative and different as children and teens. i think about the times going to the village when i was young. back then, my cousins had a world that belonged solely to them—their own slang, their own style, their own distinct rhythm. every summer felt like stepping into an entirely different universe. now, you can go all the way out to the high mountain pastures (jailoo), and the kids there are speaking and dressing like american teenagers on tiktok. the local texture gets quietly erased, smoothed over by algorithm, exporting the exact same feed to every corner of the world.

open the app on any given week and it’s the same handful of trending audios stitched under different faces, the same haul, the same exact fit that unrelated creators are wearing, because the feed rewards whoever repeats the pattern fastest and most convincingly. cottagecore gave way to clean girl gave way to quiet luxury gave way to whatever’s already replaced quiet luxury by the time this sentence is written. each one arrives with total sincerity, gets built out into a whole identity — the water bottle, the skincare fridge — and then gets abandoned the second the next aesthetic clears its way.

and those aesthetics arrive pre-named, pre-packaged, ready to install. -core this, -girl that. so you just select a character and buy the starter pack. people describe themselves in consumption categories now; i’m a clean girl, i’m in my …….. era, the self as a subscription you purchase.

and then comes a question that gets harder to answer the longer i scroll: do i actually like this, or did the feed decide i was the kind of person who would and convinced me?

it’s the same concept we tried in middle school, as teenagers who should explore and copy, but now as adults with fully formed frontal brains, with those trends which come and go even faster. and they go beyond our outfits and hairstyles.

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the writer kyle chayka traced how the sameness leaks offline too — the identical coffee shop with the subway tile and the hanging plants waiting in whatever city you land in. he has a name for the feeling this produces: algorithmic anxiety, the uneasy feeling of not knowing whether the machine has judged you wrong or, worse, exactly right. which might be the most honest description of losing individuality i’ve come across: not that someone takes it from you, but that you hand it over one recommendation at a time.

even the books do it. open five different “what i’m reading this month” videos in a row and you’ll find the same five titles stacked in five different places, because booktok decided what a reader is supposed to read right now.

so, are we individuals, or everything we consumed? i don’t know the answer still. even in that classroom, we just agreed that the only freedom on offer might be the freedom of knowing how shaped we are, rather than the fantasy of standing outside the shaping. i know also that we should go out and touch some grass and hug trees, and do whatever we want to do without thinking about the algorithm. that’s why my challenge for this summer was to be more offline, and its not very successful yet, but i will get there, i know.

p.s.

i finished this essay weeks ago and then the algorithm, being what it is, started giving me philosophy videos. and i sat there watching people work through the exact spiral i’d just spent weeks writing my way through, but thousands of years ago. and my first reaction was that i shouldn’t post this, so it sat in my drafts for a week or even more, but i decided a long time ago bad writing is better than no writing, and posted it anyways. only because other people thought about things i think about and wrote about the things i wrote about doesn’t mean i should stop doing it.

things i read while writing this that didn’t make the cut:

• on the free will: libet’s 1983 readiness potential paper how we act before brain decides

• schurger’s 2012 reinterpretation, which argues the readiness potential might just be neural noise, not a decision

• on how early we start absorbing patterns: saffran, aslin & newport’s 1996 study

• alison gopnik on children as tiny scientists building models of the world.

here is what i am not doing: reading five books a month, diving to five-six separate topics, or posting an aesthetic photo of a coffee cup next to a stack of book spines i will only finish half of (let’s be honest, more like 10%).

instead, i chose three interests from the millions i want to focus on intentionally this month: ai governance, neuropsychology, and personal essays. i am assigning each topic one book, one course, and two ninety-minute study blocks a day, monday through friday. even though this is an experiment, i chose a more honest estimation of how much i can actually hold. if july goes well, this will become the blueprint for my whole summer, fall, winter, and spring—not just a single month.

first topic: ai governance and ethics

i have been avoiding this one for months. i know i am avoiding it because it seems hard, which makes me feel like maybe i’m not as smart as i thought. this line of thinking—my old fixed mindset peeking through—is entirely unhelpful. even if you feel like you have a less-than-average iq, you can still learn difficult things. not being a genius is no reason to abandon something i am genuinely interested in. i can’t just refuse to start, or drop out at the starting line, simply because i am experiencing a bit of friction.

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learning only happens through friction and difficulties; if what i am doing is easy and frictionless, then it isn’t learning at all. i want to learn difficult, important things. i want to learn how to conduct research properly, get published, and bring about change, even if that is just my ego talking.

i need to detach my ideas and work from my identity. if i fail at some of these or have bad ideas, it does not define who i am. we all need to make mistakes to learn from them.

that particular fear belongs more to this topic. i am not scared of neuropsychology—i took a few classes at university and it went fine, so i have proof i can handle it, even though this time i am doing it for myself rather than for grades. ai governance is the one area where i don’t have that proof yet, which is why i’ve felt stuck.

to start and not to get fixed on researching what to research, i asked claude for recommendations and decided to choose one book and one free online course.

ai ethics & governance books

• human compatible by stuart russell – the clearest statement of the control problem and probably the most-cited starting point.

• the alignment problem by brian christian – profiles of researchers rather than pure theory.

• the precipice by toby ord – the existential-risk case, featuring denser but shorter chapters.

• atlas of ai by kate crawford – the political-economy counterweight to the other three.

i’m going with the alignment problem. i have actually wanted to read empire of ai for ages, but these were pushed by claude. if there are any specialists out there, i would love to get your personal recommendations!

philosophy scaffold

• utilitarianism by john stuart mill – the aggregate-welfare argument that most ai governance debates trace back to.

• justice by michael j. sandel – the counter-argument to mill, offering actual tension instead of a single, flat framework.

• the burnout society by byung-chul han – a contemporary take on the same question: what a system extracts from people who believe they are choosing freely. (this was recommended for my other interest, but i really want to get to it next month).

i’m going with mill. it is the shortest of the three and was recommended the most. i also want to avoid procrastinating during the research phase, which is a major pitfall for me. i often waste all my energy getting ready rather than doing the actual work.

alongside the reading, i will be taking bluedot’s free future of ai course. if my fears turn out to be unfounded, i hope to take their full governance course later. i am also really interested in anthropic’s free educational resources, which seem practical and accessible, so i may add those to my curriculum as well.

second topic: neuropsychology

i took plenty of neuroscience and neuropsychology courses at university, but i want to refresh my knowledge by taking mit’s free course, the human brain, taught by nancy kanwisher. neuroscience seems to be growing in popularity these days, which is wonderful. however, i want to study it seriously for a deeper understanding that i can apply to my daily life and share later, rather than treating it like sensationalized pop-psychology to gain traffic or subscribers.

i also plan to listen to my “saved-for-later” neuroscience podcasts. since i have already read the most popular books in this field, i will focus primarily on reading recent academic articles and research papers.

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third topic: personal essays

while i have always loved reading short stories, substack made me fall in love with personal essays and think pieces written by others. i would love to dive deeper into this world. it is mostly a hobby, but it is also an opportunity to get better at writing and articulating my thoughts—which remains a challenge for me, as english is my third language.

recommendations:

• the empathy exams by leslie jamison

• a man’s place by annie ernaux

• bluets by maggie nelson

• the cost of living by deborah levy

i want to pick annie ernaux and deborah levy because they have been on my to-read list for ages.

how i will study: time-blocking

my schedule consists of two ninety-minute blocks every morning, monday through friday: block one runs from 8:00 to 9:30 am, followed by a break, and block two runs from 10:00 to 11:30 am. i’m not just picking a random time or writing a vague to-do list and hoping for the best. peter gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions found that individuals who decide in advance exactly when and where they will act on a goal follow through far more consistently than those who simply intend to “find time” for it.

this time-blocking method is to support to sustain my willpower, which would struggle alone. and the pastel aesthetic of my scheduling table, which brings me joy. deciding now, while i am not afraid, removes the burden of decision-making later when resistance kicks in.

the ninety-minute block length is based on an ultradian rhythm i mentioned in the previous posts. this cycle operates continuously while we are wide awake, not just when we are sleeping.

i will map out my plan beforehand so i don’t have to make decisions right when i wake up, which usually leads to postponing. i will also alternate between an online video course block and a reading/writing block so i won’t be bored.

from consumption to creation

as someone who is intensely curious, frequently dives down rabbit holes of information, and constantly keeps multiple browser tabs open, only to later forget the details and think, “yeah, i read some research about that somewhere, let me look it up”, i need a dedicated place to put what i learn.

an interesting 2011 study on the “google effect” found that when people expect information to remain digitally accessible, they tend to remember less of the actual information and more about where to find it. this cognitive offloading got even worse with artificial intelligence. we can simply prompt a chatbot to retrieve anything we need instantly. a recent 2025 study on ai use and critical thinking confirmed a significant negative relationship between frequent ai reliance and critical thinking ability, especially by how much people offload their cognitive heavy lifting to the tool rather than processing it themselves.

as i wrote in my previous post about doing hard things, neuroplasticity works both ways: the neural connections we don’t use get pruned, while the habit of delegating our thinking gets reinforced. if i keep letting tools handle the difficult parts, the capacity within me that does hard things won’t stay the same size—it will shrink.

that is why i have committed to writing essays about everything i learn, both for myself and potentially for substack. i don’t want to simply consume these topics and forget them, leaving them buried in my browsing history or an abandoned tab. i want to truly learn them, integrate them into my daily life, and create something useful.

so, that is the july curriculum for my personal academia. i will see how this experiment goes and use the data to plan an even better august curriculum.

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as for future topics: like i wrote before, i’ve been thinking about how we must all become politicized if we want to change anything, even just the immediate environment around us. capitalism dressed up as freedom still relies heavily on making people far too exhausted to organize against it.

For years I’ve done monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews, mid-year and yearly reflections, but not very fruitful, just another type of procrastination for me. So this year I dropped the quarterly ones and simplified; monthly (not regularly though), mid-year, annual.

The six-month reflection is so interesting because it’s right in the middle, it’s the one moment where you can actually see both directions — what’s behind you, what’s still ahead.

This isn’t a productivity ritual or a scorecard against your January goals. It’s permission to look at what the year has actually been, and decide from there what you want to take to the second half.

Step 1: Block actual time

Ninety minutes minimum (ultradian rhythm). Paper, pen/pencil, not a screen — the friction of typing makes me edit as I go, and I don’t want to edit, I want to write. Take your calendar, your photos, your journal, whatever holds memories of the last six months.

Step 2: Brain dump, month by month

Go through January to June and write everything you remember. Wins, lessons, the moments you’re proud of, the ones that humbled you, the connections you made, the ones you lost. No judgment, no filtering, just letters, sentences, paragraphs.

Prompts to get you moving:

• What happened that month that you didn’t expect at all?

• What seemed important at that time, but not now when you look back?

Step 3: Sort into wins and lessons

On your paper or journal, split it into two columns: wins and lessons. Now go back through the dump and find the things that went well, big and small, and put them into the WINS column. And on the LESSONS column put the things that didn’t go your way, that may have felt like failure, but framed as what they taught you, because that’s what they are now.

Name the wins properly. We move past them so fast we forget they happened — the thing you finished, the risk that paid off, the small consistent effort that added up.

Then sit with the lessons: what they taught you, what you can carry on with purpose. If some of them are just bad memories, that’s totally okay.

Prompts:

• What’s a win I haven’t let myself fully acknowledge?

• What did my hardest moment this half-year actually teach me?

• Which lesson did I have to learn more than once?

Step 4: Name what you’re proud of

This one is separate from the wins. A win is something that went well, and you can be proud of something that didn’t even work out. You can be proud of a quiet thing no one else would count.

So ask it directly, without modesty: what are you proud of? The boundary you held. The thing you did scared. The day you kept going when it would have been easier not to. The way you treated someone. You can use the prompts to write them down.

Prompts:

• What’s something I’m proud of that I’d never put on anywhere?

• What did I do this half-year that last year’s version of me wouldn’t have been able to?

Step 5: Check in on your areas of life

Scan the areas of your life that matter to you — you can divide them however you want. Work, health, relationships, creativity, money, rest. For each one, ask: how was this area in the first half of the year? Be honest with yourself.

Prompts per area:

• Where did things move and where did things stall?

• Have you actually admitted those things to yourself?

Step 6: Name the half-year

If you set an intention or theme in January, look it up. Does it still fit, does it actually describe the half-year you lived? Keep it if yes. If not, what would an honest observer call it instead? If you did not name it, it’s okay, you can name it now.

Mine this year: Becoming. I actually named it Connections, but Becoming is what fits better.

Prompt: If you had to tell someone the story of this half-year in two sentences, what would you say?

Step 7: Decide what you leave behind, and what you take with you

This is the part that really matters — instead of just writing down your thoughts, ideas, you decide what now, what next? Now that you’ve written everything, choose.

What do you leave behind in the first half of the year? The resentment, the habit, the story about yourself that is not true anymore, the version of a plan that no longer fits. Name it, and let it stay where it happened, behind.

And what do you take with you? The lesson, the relationship, the new way of seeing things, the mindset shift.

Prompts:

• What am I ready to stop caring for?

• What lessons will I take with myself?

• If I could only bring 3 things from these six months into the next six, what would they be?

Step 8: Find the pattern

You’re not just cataloguing events — you’re looking for what they have in common. What theme kept appearing? What have you been repeatedly choosing, or repeatedly avoiding?

Prompts:

• What’s a decision I made more than once this year, in different forms?

• What keeps showing up — a person, a feeling, a type of situation?

Want to go deeper? Optional prompts

• What’s one area where you’ve made gradual progress, even if you’re not “there” yet?

• How have you handled setbacks differently this year compared to before?

• What belief about yourself shifted or got challenged this year?

• What values actually guided your decisions, versus the ones you say you live by?

• When did I feel most like myself? Why?

• Where is the gap between what I say I want and how I’m actually living?

• What did I think I wanted in January that I no longer want now?

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when i quit my job i started my solopreunership journey like i always dreamt of, working for myself, and the hardest thing was to stick to my goals and do the boring, important things consistently. i started creating mood tracking journals, inner work journals, guided workbooks, and i loved working on them — researching and then designing. but my post-covid brainrot era was so scattered and bored, that instead i started binge watching gilmore girls, or some k-drama, or a random show. but then even normal shows and movies started to bore me. i switched to short-form content and reaction videos. i could feel my brain getting fried. as a former book lover who would read a book a week, i couldn’t finish a book for a year. i remember reading cleopatra and frankenstein for a year or even more. then i read beautiful world, where are you for more than a year, even though i really, really loved both.

by not doing the things i used to love, and watching crap on the internet, i was also killing my self-confidence. day by day my confidence and self-belief were dropping.

it was so bad, i became so unconfident, that i started sabotaging myself. and then one day i stopped dreaming. dreaming was like the biggest part of my life — i’d dream big and fearless, and most of them would come true. then i felt like: this is it. this is how i’m gonna exist throughout my life in the future. my whole life will be like this. mere existence instead of fully living, opening new doors, going for challenges and loving life, which i used to do before, and life had meaning and mattered to me.

then i was waiting for the tragedy for instant change. i don’t know why but i had this idea that everything would change if i moved countries or something dramatic happened. while waiting for that miracle or tragedy, i wasted more time. i was still doing my online job, but badly, inconsistently, so the results were showing the effort. i still journaled, but only when i felt better. on my bad days i couldn’t even journal. and only by journaling was i able to do self-analysis and deep inner work.

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i knew i had to do something. so i started small, by taking tiny actions. i had studied brain science when i was in uni — neuroscience and neuropsychology and related topics were my favorite, and psychology of learning too was my favorite class, so i had the knowledge somewhere deep in my mind, but i had buried it. then i decided to start re-learning those things, to help myself. i also used to work as a coach in my previous job, so i started using those techniques on myself. i became my own coach.

i remember reading my old journals and wanting to cry. i was so harsh to myself. i was literally beating myself up, saying things like: you will never change, you couldn’t even do this, you are lazy and incapable of anything, spoiled. etc. etc.

so the first step was to be kind to myself — the way i’d be to my friends.

here’s what i didn’t understand at the time. what i was living through wasn’t a discipline problem or laziness. it wasn’t a character flaw. it was what happens when your brain — one of the most energy-efficient systems that exists — has been trained to expect constant, easy stimulation, and is then asked to do something that costs real effort.

this is not motivation problem, like most of us would think, but a prediction problem.

brain runs on two systems that are always competing. one is the basal ganglia — deep structures that handle automatic, habitual behavior. scrolling without deciding to. the morning routine you don’t have to think about. it runs on almost no energy. the other is the prefrontal cortex, behind your forehead, which handles planning and learning and choosing. it’s powerful, but expensive, and it tires fast. before you start anything, your brain runs a quick cost-benefit check, and if the task feels new or uncertain it pulls in the amygdala (a threat detector) which flags the whole thing as possible danger. what you feel then is resistance. dread. the sudden, specific urge to escape and do something easier. it isn’t your weakness, it’s just neurobiology.

i’d been choosing the cheaper route for couple of years, i’d lowered the bar so far that even a normal tv show eventually felt like too much.

the thing i remembered from uni; the thing explained what was happening to me was dopamine. and it’s almost the opposite of what people think.

most people believe dopamine arrives after something good, like a reward your brain hands you. but dopamine is a prediction signal. it fires in anticipation, not in response — and it actually weakens once a reward becomes predictable. wolfram schultz was the one who showed this clearly (schultz, nature reviews neuroscience). it’s why the pull is strongest before you open the package, before the date, before you click the thing you’re curious about. the anticipation is the event,and the outcome is almost an afterthought.

so craving the hard, meaningful work was never a trait i was missing. it’s an anticipatory response the brain builds through repetition. and mine had been built around the wrong things. every day of reaction videos taught my brain to fire in advance of that specific easy hit — and against a baseline tuned that high, the harder things stopped producing any pull at all. designing, writing, reading: no anticipation, just drag.

that had a name too. the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s main reward center, adapts to the level of stimulation it regularly gets. when easy, high-stimulation input is always available, the baseline rises to meet it, and then everything that has to be earned feels flat by comparison (salamone et al.). which is why taking things away turned out to matter more than adding anything.

while i was changing the things i consume, i was changing what my brain was capable of wanting.

i researched a lot about wanting to do hard things, willpower and tenacity, and found out about anterior mid cingulate cortex (aMCC). there is a 2 hour long andrew huberman’s podcast about it.

the aMCC sits in the middle of the brain, wired into your thinking, your emotion, and your movement at once — the coordinator for effortful action, the thing that comes online when you push through resistance. and the researches on it is were so fascinating and so specific. it’s smaller in people who avoid challenge and larger in people who don’t. it’s tied to willpower and tenacity, staying larger in people who keep facing new obstacles despite the difficulty. and the most interesting thing is that it only grows when you do things you don’t want to do. if you enjoy the hard thing, the effect shrinks. the resistance itself is the mechanism.

which means every time you do the thing you’re resisting, you’re not just getting it done. you’re building the exact neural pathways that makes the next hard thing reachable by the help of neuroplasticity. and the downside of neuroplasticity is it works both sides; all those months i spent choosing ease, waiting for a tragedy to come change me, i was doing the opposite, shrinking it. making the future even harder and meaningless and empty without realising it.

knowing this didn’t fix anything overnight. nothing fixes overnight. but it changed how i see the difficult thing that has to be done now — it became a step toward building new neural pathways rather than a burden i want to avoid. to make it easier, i started using cognitive reappraisal in daily life.

it's an emotion regulation technique: when you reframe the meaning of a situation before you react to it, the prefrontal cortex steps in and turns down the amygdala's threat read. the task doesn't change — the wiring around it does. jamieson's work narrows it: the same task appraised as a threat versus a challenge produces measurably different stress physiology, even when people feel just as nervous.

so i stopped waiting to feel motivated and changed the language i use inside my head instead. not i have to write today, but i’m choosing this — it’s a meaningful and full life i’m building, not a burden. daily, consistently. otherwise it won’t work.

other things actually helped me to crave hard work.

i want to be honest before the list: none of it is a hack. there are no hacks. there’s only enough repetition for the circuits to update, for the amygdala to stop sounding the alarm.

1. i lowered the baseline before i tried to build anything. you can’t crave hard things while your brain still expects a hit of easy stimulation every fifteen minutes. so before adding habits i took things away — not dramatically, one by one. the first day or two of less scrolling felt boring and slightly unbearable. that was the recalibration. the boredom was the baseline coming down.

2. and if you've tried to take the thing away before and always crawled back — there is a technique used by addiction researchers called urge surfing. it was developed by alan marlatt for people fighting cravings: an urge isn't a line that climbs until you give in. it's a wave. it rises, peaks, and falls on its own, usually in a few minutes, as long as you don't feed it. i didn't fight the pull and i didn't give in — i noticed it and let it pass. and every urge you don't feed makes the next one weaker.

3. i let things be ugly, bad and done. my brain updates on outcomes, not on quality; a finished imperfect thing files as this didn’t destroy me, this is doable. an abandoned good thing files as i quit here. and i was an expert at quitting things because they weren’t good enough, which i now understand was just me teaching my nervous system, over and over, that the hard thing was a threat to escape. done is storred data, proof. perfect is a standard that doesn’t exist anywhere.

4. i did the thing on the days i least wanted to. the aMCC grows on the unwanted, not just the hard. the journaling i did on good days was pleasant and did almost nothing. the journaling i did on the bad days, when i could barely sit with myself, when i wanted to do anything else — that’s the thing that actually accumulated. the resistance wasn’t in the way of the work. the resistance was the work.

5. i stopped waiting to feel like the other version of myself first. i kept thinking i had to become someone who does hard things before i could start doing them. but the self-concept updates from evidence, not intention. you don’t think your way into becoming someone who craves difficulty. you act your way into it, badly, piece by piece, and the wanting shows up later — after the repetitions, never before.

i'm not writing this from the other side of it, fixed and effortlessly doing hard things. the same thing that builds the craving can unbuild it. the baseline that came down can drift back up. the aMCC that grew will shrink again if i stop. the months i'm proudest of are real, and worth celebrating, but they're just not a place i get to stay. they're the most recent proof, not the last. there's no finish line. you don't arrive. you keep choosing it, every day. and the choosing never fully stops being a choice, it just stops being a battle.

the hard thing doesn’t get easier. your brain just gets better at predicting it’s worth it. and once your brain has gathered enough new evidence, it stops feeling like motivation — which is unreliable and shows up late anyway — and starts feeling like a small restlessness when you haven’t done the hard thing. a pull toward it instead of away. the discomfort of not doing it finally bigger than the discomfort of doing it.

that inversion is the whole thing. and it isn’t permanent. you just need to show up — every day, on the bad days, the good days, and the okay ones.

i remember being in high school and saying things like, omg, i’m good at everything, so it’s hard to choose what i actually want to do with my life. i was a math olympiad kid who wanted to study biotechnology and genetics. before that, as a child, i wanted to be a fashion designer, because i’d been doodling clothes — circles and rectangles with straps since i was two or three. then one day i randomly put down psychology and sociology on my admission paper, only because a classmate mentioned she was into it. i never had a passion. not a real passion, the kind my friends and classmates and colleagues seemed to carry around so easily. i used to be both fascinated and jealous of the people who were so passionate they would give up a lot of things to do that one thing.

even when i started working at a psych center full of ambitious people, i worked hard but i wasn’t interested, and i started to suspect i might just not like this, and be like everyone else and maybe i hate people. i used to have this dostoevskyesque idea that i hate certain people, but i love humanity. i grew out of that phase. or at least i like to think i did.

then after 5 years, i quit that job i didn't really love, and threw myself into some solopreneurship thing — fun, but unstable — all while carrying this quiet idea in the back of my mind, that i was born for something more than this, that none of it suited me. i got depressed, burnt out, and everything in between. i questioned the whole philosophy and meaning of my life.

so here is a partial list of things i have, at one point or another, been interested in:

• film directing

• scriptwriting

• painting

• photographing

• being creative director

• content planning

• data science

• product management

• neuroscience

• philosophy

• anthropology

• history

• english literature

• russian literature

• recruiting or hr

• behavior coaching

• machine learning

• ai safety

• graphic design

• writing

• ui/ux design, and the list goes on. and on.

the other things not work related i am interested in: yoga, pilates, strength training, nutrition, meditation, japanese, piano, pottery etc.

and yet. i don’t do anything at all about any of it. not consitently, maybe i do here and there but never seriously.

so many years passed and i still don’t do the things i’m supposed to do. sometimes it’s so bad i don’t even want to get up and take a shower. like i am not living and postponing my life for later. i’m stuck in the most possible way of being stuck. these past weeks i applied to a few foreign companies, thinking maybe i should just move to another country and change everything. i got rejected. so i started a 33-rejection challenge — 100 felt like too much — so that getting rejected would stop hurting. and surprisingly it actually helped.

i’ve had plenty of these stuck, procrastinating periods in my life, and each one looked a little different. in my case, there are three of them.

the first stuck: i’m afraid i’m not that special (fear of failure)

my older self — the one with the big ego and the fixed mindset — got stuck out of fear. specifically, the fear that if i really tried, i’d find out i’m not special after all. stanford psychologist carol dweck spent decades studying exactly this: people with a fixed mindset, she found, don't just fear failure — they avoid any situation where failure is possible, because failing would mean their abilities are limited and that is a truth they can't afford to know. i know about it and still these days i catch myself sliding back into it. now that there are 200+ subscribers, which is kinda insane, and that actual people read my words and peek into my soul, into my mind — i don’t want to write anything in here. in case my topics are basic and not interesting enough. in case i’m supposed to be writing about serious things, but i am not. before when i had no subscribers, it was so much easier to just put down whatever i wanted.

the way i fight this one is to embrace the mediocrity and divide failure and my identity. i’m a normal, mediocre person who loves to write, and that’s enough to make it okay to write about whatever i want. i am a person who makes mistakes and can grow by doing things, not overthinking them.

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the second stuck: choosing one means killing the others

plath wrote this one better than i ever could. i know it’s an overused analogy, but i wanted to use it once, because it was so beautifully written. in the bell jar she imagines her life as a fig tree, every branch heavy with a different future — one fig a marriage and children, one a famous poet, one a professor somewhere, one a life on the other side of the world. she sits in the fork of the tree and can’t choose, because to pick one fig is to watch all the others wither. so she picks none of them. and one by one the figs ripen, blacken, and fall to the ground, while she sits there starving because she refused to reach.

this one is the stuck of modern life, where there are so many options which, instead of freeing us, overwhelm us. psychologist barry schwartz called this the paradox of choice — the counterintuitive idea that more options don't set us free, they paralyze us, and the more alternatives we imagine, the harder it becomes to commit to any single one. it is not about not being able to do any of it. it’s that choosing one means letting all the others rot.

so i tell myself the comforting thing: in this age, we can be whatever we want to be. being a jack of all trades isn’t shameful in an era of generalists. you can learn new things and actually do them — maybe not in a pro, specialist way, but you can get better at almost anything with enough effort, focus, energy, and a stubborn belief that you can. and so this one, at least, doesn’t get to me as much. also journaling the list of the things i want to achieve daily or weekly without looking back helps, only some of the things on the list stay consistent, so if i want to learn i would stick with the most repeated and easiest one at first.

the third stuck: nothing was ever bad enough to make me move

the third one i can’t blame on anything. there’s no fear here or overwhelming list of choices. just a life that’s fine. good enough. it covers the basics, and that is the problem. it’s comfortable enough that the wanting never turns into doing.

because that’s the trick comfort plays on you. you’d think that wanting everything would be the thing that finally moves you. it doesn’t. wanting is loudest when it costs nothing. a good-enough life is soft enough to let me keep the whole dream intact — every version of the life i am going to have, eventually — without ever testing a single one of them against reality. i get to want it all, dream about them, forever, but never take an actual step because i’m too comfortable right now and will do something about those dreams later. this is the stuck i am in right now.

when i first read oblomov, i thought he was just like me, just existing comfortably; the first hundred pages of that novel he spends planning the reform of his entire life from his bed, and never once gets up. the warm bed and his servant zahar are keeping his dreams safe. the moment he stands up, one of those enormous plans has to shrink into a small, disappointing, actual thing.

so i stay. i want everything, but i do nothing, and for the longest time, things would just end on a vision board or on a list in the journal. nyu psychologist gabriele oettingen found that fantasizing about a desired future without confronting the obstacles dissolves the very tension that would push you to act — the dream substitutes for the doing. and neuroscientist wolfram schultz discovered that dopamine fires hardest at anticipation, not arrival — the brain already pays you for the wanting, so the getting feels like nothing new. which is funny and so maybe i'm not lazy. i'm just collecting the reward early, in my head, where it's both safe and free.

if you’re reading this post, i am already doing something about it. so here's the list that got me here. maybe one item on it moves something for you too.

1. embrace the mediocrity — and actually try the things i wanted to try but was too afraid to fail at.

2. start small, with whatever’s already on my plate right this minute.

3. regulate the nervous system: eat a little better, sleep a little earlier. a stuck body and a stuck life go together.

4. every time i’m back inside my head, overanalysing — take any action at all. literally any.

5. remember that everything is hard before it gets easy. which is a hard thing to accept for someone who wants perfect results from the first try.

6. ten percent out of the comfort zone. not the whole terrifying leap — just 10%.

7. pick one fig. or even two, choosing it isn’t killing the others.

8. let the wanting cost something — do one thing, on purpose, that makes the good-enough life a little less comfortable.

9. write a bad essay or article and post it anyway. let people peek into my mind.

10. work on my values, sometimes it seems like i want it but i actually do not want it that much, so i should work around my values once more.

11. also my 33-rejection challenge, i am trying to do random things i would never do, let’s see what will happen to this one. maybe i will write an essay after completing the challenge.

so here i am, doing number nine — a bad essay maybe, posted anyway. i’m still in the third stuck as i was writing this; i just decided to do the one thing on the list i could actually do today instead of adding to it. (it took more than 1 day, unfortunately)

if you are also struggling with this, which type of stuck are you in right now? and what are you trying to do to change it? also i didn’t go to the adhd, medical side of the stuck, those would be entirely different topics.

my other colleague who is a social media manager said: it’s okay, you work hard, you deserve the rest.

my colleague is a psychologist of 10+ years and it was really unlike her — scrolling for 4 hours straight. she has other problems like always being “productive” (overstimulated): listening to audiobooks or podcasts while driving, doing both jobs; psychologist and mom, cooking breakfast for her teenage sons at 5 am, and going home after work to cook dinner. but playing games for 4 hours straight was so unlike her, so i asked her if something was bothering her.

she was hesitant for a while. then she said there’s a lot on her plate right now, which was actually always the case — so this time she had like ten times more things going on, and she felt overwhelmed and just didn’t want to think about any of it.

i know that feeling. because i do the exact same thing. i binge a netflix show i’ve already seen three times. i put on a youtube podcast and tell myself it’s educational and productive. i open instagram and close it and open it again thirty seconds later without even realizing i did it, when i feel something uncomfortable. i tend to process my emotions and have good awareness of my feelings, but i’m still not so good at regulating them.

these kind of cheap dopamine, or instant pleasure activities — the scrolling, the netflix binge, the nth hour on tiktok — we engage in to rest, and feel like yeah we deserve this, we have been working really hard these days. this kind of thinking has been around forever, the idea that rest is something you earn and then cash in on the easiest thing available. it is hard to admit how unhealthy it is, because most of the time it is not rest at all — it is more like numbing. but i also would not want to demonize these behaviors, because calling them unhealthy too loudly just makes us feel guilt, self hatred, and disrespect ourselves — and then we are stuck in a worse loop than the one we were trying to escape from.

our brain is not lazy. it’s overwhelmed.

we often engage in these avoiding behaviors when we can’t sit alone with our thoughts, and most of the times it means something is unprocessed underneath. that’s not our weakness, it’s just our nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

the amygdala — the part of our brain that processes threat — doesn’t distinguish well between physical danger and emotional discomfort. an unread email from our boss, a conversation we’ve been avoiding, a decision we haven’t made, a feeling we don’t want to name — these all register as threats. our brain wants out and it finds the easiest way out.

scrolling is the easiest exit. it’s always available, it requires nothing, and it’s just stimulating enough to keep us distracted without wanting anything from us.

researchers found that what damages people under stress isn’t the stressor itself — it’s how long they keep thinking about it afterward. worry, rumination, anticipatory dread keep the physiological stress response active long after the original trigger is gone. our body doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and a vividly imagined one. so when we spend four hours scrolling while circling through the same anxiety in the background, our nervous system never gets the signal to shut down. the stress cycle never closes.

what we’re actually doing to our brain

there’s a network in our brain called the default mode network (DMN) — neuroscientists sometimes call it the brain’s “passive mode.” it activates when we’re not focused on anything external. staring at the ceiling. walking without our phone. just sitting quietly with ourselves.

this is when our brain does its most important maintenance work. it processes emotions, consolidates memories, makes sense of experiences, restores itself. it’s not wasted time — it’s essential time. the brain needs it the way the body needs sleep.

when we fill every quiet moment with even seemingly passive content, our brain stays in a low-level stimulated state that feels like rest but functions nothing like it. it's not working hard, but it's not off either.

and here’s the thing about cortisol — our primary stress hormone — it doesn’t lower just because we stopped hard work. it lowers when our nervous system receives a genuine signal that the threat has passed. mindless scrolling doesn’t send that signal. it just keeps in an exhausted half-alert state.

a 2010 study by harvard psychologists matthew killingsworth and daniel gilbert found that people spend about 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re currently doing — and that mind-wandering, not the activity itself, was the strongest predictor of unhappiness. but the solution isn’t to fill every moment with stimulation to stop the wandering. the solution is to learn to be present in the quiet. that’s what the default mode network actually needs.

there’s also something interesting about what happens when you give your brain real downtime. research on incubation — the period of rest between active problem-solving sessions — consistently shows that stepping away from a problem and doing nothing actually produces more creative solutions than continuing to push through. the brain keeps working when we’re not consciously directing it. but only if we give it real silence to work in without podcast or netflix.

fake rest vs real rest

fake rest keeps cortisol elevated:

• endless scrolling

• binge watching shows back to back for hours

• always having something playing in the background

• being constantly plugged in and available

• numbing with food, alcohol, or other habits when we feel overwhelmed

real rest lowers cortisol and resets your nervous system:

• doing nothing — actually nothing, not productive nothing

• being outside without your phone

• sleeping properly, not just lying in bed with your phone

• easy meaningful conversation with someone you trust

• creative hobbies that absorb you without pressure

• gentle movement — walking, stretching, anything that gets you out of your head

• deep sleep, which is when the brain literally cleans itself through the glymphatic system

the difference is straightforward: real rest makes you feel more energized and focused after. fake rest makes you feel worse, with guilt added on top.

why we confuse the two

part of it is that fake rest is easier. it requires nothing. we don’t have to sit with discomfort or process anything or make any decisions. we just consume.

but part of it is also cultural. we live in a system that treats productivity as a personality trait. so when we stop producing, we feel guilty. guilt is uncomfortable. so we reach for the nearest numbing thing — and then call it rest so we don’t have to confront the fact that we’re avoiding something.

there’s a concept in psychology called experiential avoidance — the tendency to avoid thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are uncomfortable, even when doing so creates long-term problems. research consistently shows that the more we avoid an uncomfortable feeling, the stronger it gets. avoidance teaches our brain that the feeling is dangerous, which makes it more threatening the next time it shows up, which makes us even more likely to avoid it again.

it’s a loop. and the loop gets worse and worse the longer we stay in it.

the things we most need to process are usually the ones we most aggressively distract ourselves from. the uncomfortable conversation. the life decision. the grief. the thing that’s been sitting at the back of our mind for three months. scrolling doesn’t make it smaller. it just postpones the moment we have to look at it and makes it even bigger and more threatening.

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how to actually rest — the 7 types of rest

dr. saundra dalton-smith, a physician and researcher, argues that tiredness is not one thing. there are seven different types of rest deficit, and sleep alone fixes only one of them. this is why we can sleep eight hours and still wake up exhausted — we might be rested physically but depleted in other ways.

here are the seven types and what actually helps each one:

1. physical rest — sleep, naps, lying down. but it also includes passive physical rest like yoga, stretching, or any gentle movement. if your body is tired, no amount of mental stimulation will fix it. and if you’re lying in bed scrolling, you’re not giving your body physical rest — you’re just horizontal.

2. mental rest — mental fatigue comes from constant decision-making, information processing, and switching between tasks. signs you need mental rest: you can’t focus, you’re forgetful, small decisions feel enormous. what helps: scheduled breaks during the day — even two minutes of doing nothing — a brain dump journal, and deliberately doing one thing at a time instead of multitasking.

3. emotional rest — this is the rest you need when you’ve been performing — being okay when you’re not, managing other people’s feelings, saying yes when you mean no. what helps: time alone, honest conversations where you don’t have to manage how the other person feels, therapy, or simply letting yourself feel whatever you actually feel without immediately fixing it.

4. social rest — not all social interaction drains us equally. some people energize us and some people exhaust us. social rest means intentionally spending more time with people who restore your energy and less with people who deplete it. it also means allowing yourself actual solitude — not being lonely, but chosen quiet time that belongs only to you.

5. sensory rest — we are overstimulated in a way that has no historical precedent. screens, notifications, background noise, artificial light, open plan offices — our senses are processing an enormous amount of input every single day. sensory rest means intentional sensory reduction. silence. darkness. no screens before bed. sitting outside without earphones.

6. creative rest — if your work or life requires creativity — problem solving, writing, designing, thinking — you need to refill the creative well. what refills it: beauty, nature, art, music, anything that inspires you without demanding anything back. consuming without forcing yourself to produce. going to a gallery, reading something just because it’s beautiful, walking somewhere you’ve never been.

7. spiritual rest — this doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. it’s the rest that comes from feeling connected to something bigger than your daily to-do list. purpose, community, meaning. the feeling that what you’re doing matters. the deficit shows up as emptiness, pointlessness, going through the life but not fully being in it.

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my honest take

i’ll be real with you. i know all of this like most of us do and i still reach for my phone when something is bothering me. i still put on a show i don’t care about because silence feels too uncomfortable. i still call it rest and tell myself i deserve it, when i know it isn’t. did they yesterday night watching random kdrama till 4 am.

here’s what i’m actually trying to do step by step:

in the morning, before i open any app, i try to sit with my coffee for ten minutes without my phone. me, coffee and the quiet. it feels uncomfortable at first. then it feels like the best part of the day.

when i feel the urge to scroll, i try to ask: what am i feeling right now? not to analyze it or solve it — just to name it. anxious. overwhelmed. avoidance. naming it is usually enough to take some of the charge out of it. a mood tracker or emotions journal helps too.

i’ve been trying to go outside without my phone at least once a day. even fifteen minutes. the research on nature and cortisol reduction is genuinely convincing — even brief exposure to natural environments lowers stress hormone levels measurably.

i also started keeping a kindle by the bed. instead of scrolling before sleep, i read — it’s boring and it works better than anything else i’ve tried for actually falling asleep. i also journal before bed to dump whatever is in my head — worries, things i need to do, things i’m thinking about. i don’t do it as consistently as i’d like to, but i’m trying.

small steps to start this week

1. affect labeling — the simple act of naming what you’re feeling has been shown to reduce amygdala activation. you don’t need to solve anything. you just need to name it. i’m anxious. i’m overwhelmed. i’m sad or angry. putting words to a feeling moves it from raw sensation to cognitive data, which makes it less threatening to your nervous system. think of it as a bridge between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex — feeling brain to thinking brain.

2. do one small thing — not the whole overwhelming thing, just one. send that email. write down what’s actually bothering you. sit outside for ten minutes without your phone. every time you move toward the discomfort instead of away from it, you are updating your brain’s prediction model. the thing that felt threatening starts to feel familiar. familiar is manageable.

3. before opening instagram or netflix, ask yourself — am i actually tired, or am i avoiding something? if the answer is tired — rest properly. sleep. go outside. do nothing. figure out which of the seven types you’re actually depleted in. if the answer is avoiding — don’t force productivity. just sit with it for ten minutes. name it. let it exist without immediately running from it. make scheduled time block for instagram, tiktok and netflix show.

it will be difficualt at first, but you will see the difference in the long run, like i do, because now instead of being tired, low energy, procrastinator i started write and work consistently, and these boring and uncomfortable things give me more energy than i expected 6 months ago.

the immidiate answer was 2020, always. covid came, i fell sick, quit my job, my life changed drastically, and something in me never recovered. but the longer i sit with that thought, the less true it feels. because when i th…

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i was reading carl jung’s the undiscovered self, i bought it thinking it’s about shadow sides, which was kind of popular online past years, but it was some politics, philosophy, and sociology. as a person from a post-soviet country it was a fun read, but the insight i got was one sentence: you only grow when you struggle. which i heard millions of times, but never took seriously.

the part that actually struck me was jung saying that a comfortable environment makes you expect everything from the outside — even the metamorphosis external reality simply cannot bring to. these are deep internal changes we have to embrace, with how the world is changing and will change in the future. also he was saying about concept of microcosm. need to read further to get more understanding on that.

then i was bored and started reading adler, i thought i need some individual psychology. it was a very interesting and funny book which had a bunch of cases, the first case was about flaura who he described as spoiled and infantile and that’s why she was getting epilepsy — lots of stereotypes and old psychology stuff, but still some truths there.
then i randomly saw a reel of a famous youtuber from my country, she was also saying you don’t have real growth on ibiza, you grow in hardships like your mother dying etc.

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so these became fear creators for my already fearful and overthinking mind. i had a privileged and pampering childhood, very promising, and somehow failed everything in the eyes of my relatives and parents, maybe even in my own eyes before. because i felt like a failure and couldn’t do anything about it, i sometimes fantasized that i can actually only grow up and embrace my potential if my father dies. that was a really bad and disruptive mindset — now that i grew up, i know that.

with all those information i started rethinking my life choices, which i do a lot, then i say this time i will change, and then i start sabotaging myself, running away from reality and lying to myself.

my younger self was literally just waiting for something dramatic enough to finally make me grow. but that’s not how it works.

so the real question for me was; yes, i would grow in hardship, but what amount of hardship? now that i think about it, i would get crushed if those disruptive fantasies of mine came true. however i know i should still embrace challenges.

then i started reading substack articles i saved and was procrastinating to read for months. i tend to have self-sabotaging patterns, not doing the things which are good for me, like reading substack.

now that i am actually writing, i feel so good.

substack, my favorite platform — not too short, not too long of contents, just hits the sweet spot. helpful, beautiful, sometimes even poetic and romantic.

i think i read around 8-10 articles and 3 of them were really really really helpful for me.

the 1st one was about stagnant periods and becoming, and it hit different because i am literally in it. 5 years of trying, failing, giving up, not moving. i kept thinking this period doesn’t count yet, like i’m in a void and the real life starts later; when i will figure everything out, become smarter, prettier, but the post made me realize — this is the real life. i am already in it. the stagnant, messy, uncomfortable part is not the pause to my story. it is the story.

still becoming

the space you’re trying to rush through might be the story itself

i have a habit of treating my life like a waiting room…

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7 months ago · 698 likes · 20 comments · kiki

(btw, remember my dream about growing by my father dying — he actually got arrested for being in the opposition party) so i had to work and feed my family at 22, so they kinda was ok with my not working. my parents are amazing, caring, loving, maybe little narcissistic, and i actually have lots of mother and maybe father issues which i am gonna explore in future posts when i learn how to write about deeper, more complicated things.

so that becoming post was really helpful because this period which i’ve been hating, but still not doing anything — is actually good (actually my childhood dream of not having to study nor work). it is scary how some of my micro thoughts and micro semi-dreams came true in the most unexpected ways.

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the 2nd post was so helpful, because it was about self sabotage and self protection, which i have always been doing, as spoiled and “gifted” child i hated the idea of being average so i played it safe and rarely stepped out of my comfort zone. i also never studied, nor did my homeworks and still got A’s, which was the bad thing which i only found out after years and years. also i just remembered the funniest thing ever, because i didn’t prepare and still got better results that my classmates in my all girls boarding school, one of classmates said that my brain works like boys’ brain. she said her brother never tries and still gets good grades, and she a girl has to try hard to get those grades. now that i think we had loooots of internalized misogyny which deserves a couple of longform posts of them own. central asian girls, how much i love and respect you, and how much hardships you get. anyways, from this post i got actual solutions, guides what i should do to exit my comfort zone into my growth zone, and be fearless.

Things you'll learn the hard way (but wish you didn't)

Self-sabotage starts as self-protection

I was recently listening to a friend vent about someone who mistreats her and speaks with a nasty tone. I was trying to explain that the person with the tone is clearly unregulated — and can’t get a grip of their big feelings, even at their big age. And that sucks for him, because his life will be harder than it needs to be…

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8 months ago · 8429 likes · 273 comments · Layla Shaikley

the 3rd post you are what you choose was the most insightful for me personally. it made me see that i should not wait to discover who i am — i should build her, right now, through every tiny choice i make or avoid. every time i scroll instead of write. every time i say yes when i mean no. every time i don’t send that one email. that’s also a choice. and it’s also me. i love everything to do with systems and thinking systematically, even if i live in chaos and my mind is scattered all over the place.

BAD GIRL MEDIA

You are what you choose

Most people think identity is something they discover, like some buried artifact waiting to be excavated if they just do enough therapy or read enough self-help books or take enough personality tests…

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10 months ago · 6091 likes · 131 comments · stepfanie tyler

so what now. i don’t have a clean answer. i’m not going to suddenly become a person who does hard things effortlessly — i’ve been fragile and comfortable for too long for that. but i think that’s okay.

i just want to be 1% braver than yesterday. send that email. write the post. read instead of scrolling. choose the small discomfort over the familiar escape. nothing dramatic, no father dying, no ibiza moment. choosing myself, what is actually good for me in the tiniest ways possible, every single day.

and honestly? writing this is already a part of it.

we are all just girls, trying to live our lives in the best, comfortable, safe ways possible. lets all be braver 1%, have more audacity, accept the reality and do what we can, with what we have right this moment.

p.s. i started writing this post feeling lost, but now i feel so much better; this is the magic of writing and expressing yourself i guess

i have a lot i need to write about, but lately, i’ve been so deep into c-dramas, escaping the reality that i’ve realized my mind is completely empty — as empty as a pot in my village. usually, i have decent ideas and “food for thought,” but right now, there’s nothing. the only thought-provoking thing to happen so far this year was my uncle’s bizarre obsession with the ussr and his dreams of returning to a colonized, communist state. like, wtf? the only other thing on my mind is: why are c-drama male leads so much sweeter than k-drama ones?

we are currently in the middle of new year holidays. about 90% of the country isn’t working until january 12th; it’s basically like russia here. normally, the government would make january 3rd a workday, but for the past two years, we’ve been allowed to keep resting for a long time, like 2 weeks almost.

but that’s not the point. i’ve been “bedrotting” for the last four days, postponing my house cleaning and now both my mind and my home feel cluttered. i managed to binge-watch three c-dramas, each over 25 episodes. this was my first time diving into chinese series; usually, i stick to korean or japanese dramas. it was such a new feeling. everyone on “threads” was obsessing over speed and love, so i jumped on the trend. i binged it by speeding up the boring parts (not my best trait, i know), and i loved it. it felt so much more intense and romantic than what i’m used to.

after that, i watched the best thing—the doctor was the sweetest character. then, for my third drama, i finally watched hidden love. i guess this one really famous, and i actually tried to watch it last year but couldn’t even get through the episode two. this time, however, i finished it and loved it. i think the biggest part of my problem is the way i watched them; staying up until almost 6:00 am, obsessively watching my favorite characters only and skipping around. it felt so unhealthy that i could actually feel my brain “rotting.” then of course i’ve missed everything on my to-do list: my vision board, creating my content plan for work, and my personal instagram posts. the funniest part that i made the theme of 2026: more creation and less comsumption…

my brain just isn’t functioning right now, and my sleep schedule is ruined after three days of staying up until dawn. i’m left with this heavy sense of guilt and shame, fearing that i’m not changing for the better, but for the worse. even so, i have to accept where i am and just do the work. i didn’t think i had anything to say today, but i told myself i had to write something—even if it’s bad—to put out on substack. so, here it is…

i have been thinking of you a lot lately, may be because i got better, i can be vulnerable and do things i would love to do and not try to escape them. remember couple of years ago i wrote a long ass email to you and you seemed to be happy, but i accidentally deleted it when i was clearing my emails, which i normally don’t do. i remember you writing about white roses and can’t remember exactly what kind of white roses, i wanted to send you those but i couldn’t so i am writing this and maybe soon i will actually send the roses.

i have been thinking about all the people in my life and how i show them nothing to them, nothing that actually matters, how superficial some connections i have with the people around me, and you were i guess the only one i could show more of myself, and you would understand me, sometimes would not understand at all, but mostly would get me so effortlessly. or maybe i am just making up these things in my head.

people have the tendency to think they know more then they do, and it makes me smile everytime someone says something about me, like they know me. then i remember is there anyone who actually knows even a little about me, i think you do, you always did. i miss you. i miss you a lot. i want to have never ending conversations with you like we did at uni, watch before sunrise trilogy till the sunrise and do some crappy pseudo-psychological tests to ourselves and only admit the ones we liked.

i just wanted to write a letter to you, my dearest friend, my twin. i’ve been browsing some sites like pinterest but cooler, and found some images that reminded you then i decided, why won’t i just write to you.

inshallah soon i will write more detailed letter, because this one is just words no meaning.

.

cr. Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World. 1948

comfort is killing my life, it’s not even comfort comfort, just barely comfort. i live, merely exist, eat, sleep but not well, i have no money, i don’t do anything to change it, i started taking vitamins but felt nauseous and gave up on them. people surrounding think i am living interesting, fulfilling, free life but those are all lies and illusions. at least i have a job, unlike last year these days, when i felt like this but didn’t even have a job.

every year i pray, plan and visualize different life, and try all those mind shifting, neuroplasticity, energy clearing shit, but even those “easy” steps to change my life i abandon in 4 days average, not even a week, i never finish anything, i run away, i abandon, i run away, avoid and struggle, overthink and all for nothing, i don’t even make art from my myseries, because i think my struggles aren’t real, may be it’s true because i make them up in my head but still could have done something out of it, at least i write when i can’t stop thinking and have posted here 4 times, i never write when i am feeling okay.

now writing these, i think i have to do serious work with my ego, all these are i i i and i hate it. i want to write about meaningful things, i actually have a lots of things to write about, my life is boring but not so much, i live in an interesting place, full of chaos and stories to be told, but all i do is think about myself and my unfulfilled, wasted potential. writing this to the void, it always gets better after writing, always...

i am sitting at my desk sipping cheap instant coffee with cheap sweetener that may or may not cause cancer in my gut, and thinking, like i always do, thinking aimlessly, thinking a lot.

by the way, i am back to 9 to 5 office work, but today, on monday, i called in sick. i wasn't particularly sick, but now i am kinda unwell because i am good at self-sabotaging, making myself ill if i think about it a lot.

i have been lying to myself that i don't have monday blues because “monday” is a new beginning, a new opportunity, yayy so many great projects waiting for me. so i woke up at 6 am to finish my presentation. oh god, i didn't want to wake up, i didn't want to go to the office, so i decided to get sick and here i am sitting in my room writing this.

for the past 4 years, i have been kind of jobless. i told people i know that i work from home - this is the new trend, the new reality, don't you guys know? then i started ignoring people who were working and seemed to be doing great and having like a total opposite of my life, which was kind of miserable. but now i am back to socializing and it's all great and stuff, but i missed being jobless and doing nothing or everything i want to do; reading random Substack posts, watching k-dramas or shows, re-watching Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City, reading webtoons, watching anime. now i don't have time for anything. also, i love learning random things, so today i watched how to use Perplexity and NotebookLM to be a great learner, and it was really fun.

also, i finally started reading again. i have been on my "can't read even 5% of a book" streak for the past couple of years. there were some exceptions like No Longer Human by Dazai and All Fours by Miranda. somehow, i finished reading them quickly. now i re-started for the nth time Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. it went really smoothly this time because she's the same age as me and she is an office girly. last i tried reading it i couldn't even finish one chapter, if there were any chapters. i think this fall is going to be really interesting and fun. i am back to office, back to reading, and hopefully writing. i gave myself permission to write badly and post regularly my bad writing.

there were some posts saying we have 100 days left until 2026, so i decided to challenge myself to quit sugar and coffee, walk daily, watch long-term content like movies and nice series, and finish books.

books i want to start and finish:

• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

• Intermezzo (started already but couldn't finish)

• Stoner

• Agua Viva (halfway through)

movies/series i want to watch until 2026:

• Perfect Days

• Adolescence

• Tempest

let me know if you any other easy and cozy books and movies to recommend.

Why?

I just realized, when i see something i like; a movie i'd enjoy, a book i'd love or post/essay i'd adore, i start reading and immediately save it to read later, don't know when but when i feel like it... Just started reading a post on substack it was so good, so i read couple of sentences and closed it and saved to read it later🥲 it was so good i even felt little euphoric, blessed even and simply closed it and felt like now is not the time, like i dont deserve that bliss...

I know on an intellectual level that its best to do things now, not later, cuz later never comes, but still emotionally i cant continue

So now I have decided, i will go back and read that damn post until the very last word.

19.03.2025 1:05 AM

Maybe because my pms is nearing, i felt down today, didn't want to watch anything, read anything nor work...

Wanted to just lay down and stare at the ceiling

My books, 70% of my books arrived, so i needed to go take them from the пункт чего-то там, but didnt want to even lift a palec

Now i read some substack posts and kinda inspired to read

I will go read or just daydream..

20.03.2025 5:32 AM

I am a hypocrite, i think i realized it recently, but I've always known it, since my childhood. When i hint it to my friends they say im just having синдром самозванца (the imposter syndrome), and that i am the most blunt in a good way and sincere person...

Even though i act tough and bitchy, never get swayed by others opinions and do what i want how i want... I actually do care, and always did a lot, a lot more than obvious "people pleasers" around, i act cool but dying inside for approval and validation. I crave peoples’ attention and want to be revered almost, not to that extent i hope, but i am the most self obsessed self absorbed person, and i thought i was the most selfless…

I am a coward, i can't let people find out who i am really inside, i can never go for the things i want and do what i want, because i am afraid i and others will find out i am a failure…

I live in a bubble, safe space, and act like im something, better than others, smarter than others but i will never do sth in case all this will be proven wrong…

Once in my life i wanted to be honest with myself at least, but even writing this, i am noticing my lungs getting tighter and hard to breath, even though no one i know will read this…

I am afraid of making mistakes, even if i know there are no mistakes and no one is perfect, and every failure is a lesson. Why? Because i am perfect, i have to be perfect so i don't do mistakes, i don't do anything…

My culture is against vulnerability and showing emotions, but i act like i am better than others and strong showing my emotions and being vulnerable, by showing annoyance, anger and sadness but never my true feelings, and act like having really deep conversations and saying all the things i don't even believe and pretend to be deeper and more interesting then other “shallow and basic” people…

I have never been honest for 100% with anyone, i never share my problems, i just ask and listen to them acting like i trully care, sometimes i do, but mostly don't…

When we were having psychopathology class in uni and covering narcissistic personality disorder i thought i have it, then the next week i thought i have histrionic personality disorder...

Maybe i should get therapy, but i don't believe there are good therapists that could actually help me in my country…

But writing like this helps a lot, and this will be the only time i will be honest, at least for now my current self, now i think these thoughts but tomorrow who knows, i will read and think this is bullshit and i am actually a good person not like wholly good person but more good in me than bad kind of good.

2:22 AM March 21, nooruz (day and night is equal?)

My fig tree or my empty coffee cups, whichever analogy you prefer

Why why why did i make myself small and say embrace mediocracy, when i was talented, ambitious and smart, capable as a kid, teenager even young adult

Then i chose one thing that i dont quite like, when i liked so many other things, not only liked but had talents even, that i made myself small, smaller and even smaller, put myself in a smallest box, like box of matches

My soul, i feel it, its limitless, but i put so much limitations and kept it, suffocated it, killed it daily slowly

Now i want to be fearless, courageous at least pretend to be, and do all the things i love, but less chaotically like i loved, more systematically and consistently

I will become many things and try to feed my all types of hunger, and fill the coffee cups one by one, sometimes simultanously, but with care, with love, with passion

I always struggled with the thought that i have no passion for one particular thing, but i have multiple interests, still unknown and waiting to be explored

I will be couragous, and passionate and gentle

no editing just raw feelings

…this is a ball pen, better and smoother feeling, but still bad. i want to start reading again, for God’s sake i should start reading, that is the thing i love the most, but why i’m not doing it

may be i am depressed.

or vitamin deficiency

d3 or magnesium.

I want to start keto and walking, but it’s so hard, my dopamine system seems to be ruined. Nothing is enjoyable at all these days. I only want to watch reaction videos, not even real movies, just high dopamine content and eat cheap high sugar snacks these past days.

It seems even impossible to clean the house or read few pages, or write something decent, really, may be this time i am depressed for real or just vitamin deficit.

I want to go somewhere safe and quiet and live alone, so no one bothers me. I want to be alone and do nothing. I know i am doing this to myself, but i don’t want to heal and start doing healthier things. Today i got this idea or dicovery that i hate the sound of anger in people or even subtle emotion that lead to higher and louder tone of speaking, when my mom was speaking with her family on video call, she was speaking loudly, almost like she was angry or something and it gave me discomfort. I think i hate people and their meddling with me. I need to be free, free of people, but i don’t have money to move out and i don’t want to work either. I don’t want people’s expectations. I don’t want to be great of fulfill my potential, i just want to exist comfortably…

I want to be average, i now know i am below any kind of average, but i want to become average and live normal, comfortable life without others’ and my own expectations…

I don’t want to be anything at all, just me completely accepted by myself, like i am right now…

It’s hard, harder that i’ve imagined, i always though i loved and accepted myself, but I hate myself i guess…

I know i am being irrational, but this is exactly how i feel right now this moment, let’s see tomorrow, may be i will be in different place in mind and a different person.

let’s just see

…