One Month Streaming FREE !!!
Act nowwww
A clickbait title, but it’s true!! I’ve completed one month of daily streaming with no paywalls, no editors, and no content plan.
I spent the last year pruning every fear possible out of my mind, and December dailies were a way of laying to rest perfectionism, control and anxiety when it comes to being creative and being public.
The longest a post took to publish was 3 hours, and the average time I spent on them hovered around an hour. I’d come to my computer, turn it out, hit publish and close my laptop immediately. This is the healthiest and most rest-full relationship to “work” I’ve ever had. There is room for care-taking, resting/healing, long walks, longer baths, and most importantly I get to say and research what I want.
There were no nerves damaged or sleep lost over these 31 posts. As my own worst critic, I am well aware of my propensity to wander, compress a multitude of ideas in a short space, write non-linearly, stick to the same language, make sharp turns and urge close reading with my streams without being clear about it.
But these are all first drafts. They allow my subconscious to speak, breathe and visualize without filter. In return, I hope that they provoke something in the reader or listener. That these half-baked ideas may be completed in different ways, taken, mulled over, forgotten and returned to on a stormy day. Or that the collection of these streams can be seen as, dare I say, a mettaverse.
Maybe this is my art practice—what is scientifically also known as neurodivergence.
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I started reality streaming because I had so many ideas that weren’t seeing the light of day at my last job. I’d then see these ideas in well-known publications, written by people who had whole institutions and social paradigms betting on them. This isn’t supposed to be a “flex,” because working in the trends space is not about who has the idea, it’s kinda about who gets there first (or gives the loudest keynote on the biggest, most expensive stage). We all kind of talk about the same things but in our own branding or language, and fish in the same collective consciousness. Rare is the truly original idea, but (if I were to flex) I did have a few of those.
I say all this because I really am not precious about ideas, especially good ones. Ones that cannot harm in the right hands and are baked with fail-safes in the wrong ones, idealistically speaking. I’m more interested in the storytelling part. In how insights come to life, are applied, practiced and land on a well-placed question. Like a tiny hammer that brings marble to its knees with the correctly placed tap.
As people’s social media accounts are mined for high performance aesthetics and emotional engagement metrics, this space serves my artistry and desire to ideate on my own terms and timeline. Reality streaming is an experiment, an emergence into a praxis for the new world. As a digital migrant, this feels like the safest place for that experimentation—whether singular streams, or an entire improvised programming schedule like this past month.
I hope that being in a space of practice like this might show others that so much can be created out of a creative desert, out of gargantuan grief, in the midst of what every email headline, meme and Tik Tok tell us this year was like. And there are still books of ideas in the pipeline. This is a practice of sustainability, of giving life to ideas that were already there but from a new vantage point.
I haven’t done daily writing and posting like this since I was a teenager. In fact, where I sit while reality streaming is the very room I was a teenager in. I’ve been channeling her insatiable curiosity, quirkiness, livejournal voice, inability to read one book at a time and desire to be friends with everyone. Even the people who unsubscribe, because I totally get it, there is enough content out there! This is mostly for bb hawa, and I’m stoked if others enjoy that even briefly.
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Resigning from a pretty cool job in July to bet on where my passions would lead me was….rough for a while. The financial security I’ve accumulated is not just mine, it is my family’s. I am borrowing from their security to bet firstly on my rest, and secondly on my ideas. This could be called first gen eldest daughter syndrome, in which (among many attributes) the eldest daughter may decline her own future and/or well-being for the family’s.
BUT! Stick with it, I say. Big risks yield big rewards. I don’t have a lot to add to the noise around “what 2021 was like,” but I do know this…if it’s possible for me, without exaggeration, to have the absolute worst year of my life and simultaneously be the happiest I’ve ever been, then it could be true for you too.
It could be true that you say NO so many times until you find your true YESes. The type of YES that helps you believe happiness can be a sustained state. The type of No that seems counterintuitive but comes from your core, with no care for any offense taken. It shouldn’t be offensive to choose your joy. As my dadoo says, “It’s not a no to you, it’s a yes to me!”
So my question, my tiny hammer, to you is: why the fuck let anything get in the way of being happy? Give me a good reason. Even the ideas and critiques you think are yours are really implanted and systemically reinforced thought formations (see first stream).
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I bookmarked this article a while ago on Social Prosperity, which is a measurement that allows us to track the wellbeing, livability and equity of cities and neighborhoods. The writer, Lucinda Hartley, says:
But for most countries attempting to assess their city or national progress through a wellbeing lens, the indicators they must rely on are based more around deficits and vulnerabilities than they are around strengths. Most metrics look at what is “going wrong”, while research increasingly shows that evaluating what is “going right” is often what’s needed to shift the dial on wellbeing outcomes.
There’s enough fear porn and nihilistic humor out there, and as many of you might be reading this on the first day of 2022, I hope we can focus and take with us what has gone right the past year. For me, I smiled so hard and made new wrinkles where “beauty” preaches tautness. I want people to know I’ve changed. I want people to know I’m happy, even when I’m “imperfect.”
In our most undone states, let us face the public and say…
Reality Streaming 2021 Data:
60,000 substack views
42 streams
7 books open / partially read
2 books read
888 miles driven up and down the California coast
17,368 photos and videos in the camera roll
12,540 emails in the inbox
3,451 sabbatical auto-reply emails
9 months and 15 days living with mom
1 week of prayer with over 5,000 people for our hearts, the planet and those most in need
Reality Streaming 2022 Projections:
More paradoxes
Alarming food shortages
Aliens, again
Public intellectual cat fights
Mass spiritual awakening
Corporate plant medicine
Entertainment fatigue
Debauchery
Making disclosure and whistleblowing sexy
Prepper-chic
The great rise of decentralized education
Labor shortage (again)
Self-ception (a heightened expression of self-awareness)
And so much more coming to a reality near you!
Binge watching the illusion is best done with friends, so thank you for joining me on this ride the past year. We are back to regularly unscheduled programming for 2022. If you have any requests or questions you’d like me to put my brain against, please reply to this email. Otherwise, cya next stream ✿♥‿♥✿
Loved your 2021 data and 2022 projections! hehe
Thank youuuuu!