#aphorism

Don't say anything to yourself that you wouldn't say to your best friend (no more self-deprecation allowed!)

Start as you mean to continue (as best/where you can)

Go where you're wanted

Guard and savor your joy

Do not set yourself on fire to keep others warm

Your best is whatever you can do in each moment, not everything you are or were or are theoretically capable of

Work to cultivate the life you want to live

Shame is a social emotion (so there's no point in feeling it in private)

It's only embarrassing if you're embarrassed

Cringe is dead, be free!

If beating yourself up worked, it would have worked by now

If you do not schedule time for maintenance, your equipment (body) will schedule it for you

Play and rest are both necessary to recharge your brain

Tell your friends you love them

It's not stupid if it keeps you alive

You are a child of the universe, as much as the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here

These are things I've found to be very helpful and/or true, anyway

“You got two roads ahead of you. You got one road where you keep blaming yourself for what happened. You keep going over it in your head, what you could've done differently. You push people away, and you suffer, because that’s what you think you deserve. And then there’s another road... where you find a way to accept what happened. You just accept it. Doesn’t mean you gotta like it. Doesn’t mean you gotta understand it. And you live the best goddamn life you can.”

It’s more needful to extinguish arrogance than a blazing fire.

Hello, yes, + thank you for asking! I'm an essayist, published poet appearing in journals such as Hobart + Rust + Moth, former ghostwriter, dabbler in fiction, critic, + sometimes journalist. This blog has largely become a site of experimentation in a form akin to personal essays, though more closely resembling the persona of what I name as the public diarist.

My work is philosophical, associative, lyrical, + in constant conversation with the literary traditions of confessional writing, Modernism, Aestheticism, Romanticism, Appalachian Gothic, + the lyric essay alongside the philosophical, political, + psychological movements + traditions of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, humanism, American pragmatism, Jungian archetypes, attachment + trauma theory, feminism, moral psychology, post-structuralism, metaphysics, + the aphoristic.

Through the above, I circle witness, misrecognition, power, control, surrender, desire, grief, mortality, home, exile, exposure, perception, moral evasion, intentionality, responsibility, the ethics of attention + relation, the rescue + failure of language, the instrumental wound, + the fracture between the exterior + interior life.