Stuff worth reading

“How to Give Up Writing and Your Dreams, in 1826 Daily Lessons” by Lori Rader-Day

In my experience, that dark moment — that black hour, if you’ll forgive me — isn’t a lightning strike. It’s a slow dwindling of your attention, one decision after another over a series of days, then weeks, then months. Even years. And these decisions aren’t even bad ones. You choose your loved ones, your job, your daily survival and comfort and enjoyment — until the small voice nagging that you should have written today stops saying a word.

We can’t cherry-pick the moments that got us where we are happy to be. We contain our successes, but also our failures.

“The Documented Life” by Sherry Turkle

When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.

These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves.

“On Feminism, Anti-Feminism, and the Things That Mystify Me” by Kelly Barnhill

I honestly can’t understand how we can be in this world and not be feminist. How can we just not notice inequality and injustice when it is staring us in the dang face? How can we not come up against the blindness of privilege and not want to change? How can we not desire to open our eyes? All social justice movements, in the end, work to remove shadows and blocks. We cannot see injustice if the limits of privilege block the view. If we remove the block we can see unfairness and we can change the world and make it better. Those blocks are removed through experience, through awareness-raising, and, probably most effectively, through story. Story matters.