If you haven’t been feeling great mentally you might start doing daily writing exercises to stimulate creativity. This is a way to stretch your mind out of familiar positions or reified habits. But be careful not to create a situation where you wind up feeling down on yourself. Know where you are. Try to find exercises that are like sourdough starters, like snake plants. Commitments that are not fragile, that survive the days you are tired, or aimless, or that you just forget. Start a story with no expectations and see where it takes you. Don’t let your tongue get caught up on speculations of the ways others might receive it. Don’t stop to wonder who will or will not understand. Come back and edit whenever it fits.
I forgot I had volleyball practice once. Well not forgot. You see, I thought practice was at 5 pm and had spent the afternoon lavishing in the felt-experience of an extra hour being stretched into one’s day. Meandering to practice around 4:30, I was surprised upon approach, to hear no teammates in the locker room. No chatter, no music, no bustling sounds of getting ready, of preparation. The clarity of what was off escaped me. It was pulling my white socks taut on my toes when I remembered that Tuesday practices started at 4 pm and sure enough Tuesday it was. I still don’t know how I had messed it up so late in the season. We had had this schedule for months. I ran into the gym crying, more mortified about being in trouble than I was upset. The next day (Retracted) wrote about it in his blog post.
His blog post was a whole thing. He published one every week.
What did he write about? I don’t know. A love for systematicness, for rigour, for devotion. About nothing. About a lot of things. And nothing in between. Generally, it was him preaching favor to some small habit of life, casting humble suggestions to entertain a particular structure, some moral orientation, a way of organizing attention he deemed worthy of disciplined pursuit. His didactics reflective allegories constituting his daily life (kind of what I am doing now) often inspired by his work with collegiate athletes, often young women. This particular day it would be about me, and how he would rather see a player cry for accidentally missing half of practice than see a player there and indifferent the entire time. An identity made in real time. It made me feel special, it was essentially propaganda.
- (Retracted) was the media.
(Retraced) was somewhat powerful in the humble athletics department of a humble institution. He was respectable in this regard. He was the strength and conditioning trainer who could give you a job ; ) It somewhat obscured his creepiness. AKA, you forgave him for more.
When (Retracted) hired me to work the front desk at the school gym I was grateful. When he chose my body as the dummy to demonstrate the heimlich maneuver on during first aid training for new hires, I can’t say I felt special as much as I felt guilty for feeling it. It was humiliating. He had me stand up in front of him and yanked me abruptly back towards him. He bent me over with a notable force and counted aloud as he took five abdominal thrusts. It was awful. And though I became repulsed of this man’s soul I still found myself circling around my understanding of his mind, magnetized by the concept of his inner workings. He wrote a blog post every week and every week I read it. Every week I would talk to him about it, clumsily posturing myself as cool and detatched. Offering my logical analysis gushing over the fact he cared. I can smell him now as if he were leaning over front desk toward me. I can see the fluorescent lights shimmering on his bald baby head.
I recently learned he asked out a teammate who had graduated a year after me. I think he was 37. I think she was 22. She had been hired as the volleyball team’s assistant coach. They were officially equals and so,
I am typing weekly writing exercises into the duckduckgo search bar. By this, I mean I practice writing like running. By this I mean the pursuit is by not temporally disciplined but I am always (sometimes) writing. Sometimes my dreams. Sometimes ethnographic field notes on the bus. Sometimes daily journaling. Sometimes starting open-ended poetic lists…
ex.) beautiful things in feburary
- A friend sending you a poem about heartbreak.
- Admitting that your heart was broken
- even though it is embarrassing.
- Roller-skating again.
- Being inside. Crustaceans and shells and memories and
- ________________________ !
- Taking your first honest ever mental health day and
- not shaming yourself for it.
- Not rolling your eyes reading this over again.
- Forgiving yourself for rolling your eyes.
Maybe this will or could be a daily writing exercise, (Retracted). Maybe it will be horridly unrigorous but it won’t be dogma. Maybe it could be like a prayer but it won’t be daily.
Social scientists hardly know how men find the courage to put their shitty thoughts into the world. This exercise might help you grow that courage like a bone (think fetus formation; gestation). Find two things that you have written down in your notes app and write any surfacing reflection on them. Publish to declare them valuable. Push them into the world like birth. It is okay if you don’t or don’t want to. Your body your choice. You can abort.
Possible Prompts: Who was your percieved audience then and now? What were you thinking when you wrote it? What were you doing? In what ways does it still resonate? What has changed since then? What aspects linger? What is gone?
Here is something I wrote in my “lines for poems” note in Noteapp on the 13th of November.
i make love to what never happened and i make it cum.
I was probably high but you get it, right? I am sure you can probably tell I was on my period, but would you mind just confirming that you caught the irony scent? I have a tendency to get caught up performing seriousness, because I wouldn’t want anyone to know that I might actually take it seriously. Because what if I took it seriously and I failed? Bleh. Besides, I am entirely genuine in pretending not to pretend. The formula is simple. Make the reader (1) cringe, (2) then realize they were just where I wanted them, and then (3) laugh because I caught them off guard and (4) this is different than attending and being attended to. It is so terrifying when you don’t know if people are gonna get it, you know? To put words in a space and know people will pick up what they want to find, take what they hope to get, and make a you out of it. It makes me not want to speak ever. What is the deal with articulation anyways. Does it matter what I mean if no one moves themselves to listen? After all, it is surely not possible to hear to the whines of the tree being cut down with a chainsaw over the scrapping of my furious scribbling. There is a pleasant distance between me and the forest as I write poems in my journal, hunched over and stoned on the bus. Here and now, sliced and dried and bleached and packaged, so far removed from the thousands of years it took to grow, did the tree ever happen? Did its fall? Intellectualize:
- Kimmer (2013) writes about how she always pauses a moment before she inscribes any thought on paper.
- This problematized my radical commitment to the assumptions of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 2000) when developing pedagogy’s life.
Great. Now I have to sit and repent and certainly not avoid by asking myself the big philosophical questions like: What if the daily writing exercise was not writing? What would it mean to spare myself the burden of articulation? What is to come of pursuing something too difficult to look back on? Doesn’t sound like moving on. Is it even healing to write? What am I getting out of this? Am I getting something out? Am I running? I write and I get it out and I run and I never look back, using a tool for only half its function. And why did I pay $50 for a year membership to a blog website when I have a perfectly good writing program on my laptop? Do I think I will get something out of making my thoughts public? My therapist would stop me here and call me out here for abstracting my experience through speculating another’s perceptions of me. They wouldn’t say this but probably to avoid some emotion, some memory. Probably. I could lean back smug and say hmm doesn’t sound like something I would do with a big gremlin twinkle running round my eyes like a ball of socks rolling in a dryer and they would have to laugh, proving my humor a mechanism of avoidance they are powerless to disable, as I am their funniest client. I have never told them about (Retracted). Not because he doesn’t impact me. No, his gaze perseverates. Did he see me as a girl? I ashamed of the ways I liked it. I can’t say that I didn’t want to be wanted more than the other young female athletes. I wanted him to want me because he thought I was uniquely mature, that I was smarter. I was an idiot. He doesn’t think of me.
I can imagine myself going into therapy and sitting on the couch and telling my therapist that there is something I want to talk about but I don’t want to start the conversation. I can imagine them suggesting we explore that resistance. I can imagine clinging to the light of the sun pouring in, dosing the grey-blue carpet in parallelograms. I can imagine them trying to reach for me as I give up on connection, as the key lime walls of their office saturate with the old gym’s royal blue, as memories of flirting with him across the desk, feeling wonderful and nauseous, ensue. I can imagine crying and my therapist purring “something sad?” in that gentle but probing tone and at first feeling silly and demeaned but then (this isn’t profound or unique or creative) nodding and crying more then suddenly feeling better than I have ever at feeling the worst I’d ever been. (Retracted) didn’t ruin my life. He is a thread in a more complicated tangle. I could write about him, talk about him, and in this practice grow my capacity to engage with the messier, more complicated snags. I could imagine that. But I think for here and now we can just move on.
Here is something 1 that I wrote September 14th 2025 in my “miscellaneous” file.2
you desire unattainability because you think unattainability is a thing, and not a very fact of being
- Yeah.
- Nice.
- Got ’em.
I wrote this to on a walk. It was dusk. I was hurting. I was projecting and sensing and angry and sad. She was out, this part of me, that when hurt gets performative and defensive and unserious and mean. She was writing to who I call the demiurge. For her, I want to say: I hate men. And for him I want to say: I hate myself for how I love men. And for me I want to say: I love her for her capacity to love. That feels good. But the skeptical part of me poses that maybe for to love what one hate as slight of moral hand makes them most nefarious. Avoidance:
- That professor who was constantly remarking that hate is not the opposite of love as if that were some deep and deeply untapped notion.
- I have a pessimistic friend who constantly reminds me the energy hate wastes.
- I should tell him hate is ethical labor.
- Imagine how much better the world would be if we took time out of our day to hate the people who don’t bother trying to see the existence of others beyond how they adumbrate and stabilize self.
- Like the other as just a little something something to indulge in to maintain one’s form.
- I know I do this too.
- But at least I know to have some shame for it.
- maybe my masochism is not ascetic but bumptious and
- I just like to think I am better when I really live to indulge in the tolerance of building burn.
- Maybe I don’t want form and I create the other to ensure that sweet loss of self.
- Maybe I am ascetic after all.
I get why they don’t concern themselves, that is. It takes energy. It’ll slow you down, complicating the beings you find yourself partipating in interaction with. Easier to throw out ripped wear and buy something new. We’re getting didactic. Let’s try some defensive reflexivity stumbling into identification with:
- I mess up all the time.
- I get caught up in efficency as a cause.
- I am just a person trying to figure things out.
- I am trying my best.
- I hope it is good enough.
- I hope (Retracted) isn’t writing up some blog or doing some journaling exercise to convince himself that he is doing this very thing too.
- I hope he is and he is trying and it is true.
- Phew.
I think I am done with this writing exercise now. I think you are not sure where this is going to go. How about some narrative to streamline, a cleanly little loop? You’d like that, wouldn’t you. You’d love that. A pungent petty allegory to pair with the oregano and assault. Well, I am sorry to tell you but there is no pepper — I don’t have to coordinate with you like that. What if I told you this whole thing was just a joke about writing and volleyball. People say a joke isn’t funny you if you have to explain it, so I am not going to try. But I will tell you that it is your fault if you don’t get it.
what to do when your cat is experiencing an existential crisis (not projection) 
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