occasionally i come across the advice “do it scared” and “what’s the worst that could happen?” and “anxiety can’t kill you”. many times from strangers or people who did not care to know me

it was a real eye-opener the first time someone said it in a way that wasn’t condescending. they were genuinely interested in my struggles and offered it as advice that worked for them and something meaningful they wanted to share with me

i think the implication is that you’ll do the thing you’re scared of and you’ll find that everything turned out okay. you’ll learn that things can be scary but you can get through them and you’ll gain confidence, and it’ll get easier to do every time

i think about the stories that people have shared with me about the time that they were scared to go to a social event but ended up having a great time. or being nervous before a presentation at work but afterwards a colleague told them they did a great job

i’ve started doing things i’m scared of and it’s going wrong a lot. but in a strange way i’m still glad to have tried. it’s nice to collapse the myriad abstract ways something can wrong into one concrete reality. i can work with that. it’s helpful because there’s a lot i don’t know about myself

observing myself planning and doing and recovering from an event i can learn:

• the different ways anxiety can manifest in my body and mind
• what specific parts i feel anxious about (or if i’ve even...

related to the previous post: the thing about advice is that you have to learn how to use advice

a non-exhaustive list of things that got in my way:

• treating basically everything as advice even though sometimes it’s just like, someone talking about their own experiences and they’re not really thinking about whether or not it would apply to someone else (nor should they have to)
• not knowing how to handle when advice from someone i trust doesn’t work
• not knowing how to handle when people give conflicting advice
• not knowing how to handle when a particular person gives both good and bad advice
• not knowing how to think about advice in a more nuanced way. it’s often not just “good” or “bad” but rather useful or not useful in different circumstances
• not being able to recognise the differences between my circumstances and someone else’s circumstances and how that affects how/if i take that advice
• not feeling able reject advice without a “really good reason”

i wasn’t really sure whether or not to post this and the previous post because i’m struggling a lot with feelings of shame. when i learned these things i felt really silly for not realising earlier, and for the ways i’d thought and acted before

but i know i’m not the only one who struggles with these things. for example, a bunch of these points are examples of “black and white...

i promised myself to limit the number of posts about the website. something something health of a platform inversely correlated with posts about said platform. part truth part superstition

but there were still a bunch of thoughts i wanted to get out of the way so uh here they are

dotted grid background

spent a while making the post background have a dotted square pattern like in the hobonichi techo. i’ve never even owned one of these notebooks, but i used this pattern as a background on my digital notebook and i’m a convert from dot grid now.

making the background was pretty fun, though it took me a while to figure out how to get the dasharray juuuuust right so that you get that beautiful cross at the corners of the squares

the hard part is making all the elements actually align to the grid. luckily, i found out that someone else had already done the hard work of figuring out how it worked when they made the monospace web a couple of months ago.

here’s some implementation details:

• CSS round came around in May 2024, and that allows me to control the width of the post so that none of the squares get cut off
  • unfortunately...

is that you can feel real bad for being no contact on a family member’s birthday, open up your journal, see the linked entry for last year, read up on that disaster that you’d totally forgotten about, and feel a bit of peace for missing out on that this year round