8:2 - play + rearticulating what this newsletter is about

I always considered myself as someone who values authenticity and following your gut, but it wasn’t until several consecutive ruptures that I realised how tightly I was holding onto certain ideas — if I do this, then I’m where I should be, if I get that, then I’ll allow myself to explore. When things didn’t go as planned, I made it my responsibility — if I worked on it a little more, maybe I could change the outcome. It felt better than the pain of letting go of what’s familiar. 

That’s not working for me anymore. So as an extension of figuring out what my relationship is to uncertainty, I started thinking about play, as in getting lost without expectations.

I used to think play meant having fun, and that it had to be some big event, but maybe play doesn't have to be this separate thing — it can be grounded in noticing and weave through my everyday. Sometimes it's a scattered collection of moments: a phrase that I’ve highlighted, an afternoon glow that makes me pause, a question that lingers in my mind.

I keep thinking about that moment when you return from an overseas trip—as you disembark from the plane, you notice your city has a distinct smell for a split second before it blurs into the background of normalcy. In the following days, ordinary things you’ve walked past countless times appear intriguing: you psychoanalyse your neighbours through their trash, noticing those who meticulously tie their cardboard boxes together and those whose ramen containers lie scattered after crow attacks (or maybe that’s just me). Lately, I've been wondering if I could find my way back to that magnified state without having to go to a new country. Or for something destabilizing to happen.

As a child, I think we experience it naturally. I could spend the entire weekend getting lost in the pursuit of capturing the curling petal of a shriveling lily. 

Somewhere along the way, I learned to dismiss this way of being as "not serious enough." Then when I tried to get back in touch with it, I built these invisible walls against beginning again and letting things fall messily onto the page.

This newsletter is a space where curiosity doesn't need to justify itself immediately — a little pocket to collect and note things down. It’s about sitting in that open-ended unknowing, following whatever I feel drawn to, and trying to capture a feeling.

I still feel that resistance to being a starting again, to not knowing where something is going. And discomfort with the murkiness. I often freeze up when someone asks me what I write about or create. But I'm starting to trust again that it might make sense later.