writing my memoirs
If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all. ~ Yogi Bhajan
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I was reading Visa's advice to "write your memoirs" in bed on my iPad this morning and it motivated me to get up and write this post. I like to judge content creators by how consuming their content makes me feel. The best ones are the ones that instill in me some of their contagious joie de vivre via their work.
Visa writes:
Stories are extremely powerful tools for getting people to see why something matters, to feel an emotional connection with an idea.
You can use the story of your life to get you to care about yourself, just as you find yourself rooting for your favorite fictional character.
If you share some of these memoirs on a blog (or a vlog, or a podcast – it doesn’t necessarily have to be text), you make it easier for people to find you, learn about you, care about you. Montaigne described this as part of his motivation for writing, and I relate. Derek Sivers said something similar too. The people who discover you through your most honest writing, and love you for it, are the people who you will consider your dearest friends.
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I haven't been taking very good care of myself recently. I worked for thirteen hours yesterday and didn't eat anything except a box of couscous at 9 PM and some kale and arugula. It wasn't because I wasn't hungry—I was starving—but rather because I didn't have anything left in the pantry I could make easily (or much of anything at all, frankly). I'm proud that I don't buy myself much unhealthy processed food at the supermarket, but the flipside is that I can get too lazy to make any of the food I have. And since I move out in a little under two weeks, I don't want to buy too much food and have it go to waste.
My friends often seem appalled at what they call my "struggle meals", or my attempts to feed myself as lazily as possible with the ingredients of my pantry/refrigerator. One morning I had an entire bag of spinach for breakfast. Sometimes I can feel my blood sugar getting so low I eat a spoonful of honey. But yesterday I didn't even have any of my usual go-to stomach fillers: bananas, peanut butter, oatmeal. I'm out of everything. I just checked my pantry and fridge, and here are the aggregate contents:
- 1 sweet onion
- 1 red onion
- 1 bag of couscous
- 1/2 a cauliflower
- 2 sweet potatoes
To be clear, I hope this changes soon. I just haven't had the time or the physical energy to get up and go get groceries from Williamsburg, where the nearest Trader Joe's is, and lug my 20-30 pound bags of vegetables the half-mile walk and subway ride back home.
I didn't get any exercise yesterday either, unless you count the short sprint to the post office to drop off postcards. Working from 8 in the morning to 9 at night alongside my boss is surreal. I'm always wondering what he's thinking as he's online so late after hours. Is he wondering why I'm on too? Does he see long hours as a reflection of good work ethic, or is this just normal for him?
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Things I'm reading today:
- Buster Benson's cognitive bias cheat sheet and the super neat poster designed by John Manoogian III. I'm going to try sifting through it and looking up the ones I don't know in the coming weeks when I get a chance.
thank you for reading; write to me at yourstiramisu 🐌 proton dot me