What Should We Do Instead of Doomscrolling?
A new chapter for IOD: what this process has actually looked like through a multi-layered journey of of digital spaces, music, artwork, resources, ideas, and so much more <3
Welcome to a new chapter of this digital rhizome2. Beyond a newsletter or publication, this space is a direct mirror of my mind and my way of navigating the world: a labyrinthine ecology of interconnectedness, nurtured by and ever-growing through the meaningful encounters I experience—
this sounds beautiful and poetic or whatever, but…what does this even mean?
let’s backtrack to understand how I got here:
A couple of years back, I got tired of mindless consumption and doomscrolling—which if you’re here, you probably are too—so I decided to reclaim what the current systems were designed to exploit: my attention, my agency, and my humanity. I felt so powerless scrolling past a world that felt doomed, losing myself to a screen to avoid thinking about it. I felt like I couldn't change the world, so I decided to change myself. Once I started sharing this journey, I realized that if I'm not the only one, maybe we can actually change the world, even if just a little.
in my head I was like, ‘if I’m gonna be on my phone so much, at least let’s try to do something productive while I’m at it because I am definitely not using my free will to its full potential’.
I created this piece as a multi-layered digital journey that represents everything I stand for, and what I hope to build together through IOD. Enjoy the ride.
NAVIGATION MAP
(or table of contents lol)
ON THIS IOD CHAPTER
I realized that despite getting so personal on here, so many of you don’t really know who I am or what I even look like. I’m just a regular (extremely curious) person who has internet access, a very neurodivergent brain, and something to say. Over 500k of you and a hell of a lot of learning later, figuring out what to do instead of doomscrolling—and sharing it—has completely transformed my life.
After living four years in Italy and studying Fashion Business, I decided to come back home to Bogotá—jumping into the deep end to pursue writing and creating full-time, crossing my fingers that through IOD, we can create a space that helps construct a reality that is worth dreaming of.
Accessibility is one of the core values of IOD, so there will always be something available to everyone—even on paid posts and projects—but to keep this space alive, your direct support means that you value my work, the shift from the attention economy to the connection economy, and the other independent projects I share with you.
also there are obv a bunch cool perks to going paid!!!
+ right now you can upgrade before price increase at the end of the month
What everyone will always have access to:
Media To Consume Instead of Doomscrolling—monthly selection of podcasts, articles, essays, YouTube videos + my reflections on them
Interludes—monthly lives where I share what’s going on in my head, the BTS of the publication + connecting with you
Collabs and partnerships with some really cool people and projects
Correspondence—a space for digital pen pals and genuine interpersonal exchange (more on this soon!!!)
+ intro essays on paid posts
In the meantime, I would love to get to know you + you can sign up for the waitlist on the correspondence space here as well
Extras you’ll get if you become a paid sub:
Hyperfixations—monthly deep dives into a broad, conceptual topic I’m hyperfixating on as a starting point of questioning together. Collectively gathered resources and reflections via the Media Club as the live community extension.
Media Club—small, monthly live zoom built around that month’s Hyperfixation. Signup includes access to a shared Notion page with curated resources from me where you can add your own. (starting next month, still a lot tbd but we will figure it out as we get started with the dynamic—suuuuper excited for this)
Beyond the Algorithm—essays that include how-to guides + resource lists for navigating life beyond algorithmic ways of the internet.
Monthly Media Ecosystem—a monthly wrap-up of digital and physical artifacts that I’ve actually been engaging with. Includes books, films, pdfs, music, websites, etc. A more personal glimpse into what’s influencing everything else that goes on around here, and my life.
Full access to the archive + ability to start threads in the chat!
If you want to become a founding member:
A quarterly curated media list, personalized for you + my eternal gratitude <3
THE(R)EVOLUTION
One of the most powerful tools of active resistance against the broken systems we are forced to navigate is exercising our agency to genuinely develop our POV and allow ourselves to constantly deconstruct and reconstruct it.
This evolution has made the mission of this publication, and my vocation in life overall, turn into something much bigger than me because I no longer just want to treat the symptom of doomscrolling, but I want to get to the root cause.
So in this new chapter of this publication, my life, and hopefully yours, we can—as ambitious as it is—change the failing systems into something where every single one of us gets to choose how we want to live our lives.
If we choose what we attend to, going past the threshold of comfort allows us to navigate the world rather than letting it navigate us—this individual evolution can create a collective revolution.
This goes far beyond the media we consume; it’s about navigating the world through and beyond it, continuously expanding the boundaries of our reality—it’s what we actually do instead of doomscrolling that truly counts.
I believe that the desire to create4 is the essence of what we’re lucky to live as the human experience—not necessarily as an output-based action, but often by surrendering to the act of being5. The way I manage to grasp this is through openness6 so my attention isn’t static and narrow, but receptive to experience and adaptation; in constant movement through the very creation of the spiral.
inward<>outward
online<>offline
digital<>physical
metaphysical<>tangible
expression<>depression
conscious<>subconscious
individual<>collective
I know this seems maaaaybe a tad too conceptual, so I decided to show you what this movement has actually looked like in my life in 5 stages, through pieces from the archive, and some spaces, works, resources, and ideas that have taken place through this metamorphosis. 7
In the spirit of this movement, I encourage you to explore the links and footnotes that intrigue you the most on your own :)
You choose how deep into the spiral you want to go.
1
As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery. / Laistrygonians, Cyclops, / angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: / you’ll never find things like that on your way / as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, / as long as a rare excitement / stirs your spirit and your body. / Laistrygonians, Cyclops, / wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them / unless you bring them along inside your soul, / unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
-C.P Cavafy, Ithaka (1911)
Are.na: I’ve been putting together and reading the pieces on this channel of pdfs and other artifacts by falling down rabbit holes on the explore page (it’s an open channel so you can add pieces if you’d like!). Their ethos, transparency, and business model are something I genuinely admire, especially given the current landscape.
The more I get to know their features and projects, the more I fall in love with the platform. I recently got a yearly paid subscription and I’m super happy to be supporting them directly :) You can find them here on Substack on Are.na Editorial as well.
NTS radio: my current favorite show is the nts guide to where we get to—in their words—“deep dive into scenes, record labels and genres from around the world”. But honestly, the width and depth of their curation and features is just incredibly thoughtful. As I’m writing I’m listening to Temporal Cove w/Cole Preston from Wallows and I’m having a blast. I have also recently become a supporter, because supporting independent radio is so important to keep music culture alive!!!
I’ve recently started putting together a playlist where I save some of my favorite songs found exclusively through the radio:
Here’s a recent note I wrote about this:
Metalabel: supporting and getting to discover incredible work from independent artists and creatives is so important to me and I’ve been able to do so by exploring this space. You can find more about them and their podcast on their Substack Metalabel.
Some of my recent acquisitions have been Quiet Media8, a zine by the amazing Charlotte Rubesa (can’t wait to share my thoughts on it!!!), The Dark Forest Internet Anthology, which has led me to start exploring DFOS and I’m so intrigued to see where this is going, and the digital publication Stillness is a Move by Source Material Studio.
Your support is what makes IOD possible. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber so I can keep supporting and sharing about other independent spaces myself—and make this one sustainable <3
PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVE THAT WILL HELP GUIDE YOUR EXPLORATION:
My Favorite Corners of the Internet to Explore Instead of Doomscrolling
We have endless universes at our fingertips; in just a few clicks, we can access information that not even a hundred years ago would’ve been unfathomable to access in a lifetime. Despite this almost miraculous invention that we call the internet, we seem to be suffering from a sort of collective decision fatigue that leaves us stuck scrolling through whatever the algorithms know will keep us hooked.
How to Drift Through the Indie Web Instead of Doomscrolling
I was very lonely growing up. As an only child with undiagnosed AuDHD, let’s just say I had to come to terms with the fear that I might not actually belong anywhere—or at least anywhere I could go at the time. However, once I was older, but probably not old enough to have unrestricted access to the internet, I finally found a place where I truly felt I could be myself. In between my Adventure Time fan account, my attempts at writing fan fiction on Wattpad, and a mildly successful Rainbow Loom Instagram account, I felt so alive—and so did the internet back then.
My Current Ecosystem of Internet Artifacts
I’ve always shared the media I casually consume throughout my week and where I find them, however, I’ve never fully shared how I find them, but most importantly, why I chose them. I have an entire foundational ecosystem that lies beneath the surface, which is greatly built through a growing collection of digital artifacts—unique pieces that live outside my daily digital garden, meant to be sought rather than served.
2
What happens when we react to a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, of course, still less to some mysterious world of the spirit: it lies in the complexity of our brain, in the kaleidoscopic network of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave what we call meaning.
-Carlo Rovelli, White Holes (2023)
Perfectly Imperfect: I have significantly reduced my time on TikTok and Instagram and have been really active on PI instead—I actually share a lot of what comes back here in real time. It’s the only social media space where I actually feel connected to others, where I feel like I can truly be myself and feel enriched rather than empty once I close the app/tab. I get to have fun, get and share recommendations, be part of scenes of like-minded people, away from the algorithms and AI slop.
If you’ve been here a while, you already know how much I love PI and getting to work alongside them on my segment Things to Do Instead of Doomscrolling (this is one of my favorites, titled “feeling human”) has been a dream come true. I’ve loved them way before I got the chance to work with them, and even though I’m moving on from this segment, we are working on much more exciting things which will be coming soon :)
Mapu’s Digital Dérive: this is my indie website made from scratch where I saved some of the places that genuinely sparked something in me during my exploration of the indie web with BlogTherapy’s guidance on the piece linked above! This is definitely a project I want to keep working on, but there is quite a big learning curve to keep teaching myself how to HTML.
AO3: if you are unfamiliar with this space, it’s called Archive of Our Own, and it’s essentially a non-profit archive for fan fiction. Fandoms have been a safe space for me ever since I can remember. And especially within the last few months, I swear it is one of the very few things that are allowing me to keep my sanity. I also want to add that the stigma around them is mostly because these are spaces built primarily by and for women, queer, and neurodivergent individuals (all of which I am btw).9
I considered gatekeeping ao3 for obvious reasons, but being so for real, this is such a big part of my life, so sue me, I wanted to talk about it!!!
If you want to connect with others in this community (or with me!!) feel free to join the subscriber chat where we will be having more recommendation threads, discussions, updates, and more :)
Work I’ve connected with lately which has shaped this new chapter:
The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra10
Hall of Egress (Adventure Time, S7, EP 24)
A Saurcerful of Secrets by Pink Floyd11
Oslo, August 31st by Joachim Trier
Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958.12
The Cosmic Dance: Finding patterns and pathways in a chaotic universe by Stephen Ellcock
PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVE ON FINDING AND CREATING CONNECTIONS:
10 Book Pairings to Expand the Way You Think
Why do you read? This is a question I have asked myself countless times throughout the ups and downs of my reading journey—and one I believe every single reader should ask themselves. As the years go by, my answer to this question is becoming clearer and clearer, as if my eyes were slowly but surely coming into focus.
Media To Consume This Week Instead of Doomscrolling - By & For you
The current systems, platforms, and algorithms that we navigate to get our work out, on and offline, are deeply flawed; there is SO much incredible work that simply goes unnoticed because of this very reason. I consider myself so lucky to have a platform where my voice is heard by so many (we’re almost at 500k <3), so I always want to make sure that I a…
Finding Meaning Online Instead of Doomscrolling
How many hours of your day do you spend in front of a screen? And what exactly are you doing during these hours? I spend around six hours on my phone, give or take, and then between my iPad and my laptop, probably a few more. A couple of years ago, I would have been ashamed to tell you my answer—I mean, there’s a reason I created this space in the first place—but somewhere along the way, I realized my screen time wasn’t the issue. The fact that meaning collapsed was.
3
The intellectual faculty is never in repose, is never pleased by any truth it attains, but proceeds onward toward an incomprehensible truth.
— Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies (1585)
The MIT Press Reader & Jstor Daily: despite really enjoying the other publications and newsletters I’m subscribed to, I find it so important to balance it with academic research and peer-reviewed papers. These two do exactly that, with the perk of being significantly more accessible, often introducing me to new resources, concepts, and thinkers. Here are some a couple of pieces I’ve read recently from each:
‘Backrooms’ and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic14 by Shira Chess on The MIT Press Reader
Surrealism at 100: A Reading List by Allison C. Meier on JSTOR Daily
Art History quizzes on Obelisk: I am a devoted art lover and have been ever since I can remember, so I always make sure to incorporate art into my posts. Even if only I notice, I always make sure to relate it back to the piece somehow, but this requires a lot of research and constant learning about art. I have a lot of places where I find artwork, but Obelisk has been one of the best ones I’ve come across. I recently came across their quizzes, and I’m obsessed. I love gamifying learning and testing my knowledge, so this has been a lot of fun!
Public, non-profit archives are the actual gold mine of the internet when it comes to finding free resources for learning—and honestly, everything. I’m spending more and more time in these spaces, and though often overwhelming, I always manage, through some digging, to find something that sends me down a rabbit hole.
Here are some I’ve been learning from lately:
Techno Feminism catalogue/wiki on Monoskop
Cultural and Academic Films collection on the Internet Archive
Philosophy and Ethics category on Project Gutenberg
PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN SOMETHING NEW:
Cultivating Intellect: Essential Essays to Make Sense of the World
Think of someone you consider brilliant—perhaps a great mathematician or scientist, or maybe an important philosopher or psychologist. One of the first traits we often attribute to them is intelligence: the innate ability to learn, adapt, and apply knowledge and skills. Yet I know many intelligent people whom I wouldn’t necessarily call brilliant—so what sets them apart? Their intellect.
Algorithmic Indifference: Seeing More, Feeling Less
I posted this note a little over a month ago, and this thought has stayed heavily present in my mind since. I felt this incessant need to understand why everyone acts as if the world isn’t on fire. It turns out that the amount of information we have access to, the contexts in which we consume it, and the systemic failures of entities in positions of power have created a perfect recipe for collective cognitive and social dissonance. We are simply not built to navigate this—our evolution could never keep up with the one of this digital era—but we can give it our best try.
Visual literacy: looking is not seeing
Have you ever walked into a museum and just mindlessly scanned through the pieces, not even taking the time to read descriptions, moving quickly from room to room in hopes of maybe finding somewhere to sit as your itinerary has completely drained you? Me too. I often find myself in front of a piece with so much to say, all of these thoughts and feelings trapped in the tip of my tongue as I do not have enough knowledge to articulate them.
4
“To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities.”
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
You can read all of the books, essays, and articles you want, but unless you turn information into embodied knowledge—practicing what you preach—then what is the point?
In the pieces below you’ll find more specifics on tools and resources I use and lived examples of this sentiment, but I think it’s far more productive to share a couple of my core beliefs and mantras that have allowed me to do this in the first place.
Nothing changes if nothing changes15
Devotion over discipline / Rituals over habits16
The act of being is enough17
If there’s no meaning then I get to create my own18
We’re all fragments of a broken mirror, only reflecting a small part of the bigger picture.19
Everything is a win when the goal is experience20
PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVE ABOUT THESE PRACTICES:
How to Break Away From Doomscrolling Without Quitting Social Media
One of my biggest struggles over the last few years has been using my phone as a sort of digital pacifier, attaching myself to it to numb myself from all of the overwhelming feelings of life. Losing perception of time, space, and ourselves seems to be the easiest escape from the pressure, expectations, and struggles of reality. Like most addictions, the issue isn’t necessarily the substance, but the void that it’s trying to fill.
We Need to Start Bringing our Pinterest Boards to Life
How many things have you saved as inspiration you’ve never even looked back at? I, for one, have done this way too many times; I scroll through feeds, save videos, pictures, books, recommendations which I never even give a second thought to. As someone who quite literally saves, curates, and shares media as an integral part of my work, I have been forced to ask myself, what does inspiration even mean?
New Year’s Absolutions
I have always been a daydreamer—especially when I was younger—conceptualizing idealized realities and impossible versions of myself. I found refuge in my mind, living vicariously through these imagined versions; these dreamscapes provided a sense of freedom whenever I felt stuck. In a way, whenever I used to write my New Year’s resolutions, I did the ex…
5
Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home, and by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
-Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
Returning, to me at least, is the most important part because it allows you to close a cycle to begin a new one through regeneration and circularity. I like to understand it in every sense of the word, digitally, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. When I visualize it, I see it as being parallel to the last loop of the spiral, directly above where I was before, but now I observe it through a different perspective.
In the context of IOD, I think it’s worth sharing what returning looks like for me when it comes to the digital landscape:
this is long enough as it is, so if I went into each field of understanding, I would be writing an entire book, I swear.
I have a massive archive of everything I come across online (and sometimes offline) on Sublime. Publications, articles, videos, podcasts, quotes, images, etc. are things I am actively revisiting through this sort of personal archive that I have built there. This way, I can actually connect ideas and make something of my own out of them. All of these scattered pieces of a puzzle that for some reason or another, I felt drawn to save, are much easier to put together once I lay them out at once. I love their canvas feature where I get to actually visualize and develop ideas.
I’ll be sharing more about how I use Sublime soon :)
Other things I’m constantly returning to:
Journal entries
Playlists and songs
Notes on my phone
Screenshots
Physical family albums
Book annotations and highlights
Saved posts on social media
Comfort films/shows
YouTube history and likes
One very important thing to note about returning is that it is not about rumination, but rather about learning to know what stays, what we shed, and what transforms.
PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVE YOU CAN OFTEN RETURNIN TO:
Where to find media to consume instead of doomscrolling
Finding the media that you want to consume when there is a vast and endless sea of information can be quite overwhelming. When I started on my journey of mindful media consumption I had zero clue of where I could start, however, slowly but surely, I began to find so many amazing sources that are now part of the ecosystem I have built for myself. I wante…
Where To Find Media To Consume Instead of Doomscrolling - Vol.2
A few months ago, I put together my ultimate guide to all the places across the internet where I find the pieces I share with you as a thank you for 100k subs—and it’s safe to say you absolutely loved it. The amount of love that post received was so encouraging, and it genuinely marked a before and after for this publication. Seeing how useful it was for you pushed me to create more practical guides with resources and advice, as well as more curated deep dives with robust academic research.
The 25 Best Pieces of Media I Consumed in 2025
This has been the most life-changing, expansive, and exciting year of my life. Before I decided to take this journey of mindful media consumption seriously, I was engulfed by powerlessness and despair. I saw the world burning and felt that same fire blazing from within, but because I didn’t know what to do with it, it ended up burning everything down, over and over again. Fire isn’t inherently destructive—it gives us light, creates sparks, and provides warmth—it’s just a matter of how we decide to harness it.
END NOTES <3
Speaking of returning, this was the sky that greeted me once I landed in Bogotá to begin this new chapter of my life. Being able to finally share this side of it with you after having so many personal challenges feels so rewarding and motivating. I’m now with my family, I’m grieving so much, but I’m looking forward to so much as well. Most importantly though, I feel alive. Each high high and low low that I’ve experienced these days has been fuel to keep going, to keep creating, to always keep moving through the never-ending spiral that I understand as the human experience.
Here’s a note I wrote about it for a little more context:
This was one of the most fun, challenging, and rewarding pieces I’ve ever put together. The conception of this new cycle has meant so much reflection, experimentation, and growing pains. I’m playing with a lot more visual and interactive elements moving forward—my graphic design skills are being really put to work and I’m pushing my creativity to the limit for sure.
Beyond these fun elements, I’m also expanding on what it means to build community, to think outside of the box, and to shape a new era where we subvert the current perception and experience of the digital landscape to become more human through it.
I wanted to show you that you don’t have to stay in one lane when it comes to sharing who you are. We are beautifully unique, complex, imperfect, and multifaceted beings—and simplifying ourselves for the sake of fitting into a category is one of the core issues I have seen within myself and the people around me. I believe that bridging worlds together is how we build one that works for everyone, not just a few.
I hope this piece made you understand what IOD is, who I am, and what choosing to be a part of this space could mean to you. Thank you for being here (especially if you made it all the way here!).
Love,
here are the footnotes I had waaay too much fun putting together:
My initial instinct was to use the term “digital ecosystem” to describe what this space has grown into. However, as I researched the term—specifically though Iman Hamadi’s “Toward a meta-framework for digital ecosystem concepts: A comparative review on the state of research, concept relationships, and future directions,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 223 (2026)—I unfortunately realized the concept had been largely defined by corporate structures and capitalistic ideals. I wanted to better reflect the organic interconnectedness of IOD, I pivoted toward ecology and philosophy, where I encountered the foundational framework of “rhizomes” as established in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the center is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself. Spirals—which way to turn—represent the fragility in an open space. Fear makes the world go round.
-Louise Bourgeois
All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making (poiesis), and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.
-Plato, Symposium (c. 385–370 BC)
And there was no danger of wasting this feeling out of fear of losing it, because being was infinite, infinite like the waves of the sea. I am being, the tree in the garden was saying. I am being, said the approaching waiter. I am being, said the green water in the pool. I am being, said the blue sea of the Mediterranean. I am being, said our green and treacherous sea. I am being, said the spider and stunned its prey with its venom.
-Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship Or The Book of Pleasures (1969)
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.
-Simone Weil, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God (1942)
Here’s an excerpt from a PI rec where I talk more about this:
I know fan fics get an overall bad rep—I totally get it’s not for everyone—but if we look at them objectively, they’re a non-profit, community-based creative outlet for expression and shared passion over certain pieces of media and beloved characters. As someone who reads so much, I tend to go through emotionally heavy, dense, and difficult books, coming back to reading fics has been a wonderful way to not only escape the weight of my head, but to escape the algorithms—I could be reading Virginia Woolf in the morning and a Hollanov fic at night, both adding value to my life. As a disclaimer, if you are not familiar with fandom and fic culture, make sure to understand it before you decide to engage with these communities :)
Some thoughts from my journal about this novella:
We are confronted with a scene where words take on the volatile qualities of the space-time fabric, weaving memory, temporality, and stories in an attempt to find places that are beyond words, which, paradoxically, can only be reached through them. I found myself reading it backwards once I finished it—going through each page bottom up and jumping through the paragraphs—eagerly making notes in the margins while uncovering the untold through the words that were.
I have always hated the advice people gave regarding consistency and reaching your goals. Before I knew I had autism and ADHD, I felt like a complete and utter failure because I could simply not keep habits or be consistently disciplined. I thought I was never going to get anywhere in life. I had genuinely given up on accomplishing anything at all. When I started this journey, I stopped listening to everyone’s optimization and hustle culture-adjacent advice, and observed how I operated to begin to deconstruct a lot of internalized shame. These new beliefs have allowed me to build a life under my terms, to meet myself where I am, and accept that I am human, and not a machine.
Imagine taking a mirror and smashing it with a hammer and distributing these shards all over the world. And then recording what happens on each of those shards and then bringing them together and reconstructing that mirror in a supercomputer. That’s what the Event Horizon Telescope is doing.
-Shep Doeleman, Black Holes: The Edge of All we Know (2020)
I am obsessed with learning about cosmology and the universe. When I watched this documentary and listened to the explanation about how they would see the invisible as they took the first picture of a black hole, it resonated with me across SO many areas of life.
I think I literally read this on some TikTok’s comment section lol but it has made suuuuuch an impact. I have had this mindset long before I read the quote but seeing it put into words made a lot of things click for me.
BRILLIANT. the world needs your gifts!
AO3 got a shoutout!! It’s such a unique digital space. I’ve read heartbreaking, life-changing stories on AO3 that honestly had very little to do with the source material lol. It can also be a great place for new writers to get their work seen, what with the lack of algorithm. Thank you for mentioning it!
This little footnote at the end caught my attention as well:
“I have always hated the advice people gave regarding consistency and reaching your goals. Before I knew I had autism and ADHD, I felt like a complete and utter failure because I could simply not keep habits or be consistently disciplined.”
I’m so glad you let go of that hustle culture dogma and started working in a way that suited you. I’ve recently brought this knowledge into my life as well, and since accepting that not doing things as neurotypicals would doesn’t mean my coping skills and treatment have failed me (and in fact that maybe the aim of some of those coping skills are misguided), I’ve felt much lighter. My drafted essays and unfinished stories don’t hold the same amount of dread, and I’m not as afraid to return to them after long periods of absence. I just posted an article titled “Giving Up on Consistency” but I really do feel this topic could be fleshed out some more, and I would be interested to read anything you write on it in the future if you choose to do so!!