I was isolated for years —then swung to the opposite extreme and didn’t want to do anything alone. — Sharing hobbies with the most important people in your life is a bit harder than we initially expect it to be. Growing up, I was very much a social outcast. I was an introvert with social anxiety when I was a kid. I’ve come a long way since then… Now…

Over the years, my poetry practice has become one of the biggest ways I practice presence. — “The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.” —Thích Nhãt Hanh Looking Too Far Past the Day This is a longer piece and it’s a little rough, but I really wanted to put all of these different ideas out on the page. I wrote this at a moment when I was questioning…

It might sound ridiculous, but it’s a mindset and a lifestyle. — “When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habit If you haven’t done a lot of content creation, I might sound…

When you push yourself to grow, finding comfortable limits is harder than you might expect. — Personal growth means something a little different to every person. We’re all pursuing unique goals and no two people are exactly alike. Personal development journies run on different timelines and look quite different for everyone. …

While you can learn a lot from research, making experiences teaches lessons of its own. — It seems impossible, but I’m in the home stretch of working on my thesis, The Wildwood of Thought. I always struggle with walking away from a project and calling it done. No matter how many hours I’ve poured into something, I can usually see something else that I could improve…

In the most recent talk on humor, writing, and art I attended, a few interesting things came up. — In my quest to harness more humor in my writing, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Michael Rees through my Humor Makes Us Better Storytellers course this semester. Rees is an award-winning artist, a Yale graduate with an impressive teaching career, and many museum exhibitions. …

It takes a lot of vulnerability to put your story out there. — The initial choice to tell my personal story was a difficult one. Even though the objective of my thesis project, The Wildwood of Thought is to encourage self-introspection on goals and priorities. But for me, explaining the reasons for the career decisions I made in my life requires touching on…

Being funny actually takes a lot of practice and revision. — Recently, my Humor Makes Us Better Storytellers course was visited by writer and comedian Valerie Nies. Her workshop was a mix of challenging my classmates and me to brainstorm potential content for jokes and humorous stories as well as work on analyzing and revising solid examples of humor. …

In experimenting with mixed media, I made a 2D-style comic in 3D. — Recently, I became aware of how much I operate like an ideal office-ready professional and how seldom I act like an artist. While these are all just labels that never encompass an entire person, I wanted to venture out and be a little unorthodox with how I created this project. Horror stories from my IT days came to mind when I read the prompt “misdirection.”