Spring Forward
Or, how we find the will to keep going.
If you need a reminder on what this is and why I’m directing you to it from my Instagram stories on a semi-regular basis, you can click right → here. Blah blah blah, thanks for reading, ily bye. 🫶
A Dream of Spring.
It has been an absurdly warm January and February. Where previous winters have been marked by wet, slushy Seattle streets and snow days that close the city entirely down, I’ve barely even worn a coat the last couple of months. Even when the temperature does dip, the skies have been unreasonably clear. I’ve been able to see the sunset almost every night for the past two weeks.
All of this to say, even though we’re still well over a week away from the first day of Spring, it still very much feels like it is already here.
Spring gets kind of a bad rep in my circles.
“It’s way too wet.”
“It’s still so gross out.”
“Nothing fun happens in Spring.”
“Ugh it’s just a placeholder for Summer.”
“Honestly? Spring is kind of lame.”
So I am here to formally make a case for Spring. To be its court-appointed representation, if you will. Because seasons typically need those things.
I love Spring. I love how it always kind of smells like a mix of rain, fresh dirt, and greenery. I love how it lingers between sunny and grey most days. I love the oscillation between cold and dark and warm and golden. I love how produce comes back into season. I love when ranunculuses and peonies start to bloom. I love the puddles on the sidewalks and the way people start to wake back up after the long, sleepy Winter..
A big thing for me has been (and probably always will be) the idea of potential. Living up to it, seeking it out, wasting it. Potential and what you can do or what could be haunts me a little bit. And while it does feel intimidating at times, there’s also something exhilarating about potential.
Spring to me is the ultimate form of potential. The ultimate way of looking forward. The ultimate “look what could be.”
I’m not going to sap too poetically about a season, I promise. I recognize that I can lean a little *too* heavily on a metaphor at times. Idk, maybe in another life I was BFFs with Mary Oliver or something. Who’s to say!
Something I talked recently with a friend about is how the hardest thing about time is waiting for it to pass. The worst part of “eventually this won’t matter anymore” is the eventually in the sentence. Sometimes life feels like one continuous game of “hurry up and wait” and that…really sucks for lack of a more elaborately crafted phrase.
But Spring feels like a reminder that things will always change. That there’s always a sunset later than 4:30 on the horizon. That leeks and broccoli and fennel and spring onions and cauliflower and beets will come back into season again. That eventually the rain will feel more like a rinse and less like a typhoon. That everything can bloom again, someday.
Even thought it has been weirdly warm for the Winter this year, I think the tail end of 2023 and the Winter has particularly dragged. While I have been trudging through in bike shorts, it’s still felt like exactly that: a trudge. Lately though looking out at the Spring fog and the new flowers lining the walls of the grocery store, it feels like there’s more of a bounce in the air. It feels like the sluggish part of the last while is almost over.
And if eventually is the worst part of a sentence, there’s little with more potential than an almost.The ethics of oversharing online.
TW: Going to be touching on some darker things like drug use, suicidal ideation, light doxxing, self-exploiting, and the permanency of the internet. If you’d rather not read about that, skip to #3 where I talk about pasta and soup.
If you’re like me and grew up (so to speak) online in the ages of the early 2010s to mid 20-teens, you probably remember the age of the personal essay. Sites like xoJane, Elite Daily, Gawker, and Thought Catalog (my bad) really came to be by pushing out essays often centered solely around the author’s willingness to exploit their intensely personal experiences for the sake of a click. It was a whole thing. A whole very shockingly transparent thing.
And we all ate it up.
I think about us watching Cat Marnell snort literal bath salts in the xoJane office at least biannually. I could probably do a “where were you when the cat hair in the vagina essay dropped” and get multiple, multiple responses. I check in on Marie Calloway once a year. I wonder what happened to people who were religiously documenting their eating disorders, their traumas, and their lives who eventually just stopped often. I still get DMs from people asking me to remove them soft-slandering their exes from Thought Catalog despite not working there for 3 years.
The last point brings me here: Where I have a constant ethical dilemma over what we allow, encourage, and even just see people put onto the internet.
I feel very quietly guilty for platforming people for the better part of a decade who were clearly unaware of what they were signing up for by clicking “I agree to the terms and conditions of submission.” Not only because was publishing some of the darkest thoughts a person might have just truly not something I would ever consider doing today, but because it exposed otherwise non-media people to the idea that they could have total strangers validate them online. And…I don’t think that was a good thing.
Getting attention online is a double-edged sword. There’s a lot of power in being able to you have your thoughts, words, musings, and just general being out there for potential mass-consumption. The internet is a really influential tool. But seeking hits of dopamine from strangers will almost never end well.
Here’s the thing: I think we all have a right to overshare, undershare, and share to any degree we feel like sharing at any given moment. Who am I, the person who regularly writes about fEeLiNgS via this medium to tell anyone, “That wasn’t a thought for the internet, friend!!”?
However, I think if your inclination is to err on the side of oversharing because you have historically gotten the most reaction for doing so, I don’t know how you can look at that as anything other than deeply unhealthy. Yes, we can all select “archive” and “delete” but when people say the internet is forever, they’re not kidding. Putting your ex on blast with their full face in a photo and their name in a caption is not NOT doxxing. Pressing post on a video where you allude to wanting to no longer exist but then being upset when individuals try to call a wellness check to help is a backwards thought. Exploiting the deepest, darkest things that cross your mind for attention is never a recipe that is going to turn out. It will likely burn too quickly and come out sour and leave you wondering what you even expected in the first place.
Sometimes when we’re “oversharing” what I think we’re actually doing is “processing for an audience.” We’re ripping open the scab, no matter how fresh, and holding up the cut asking for validation that it is, in fact, as bad as we thought. I’m sorry, but processing should be (mostly) private. Something we reserve for those who have earned our trust and who know how to keep us down on Earth. Internet strangers are not that. Not ever.
And the truth of the matter is, processing that way is unethical for everyone involved. Both as poster and viewer. It’s the worst possible case of car crash syndrome. Especially when you consider that as poster you’re intentionally hoping someone looks at the carnage for long enough to generate a view count.
Understatement of the year, I think about the internet a lot. I think about how we can use it, how it can use us, how we can become entrapped by it, how it can manipulate us, and how we’re all likely 1,000,000,000x different today than we were pre-dial-up. If I’m thinking about the internet, I’m likely thinking about my own responsibility in all of it. A millennial from media’s “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”, if you will.
I have to say, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting to share things to the internet, even for strangers. I will never judge someone for a crying selfie or a video where they say something petty about someone who may have wronged them. I think (just like everything else in life) the only way to do something without losing your metaphorical (or literal) head is by doing so mindfully. And if you wouldn’t want to explain it in a year or to say, your future child, is it really that mindful?
But who the fuck knows! I’ll probably be cringing at this Substack in a year. TBD.A case for putting everything in a bowl.
I am a woman of many opinions. If I am unofficially qualified to do anything, it is forming an opinion on literally anything. As I said last week I could probably form an opinion on a brick and call it definitive. Nothing I love more than an opinion, you heard it here first!!!
I have a lot of opinions about food. I think lettuce is often stupid. I think the caviar things is getting to the point of overplayed. I don’t think there’s an app on the planet that could possibly deliver a grilled cheese that doesn’t arrive soggy and sad. Milk is an ingredient, not a drink. Ice cream is almost never more than just okay. And if you like penne as a pasta shape I think you should consider never speaking to me again.
But my Number One, All-Encompassing, Overarching™ Food Opinion is that the bowl is the superior food vessel.
Everything I love most in this world is consumed via bowl. Spicy soups, spicier noodles, jammy shakshukas, rich pastas, rice and eggs—all bowl food. The best comfort foods like stews, gravies, macaroni and cheeses—all bowl food. And eating in bed (a top tier activity) is much more easily executable when done so with a deep bowl and one’s favorite spoon.
Also, what a fun shape! No one ever felt joy or whimsy from looking at something flat. A round, interesting bowl is much more pleasing to the eye. And better to take a picture of to post to Instagram to prove you can cook, if I do say so myself.
Basically, I think plates are out and bowls are in. Put it on my 2024 vision board! If you must have something with less of a wall to it, consider the pasta bowl which is basically if a plate gave up sucking for lent and became a bowl.A Few Small Things We Should All Agree To Stop Doing:
Putting our locations in our Instagram bios with an arrow emoji to depict where and how we moved to and fro—no one cares and you seem like you’re interviewing for an entry level marketing job. Not having a house shoe for inside times, I suggest these they are very comfy and wash well. Shredding chicken with forks instead of a stand mixer. Staying up until 2 in the morning for no reason. Lying about going to therapy instead of just going to therapy. Saying, “Touch grass” to insult someone—if you can’t come up with something more original you should just accept the L. Never cracking open a book. Never cracking open an opinion you might disagree with. Never cracking open the confines of your own head. Using butter to make a grilled cheese instead of mayo (iykyk). Skipping lunch. Glorifying being busy. Acting as though you can just never make time for a catch-up. Not cleaning your headphones, or washing your screens, or wiping down your suitcase at the end of a trip. Feeling like you don’t have the time to make a home cooked dinner. Not realizing you deserved to do that for yourself “just because” all along.This is my new favorite TikTok.
When you have any sort of digital footprint it’s really easy for people to assume what kind of content you consume. For me, people often assume I only watch videos of people having dissenting pop star opinions, essays about the ethics of video gaming, and gay stuff. And…you know what? That’s not totally off.
But I would just like to present to the class a TikTok I found so funny I downloaded it to make sure I would never not have it:
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserWhile I am very much here for longform content that scratches on the crevices of the cerebellum and makes you consider a perspective you otherwise wouldn’t , sometimes you just need to giggle at a lesbian losing her Birkenstock Boston to the waves of Lake Michigan. Sometimes it’s just that simple.
After all. Everything—the internet, observing others, cooking for yourself, or just existing—can be A Lot™. When you can find a giggle, that’s something to grab on to. And even download for a rainy, dreary Spring day just in case.
