What makes you feel powerful?
Oh, hi friends!
What do you need to make you feel powerful?
Something tangible? The right pen? A long run? A paycheck?
Something ineffable? Confidence? Security? Momentum?
Or maybe feeling powerful requires different things at different times.
A fairy godworkmother gave me a giant old Mac monitor and keyboard this weekend, an upgrade from working on my laptop for five years. In my previous life, I used to work off a desktop with two giant monitors and I’m not gonna lie—every time I sat down, I felt like I was in charge.
Working from a laptop doesn’t make you feel in charge. It makes you feel like you need to order another Americano and beg for a WiFi password.
But now my desk is full. I feel like I'm operating mission control. My words have space. My work can breathe.
Go find something that makes you feel powerful, whatever that may be.
Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash
“But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.”
Thanks for speaking for all of us, Deborah Eisenberg. From her wonderful Paris Review interview. (Her Collected Stories are worth reading!)
Movie whiplash! This weekend, before being awed by Lynne Ramsay’s brutal new film You Were Never Really Here starring Joaquin Phoenix, I teared up watching this trailer for the upcoming documentary about Mr. Rogers. Oh boy. Can’t wait. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? comes out on June 8.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara