And so it begins . . .

Base is an amalgamation of everything
Rules are not to be played by rebels

Your introversion led you here
Intuition protected you along the way

Feelings allow you to be well-balanced
And perspective gives you foresight

Alone, but not lonely
Your truth unveils with time

The top of the mountain is nothing without the climb
Only the strong will survive

Little Simz, Introvert

You’re so vain
You probably think this blog is about you

Carly Simon (Prof P-Mix)

If you live like that, you live with ghosts
If you love like that, blood runs cold

Taylor Swift, Bad Blood

Don’t mourn that the bull is not to be bought
Be grateful he shares his seminal shot

Mess with the horny bull
Get the bully horn

No beef
Lest beast
Haunt dreams

P Willy

Damn, now I done heard of trimmin the hedges
But you done scorched the earth!

Leonard Washington

There’s a war inside, I hear battle cries
Mothers burying sons, young boys playing with guns

Now I don’t want to be the one to doctor this
But if you can’t feel pain then you can’t feel the opposite

Fight between Yin and Yang’s a fight you’ll never win
I study humans, that makes me an anthropologist

I’m not into politics but I know it’s dark times
Parts of the world still living in Apartheid 

I need a license to feel
Internal wounds and I’m not tryna be healed

I sabotage what we are trying to build
Cuz of feelings I keep inside but it’s time to reveal

I bottle up and then spill it in verses
One day I’m wordless, next day I’m a wordsmith

Realize there’s a prison in us, we are conditioned as fuck
Man, it’s like they can’t sleep til our spirit is crushed

I’m directly affected
It does more than just bother me

Look beyond the surface
Don’t just see what you want to see

My speech ain’t involuntary
Project with intention straight from my lungs

Little Simz, Introvert

Got in a pattern, followed the rhythm
I disregarded all opinions and continued my mission

Unapologetically I be bossin it, gettin better with age
Got it back, never lost it, my legacy remains

Rejected the dotted line but not the pen
Invested in myself, that was money well spent

Dedicated it all to the art
Who would’ve known it would be this from the start

Little Simz, Boss

The difference between a great writer and a good one (or a good one and a bad one) is in the quality of the instantaneous decisions she makes as she works. A line pops into her head. She deletes a phrase. She cuts this section. She inverts the order of two words that have been sitting there in her text for months.

So, that’s harsh. But it’s also freeing.

It narrows the number of things we have to worry about down to just one: the moment when, reading a line of our work, we decide whether to change it.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.

That’s it. Over and over.

It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

And so, today, we boldly make the change (or don’t). And the beauty of it is, we get to pass this way again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and read that sentence again, and leave it alone or change it again, and we can even change it back again to what it was at the very beginning.

We do this repetitively until a decision has been reached, and the way we know a decision has been reached is that that place stops changing.

It’s not the flavor of your taste that matters; it’s the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized. By (to use a fancy technical term) “energetically messing with it,” per exactly your taste (no defense or rationalization needed), it will start to become a more highly organized system. It just will.

And it will have something of you in it. It will, potentially, have a lot of you in it, nothing but you in it. It’s being organized per your taste, after all.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain