Animal, Not Algorithm

On escaping the performed self

Pull me out of this structured society. Tear me from Western tradition and drop me into the wild. Take me back to the nomadic tribes before feudalism, before obligations, before screens and curated selves. I want to run into the woods, clad only in hides, stomp my feet into the soil, and listen to birds chirp as the fire burns. I want to escape my overly articulated life and become an animal. Not thoughtless in a chemically induced haze, but stripped back, sober, raw, until thought itself becomes a distant echo. To be so enlightened that consciousness doubles back into blankness. Modern life has over-articulated me, leaving me craving the simple, unmediated experience of being seen– unperformed, unmeasured, alive.

Systems of Faith

Engineering, labor, and the pursuit of order in a volatile world

Work, at its core, is about trust – not just in people, but in systems, in process, in the possibility of order itself. Developers and surgeons share this: they act with the faith that precision, discipline, and judgment can turn uncertainty into stability. But that trust (in ourselves, in our hardware, in our colleagues, friends) is never boundless. A savior complex can drive us to achieve, yet it can just as easily consume us. I think often about where to draw that line – about what deserves faith, and what drains it. Even as someone who is generally open, I’ve learned that there are always edges, places where trust runs out: money, time, energy.

Familiar Strangers

Between What We Show and What We Can’t Contain

I’ve been told more than once recently that I move through a wide range of emotions. At first, I laughed— doesn’t everyone? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the raw, primitive signals that evolution has handed us: hunger, disgust, satisfaction, irritation. They help us survive. Emotions, though, are different. They are layered and human, shaped by memory, imagination, and meaning. They connect us to history, to each other, and to ourselves. To experience emotion is to see not just the surface of things, but their depth— the way billions of years of change have somehow led to this moment, and to the fact that we get to feel it at all.

Toaster Girl

Ode to Toes

Silly little poem