🤙🏽 Kenta Thomas Naoi

Laura and I had dinner last night with our friend N, whom we love very much.

She asked me how I was doing – which has been a prompt that’s stayed with me in my mind even utill now. “How am I doing?”

Yah. I feel like I’m in such a season of creating. I noticed this, because I have been feeling a bit off put by consuming ‘content’. Which feels strange to write, because I can clearly hear myself accepting that ‘consuming’ is the default, and anything that veers from that behavior is ‘miraculous’ lol.

But, I’m really enjoying myself – I feel creative again. And the act of creativity, feels like an emptying – an emptying of all of these ideas and thoughts that have been circling in my mind like a kind of obsessive neurosis. And what’s been holding me back has been … judging my ‘knowing’.

That’s also why, I feel like the ‘act of creating’ is also a leap of faith, a practice in trust – trusting yourself, and understanding that it’s okay to create for YOU. And also trust, that we are not US, in that we contain each other. Does that make sense? We hold each other, in so many more ways than we can imagine. I think of creating for myself, as a ritual for resonance. I create for the parts of US that need the same medicine.

Anyways, I have been really enjoying having so many different places to create, and to notice the tone and the difference of pressure I put on myself. It’s interesting. For example, I feel VERY casual here, BECAUSE this is my website, because I intentionally don’t include ‘comments’ and I call this space ‘notes’. So, I really do think about it like a ‘public’ notes section. Even the way I publish here … is not through my website, but through my email. SO, it kind of feels like I’m just writing to myself.

In contrast, I feel another kind of pressure or needing to polish my thoughts when writing on Substack or watching my thoughts carefully when posting on Instagram. Which, feels silly, but it also makes sense, because there’s another kind of consumption habit and features for socializing.

But what’s been cool is that first, recognizing that none of these are ‘right/wrong’ – more or less me, they are just ways in which I am navigating different social spaces. And secondly, I’m being able to take different qualities of how I show up in various sharing spaces and reflect on it – and bring them into how I shape my thoughts and sharing practices across spaces.

And I’m truly able to start seeing how each one of these ‘ponds’, these ‘pockets’ are a part of a larger ecosystem I’m world crafting.

And when one area feels too much for me, I have options. I can find refuge in other parts of my world. That’s where I’m at right now.