FIRST EVER HACKATHON

 I participated in my very first hackathon last month!! 'Code as a Canvas' hosted by byte journal and cherrielle on insta :D
It was so much fun to work on even though i felt stressed working on such a short deadline. It was a godsend that i was approached by another participant to work together since i was wayyyy in over my head about the scope of my own project. We made a really cute and cheesy dress up game and actually won !! 

Photo dump 1

 

My first ever zine !!

 I made my first zine today!! (https://heyzine.com/flip-book/1c671bff74.html#page/2) I read a Substack article about turning your Substack into zines (https://open.substack.com/pub/commonplacezines/p/why-you-should-turn-your-substack?r=6mhfpt&utm_medium=ios ) and it was the final push I needed to make one after wanting to for the whole past year. 

It took me an hour to format everything, the text, images, effects, and stickers. The writing process definitely took a lot longer and I don’t really have a way to track it either, but it took me several hours over the course of three days. I put a really pretty gradient map over each page for cohesiveness (for the digital version, cause the prints are black and white). I don’t know if I’ll do anything with this zine. I’ve seen people trade the, and sell them but I’m not exactly sure how to do that. I think I might eventually open a P.O. Box and do zine trades with pen palls. That would be so so so fun. 

I honestly feel really proud that I’m coming to do a lot of things I’ve been dreaming about lately. A blog, a personal website, a portfolio, digicam photography, Filofax journaling, and a zine. I feel like me from a year ago would think I’m the coolest person ever. The year felt so incredibly short but so much has happened. My hair was partially pink this year, and I’m going to school next year for the first time after five years of homeschooling. Everything feels surreal right now.

Magic is real

 Magic exists in our world. The only issue is that soon as we figure out how something works, we call it science. The only difference between a witch and me is that she calls her mixture of boiled water and herbs “potions” and I call mine tea. The same way the only difference between our world and a world that has magic is that they call it magic, and we don’t. 

Knowing why something works the way it does shouldn’t remove wonder. I know theres chemical reactions that explain how flowers dye lemon tea purple and biological reasonings to how jellyfish move even with no brain. None of it means it’s not magical. Magic and science can coexist. Magic isn’t unreasonable, completely unpredictable and unexplainable. Magic is defined as ‘the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.’ It’s unfair to say it’s not magic at all anymore once we find out enough to be able to attribute the ‘mysterious and unexplainable’ to being simply nature or intuition or psychology. 

So I actively choose to believe in things like tarot and astrology and magic. Jellyfish are magic, and so are flowers dying tea purple, and so are fireflies, and everything else that I would look at as a 5 year old and think is magic. Medicine is witchcraft and chemistry is wizardry. 

This doesn’t affect my decision making or anything big in my day to day. I don’t go around and make life altering choices after getting a palm reading from my uncle, but it makes me happy. The joy I get from watching a Ghibli movie and not thinking, ‘man, I wish magic existed’ is incomparable. Because it’s everywhere.

Impatience is a virtue ⭐️

 Ive always been a little bit ashamed of my impatience. It sounds too much like a bad thing, too much like lack of care, or respect, or even just calm. It sounds like this rash, abrasive thing that snowballs into bad decisions and reckless, destructive behaviour. 

I’ve come to realise, though, that I’d have no skills or achievements to speak of if I had patience. Because combined with my perfectionism, all I’d do is procrastinate. Id very patiently work and work and work at being better, being my best, before starting. So when I start, it’ll be predictable and easy. 

I’ll never be my best. I’ll never be my best til the day I die, every day will make me better (or so I hope). And it’ll never easy, either.

So I’ve decided my impatience is a good thing. It’s my little assistant, hyping me up and screaming and screeching at me to get it done before I’m bored. Before the inspiration leaves me and I’m left with another husk of something beautiful in my wip graveyard. It doesn’t desert me til it’s got its sick thrill of seeing the end result and when it’s done, it’s done. Gone like it was never there and suddenly it’s all I can think about to bring it back. 

This impatience makes it so I really push myself too. I learnt sewing to make myself clothes and my very first project was a frilly, flowy top that also needed a lining. It definitely wasn‘t the most beginner friendly thing to do, but I was impatient. I wanted fun clothes, not scrunchies or pillow covers (unfortunately). This accelerates my learning curve by SO much. No matter what it is I’m doing, I’m pushing myself. Not to be the best, but to have in the physical world whats in my head.

Fall in love with yourself

 I’ve been thinking for a very long time about being a kid. Even though I’m not anywhere near old. The concept of an ‘inner child’ speaks to me more now than ever, cause it feels like all I’m doing every day is drowning myself in either nostalgia or hazy dreams for the future. I want to live like a kid again. I want to create like a kid again, and think like a kid again. Maybe if I did, I’d be *her* again. ‘Smart for my age’, ‘so very strong’, and ‘an old soul’.

I used to like myself a lot more than I do now. I used to think I was a lot more special, more unusual (in a really good way), more me. Then I began to lose it. I became swamped by every glorious distraction in existence and lost sight of myself. Social media, expectations, music, noise, *anything*. Laying in bed, alone with my thoughts, became the most dreaded part of my day. Boredom was my worst enemy. 

I couldn’t care to think about myself, I didn’t love me, because I didn’t even know me. How could I ever love a stranger? 

Knowing me doesn’t mean knowing my favourite show or the very few things I hate eating. I’m sure if I really put my mind to it, I could learn to love eating those things, and my favourite show could change next week. They're adorable trivia but they mean nothing if it’s all you know. If your deepest beliefs and boundaries and values aren’t things you can put into words.  

The reason why I don’t feel like I know myself anymore is cause I don’t think about anything as deeply anymore. I don’t obsess over a book and every word in it for hours anymore. I skim. I fast forward the quiet sections in videos. I consume a piece of media and let it go, having understood maybe 20% of what the creator wanted to say. And a week later, my minds forgotten that 20% too.  

So it is that deep. For the sake of my attention span and my emotional development, it is that deep. For the sake of the artists vision and their hours of hard work, it is that deep.

Everything else in the world is that deep too. I go about a lot of my life with invisible rules. Set either by society or myself. Analysing these rules and why they were set in place and what the do for me, how they serve me, is the only way to be free of them. Deciding things about myself is fun. It’s reassuring, too. It feels like i have proof, that i know me, that ive experienced enough life to be so sure of these things about me. But it often limits my options. Narrows my worldview, and shuts off my heart to new experiences. 

Deciding ‘parties aren’t for me’ has to be that deep if I want to know if it really is just parties I dont like or if it’s the memories of the parties ive been to before. If i wanna figure out what not liking parties means for me and how I approach certain scenarios. It could be something negatively affecting my life and id never realise and never alters anything about it if I never reflected on it, If, after thinking it over, i come to the same conclusion as before, it hasn’t changed my life at all. But now i know. I know why and i know that it’s only ever been a choice. There is nothing inherent about me that makes me averse to parties and knowing that unlocks more for me than i had before. 

There is nothing inherent about me at all. It doesnt mean nothing about me is set in stone. Im an artist, and i always will be. I love love, and i always will. But even these things that are set in stone are cause ive decided they are. Everything about me is a choice i can make. It feels so freeing to build myself up from scratch every other day. 

Thats what i did when i was a kid. I could learn a new fun fact online and make it my whole personality for a week and move on so quickly afterwards it’d give anyone whiplash. i could change and learn and grow and not look back and miss what i used to be. Because id make every choice to suit who i was at that instant. Maybe it was immature, selfish, even. But Ive decided not to care.