your ideas need room to breathe

some thoughts on letting our ideas touch reality

An idea I’ve been a bit obsessed with lately is clipping women from their paintings and dropping them into scenes I create in Midjourney (lol) This woman is from Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image by Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst (1625)

I've been thinking about the things I've learned about myself that I never could have discovered in the safety of my own notebook. The realizations that only came when I stepped across that invisible threshold from private scribbling to public offering, from interior monologue to actual conversation.

There's a peculiar kind of education that happens when your thoughts meet the world—when they stop being yours alone and become something other people can push against, misunderstand, build upon, or reject entirely. It's not always comfortable. In fact, it's rarely comfortable. But it's taught me things about my own voice that years of private journaling never could.

I remember the first time I published something truly vulnerable. I had an audience of about 5,000 people on 𝕏 and I'd really only used the account to share art, but things were starting to heat up in the world and in the U.S. and I felt like it was time to share some of my deepest thoughts with the world. After all, I thought this way. These were my true feelings on the situations at hand. Why was it so difficult to say them out loud?

But I did share them. I hit "post" and went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning to a viral shitstorm I never could have imagined. Elon and