For a long time, the structures of journalism (both product and industry) have made me feel uneasy. Increasingly, an incredibly important public service—the provision of high quality information to generate belonging, well-being and agency—isn’t effectively coming out of newsrooms.

But it is coming out of communities.

Often, when in conversation with people who are feeling disillusioned by the media, I find it hard to put in words that I’m actually deeply encouraged by the work happening on the ground in journalism and journalism-adjacent fields these days.

That I’m deeply convinced if we just stop worrying about the monolithic structures that are crumbling above us and instead look directly at the care-filled work happening on the ground in so many communities, the future isn’t as bleak as we think.

Thanks to support from News Futures and an amazing team of collaborators, the brilliant Jennifer Brandel and I spent the last year thinking about how to communicate what all the bad-ass participatory, civic information projects coming out of communities, mutual aid groups, courageous newsrooms, independent researchers, libraries and more are actually made of:

As we looked at examples from journalism and beyond, a metaphor began to emerge.

Every culture has bread. Every culture has soup. Every culture has ways of preserving food for lean times. In the same way, it turns out, when communities need to understand and act in the world, they develop their own recipes for gathering stories, sharing knowledge and making decisions together. Necessity creates practices.

So we wondered: What if we could document these civic media recipes? What if we could break down the components—the ingredients, the techniques, the variations, the “nutritional value”—so more people can understand what civic media is and how to make it themselves?

So we wrote a cookbook!

Download for free below, or email me if you want to be kept posted on print editions once they become available. And if you’re feeling some kind of way about the world, journalist or not, consider this book an invitation to get your hands dirty, use these recipes, and report back!

Get the cookbook!

Jihii

I’ve been reading and talking to friends a lot lately about how hard “life admin” is—you know, that category of responsibilities that feels like an avalanche of things you should have done a long time ago but keep piling up instead?

An incomplete list: paying bills that somehow still come in the mail, renewing or cancelling subscriptions, updating policies, paying or preparing for taxes, restocking basic necessities, buying the next size up for little ones or replacing your own as your body changes, figuring out why you can’t ever find X, finding the best prices, unboxing, recycling, returning, finding doctors, paying old doctor bills, saying happy birthday properly to all the people far away, sending a thank you on time, replacing the broken thing, booking the flights, navigating the logistics.

It never ends, and yet it owns no real place in our life, except perhaps secret office time when you’re squeezing these things into a lull or a lunch break. Or, late at night on your couch while putting out a fire that only erupted because you didn’t take care of things sooner… on a screen that’s way too small for the task, with its auth codes and please try again later and why is the credit card upstairs, now I can’t do it, I’ll try again tomorrow. For retirees, I notice, entire days are filled with this work. Where is the retirement?

It also seems to have spawned an entire world of commentary and solutions: some people blame the industries that purposefully make these things hard for us. Others offer tools to help organize these noisy, invisible parts of our lives. Others suggest hiring it out like the wealthy do; we were never meant to do this much, build a team! And of course, there are those of us building teams of AI agents to do the work for us.

Until recently I’ve also viewed the life admin problem as a time issue—when do I do all this stuff? How can I outsource or automate it to get it off my plate? But lately, my view has begun to change.

I’m currently reading Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, a study of how parenting works in non-Western cultures, specifically: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania.

The introduction alone, which is about how and why western ways of living are not at all representative of most of human culture across ethnicity or history, gave me pause. In it, Doucleff explains that the nuclear family is one of the most non-traditional structures for human living and hasn’t been around very long at all. She references a 2010 study describing WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies as cultural outliers across many dimensions—how we cooperate, how we think about the self, even what we think is fair, arguing that because most of human psychology has studied only people from European backgrounds (just 12% of the world’s population), most of us in the west don’t realize how "weird” we really are.

She writes:

Over the past thousand years or so, the Western family has slowly shrunk down from a multigenerational smorgasbord to a tiny amuse-bouche, consisting solely of Ma, Pa, two kids, and maybe a dog or a cat. We not only lost Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie Fay, and Uncle Bill in the home, but also nanny Lena, cook Dan, and a whole slew of neighbors and visitors just hanging around the front porch or sleeping on the couch.

Once these people disappeared from the home, most of the parenting burden fell on Mom and Dad. As a result, for the first time in human history, moms and dads are suddenly doing this crazy-hard thing, called parenting, all by themselves (or even solo).

Most modern cases for rebuilding “the village” to raise children in are drawing on this very context. This isn’t new to me. At the same time, being from a South Asian culture where joint family living is still the norm for many, unless immigration or relocation has severed the possibility, I’m well aware of the problems of patriarchy that can make intergenerational a challenge for many.

Still, this week, reading that chapter while grappling with lots of admin work made a lightbulb go off for me that speaks more broadly to the experience of being an adult in 2026 than just parenting.

What if life admin feels so hard because in the absence of a culture where we have a smorgasbord of people around us, we lose what I can only think to call ambient social momentum?

Whether or not you’re a parent, what Doucleff is describing affects all of us. If you think about it, communal life has not only shrunk in terms of what’s happening within homes but also around them.

There is no need to walk to the bank to deposit the check, no need to meet the accountant during tax season, no need to shop at the store for the next size of shoes. We can do it all alone, on our devices, at any time of day. But that also requires us to be our own source of motivation to do any of this kind of work. There is no social pressure. There are no physical cues.

In other words, in the absence of communal structure and unfettered access to convenience, we need to rely on our own internal engine to do everything.

Consider how this looks in my life.

Within my home:

There is no grandparent starting the stove at 5pm to boil rice. When I get home, there is nothing on, nothing simmering, no voices chatting over empty tea cups, no soft snoring from a person napping on the couch, no rake in the garden making piles of leaves, no greasy child running to the door with flour-covered hands because they were helping auntie make the dough.

The greasy child is with me because I just picked him up from daycare, and I am holding his backpack, jacket, my purse, the mail, an Amazon package and my empty coffee cup as I try to push open the door without letting the dog run out of the house.

The lack of ambient social momentum means that I have to turn the rice on. I have to wash the empty coffee cup in my hand, put on the music, dig through the fridge, wipe muddy paws, and maybe get to wash my face while mentally trying to disconnect from the work I didn’t quite finish today and the deep breath I never quite took.

Around my home:

There is no gang of kids playing ball in the street, I have no appointments to keep with the plumber or the banker, no door to answer to the vegetable vendor or mailman. If I don’t have tomatoes it’s because I forgot to go to the store; maybe I can do a quick pick up or delivery. If the faucet is leaking, we’ll YouTube it. If taxes are due, I’ll sit on the couch tonight and work through a website that tells me to do what I need to.

In my physical environment, I need nothing more than the square footage of my home, a place to sit, and good internet to get things done.

What is missing in both settings is environmental cues.

If the vegetable vendor was showing up to the door, as he did in my grandmother’s town in India, I’d know when I could get the produce for dinner. I’d smile at him, say thank you, and pick my okra as she did. If I had to put on a pair of real pants and meet my accountant, as I once did, I might feel like tax season is a communal event: dreary, but still, dreary things are best done together. If the rice was already boiling on the stove, I might be able to take that deep breath, because life is moving, it doesn’t depend on me to move.

Perhaps life’s work has become so difficult not only because there’s so much of it, not only because I’m doing it alone, not only because it’s so digital and optimized and I can’t see it, but because it depends on me having a large reserve of energy to constantly mode switch without any visual cues. Isn’t it the movement of other people’s lives that actually pulls us forward toward action? How strange it is, to have to generate the energy all by yourself.

Of course there are modest gestures one can implement to help, but these, too, require astounding executive functioning to put in place: I treat the first of every month like an appointment to face the thornier parts of financial admin. I invite people over for food more often, and prepare less, so we can work together. I study the environments where I feel most alive and try to bring some version of that home. The fact that an entire industry exists to influence us to take better care of ourselves feels like an approximation for something that used to simply exist on its own—and still does, in many places.

I never really thought about the beauty of ambient social momentum before. Now, I notice it everywhere: it’s why sitting in a cafe, writing to you, as the people around me all do their own thing—waiters, workers, even the people in line for the bathroom, all moving forward in time—feels so easy.

I think human beings were meant to merge into a river of side-by-side living, and maybe the relentless offerings of convenience have stealthily robbed us of this option.

The other night, my 2-year-old son asked to “cook” pasta. So I gave him a large bucket of dry pasta and he took a spatula and busied himself pouring “soup” into a number of vessels, stirring and slurping with a satisfied smile.

The same child who ordinarily clings to me in the kitchen, begging me to hold him as I cook, pushed me away each time I tried to look over his shoulder.

“Mama, cook!” he would say, pointing to the stove.

By which he meant: you do your work, I’ll do mine.

Happy Monday,

Jihii

Every so often, I meet someone who sees time the way I do, like an inventory of experiences to accumulate, then settle in with for a proper debrief. They’ll be listening and talking, but I know they’re also somewhere else—making a plan to investigate a moment of inspiration, or quietly wallowing over a moment of disconnect.

If I were to describe how my mind works with ruthless honesty, it would require admitting that it functions like an actual index; I’m incapable of experiencing life without also filing it into an appropriate bucket in my brain. For example, I’ll leave a dinner and immediately sort it: good conversation, one idea worth exploring, one moment I wish I’d handled differently. This has given me both the discipline to never let a good idea vanish and, unfortunately, a precisely dated archive of my failures.

The reality, though, is that my desire to document emerged out of a desire to simply be…witnessed. It’s something I’ve struggled with throughout my life. As a teenager, I had a friend who commented on every one of my blog posts to say that it sounded deep, but they didn’t get it. As an adult, more than once, I’ve gone through multiple rounds of job interviews only to be told I’m a little too out of the box for the role—and am I sure this is what I want to do?

This, in a sense, is the backstory that led to my preoccupation with time and writing about it: If the structures available to you—adolescent friendship, adult careers—repeatedly tell you they can’t understand you, you start looking for other ways to prove that you exist.

Motherhood, in particular, compounds this experience: you are at once being witnessed in great detail by a tiny person with limited vocabulary—my son notices if my hair falls out of its ponytail, if I’ve forgotten my sunglasses at the beach, if my sleeves are short or long today—but also, neither of you feel part of society in a meaningful way when you’re together, except, perhaps, at the playground, the closest thing to a cohort-like experience for average parents on an average day.

For many of us—especially writers—the page is the only place where we can reliably witness ourselves.

And so, over the years, I’ve leaned on many writing exercises to ground me in time—to prove to my own existential angst, that I do in fact exist, even if I can’t explain how at a dinner party.

Here’s an exercise I did this week, if you want to try it.

Exercise: An Inventory of Decades

Look at today’s date. Let’s treat it as the end of a decade. Ask yourself:

1. How many decades have passed since you first emerged into adulthood? List them out in a way that feels close to right.

2. For each decade, write a few sentences: where were you at the beginning? At the end?

3. For the decade you’ve just begun, write where you think you’re headed.

My example:

1. It has been two decades since I emerged into adulthood; starting with my sophomore year of high school feels right. That makes decade 1 2005-2015 and decade 2 2015-2025.

2. Decade 1: March 2005 - March 2015
   At the beginning of the decade, I was ending 10th grade, a year wrought with pain, angst and deep questioning. It’s here that I discovered both writing and rebellion. Perhaps it is also when I first felt like myself—the one I know now. At the end of it, I had just finishing all my schooling—high school, college for liberal arts and graduate school for journalism with a smattering of part-time jobs along the way.

3. Decade 2: March 2015 - March 2025

   At the beginning of this decade, I was in my first salaried job. It was here that I began to wonder if salaried work was for me or I should really commit to freelance life. The latter eventually won. This season was marked by production and reckoning. I had jobs, left them, built creative work, got married, reckoned with my health, moved across the country, gave birth to my son, and enjoyed a spectacular first year of motherhood in which my body and my writing felt like one. At the end of this season, I was a mother to a one-year-old, ready to invest more deeply in my career, but unsure how.

4. Decade 3: March 2025 - March 2035
   Here we are! It’s just been a year that I feel like I’ve invested back into my work after a year at home. My intentions are to double down on production, having collected and tested a great number of ideas in the past years. At the end, I hope to have a body of work and sense of self that I’m proud of.

There, you’ve just witnessed yourself. You exist.

Happy Monday,
Jihii

If you’re new here, some related pieces:

I've been taking a class on writing and motherhood and swirling in the perspectives of writers in the middle of both. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me there is motherhood and then there is idealized motherhood.

It seems we're living through a moment of intense writing and examination of care—both the systemic forces around it and our own childhoods. This is so important and I’m all for it. But, at times, especially in works dealing with the latter, I’m noticing an implication that there is a right way to be a mother and if you're not that, you're not a mother at all.

I don’t think this is true. A mother is a mother is a mother. If we have failings, they do not make us less a mother but perhaps less effective at a certain type of care. You wouldn’t tell a bad writer that they are not a writer. They simply don’t write the way you prefer, or even the way you think the world needs them to.

It feels important to untangle the two—our implied understanding of what good mothering is, and what makes a mother.

Many people can offer good mothering. They don’t even have to be mothers to do so.

But not all people are mothers. (A related book: Nancy Reddy’s The Good Mother Myth.)

In our conversations on these subjects, which have mostly been about the works of women in midlife, I find myself craving more perspective on the later ends of motherhood, when your own end is near and you're thinking of your own mother.

It’s a wholly different view. Arundhati Roy does a spectacular job of it in her recent memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. She could indict her mother, as many memoirists do, but instead, she shares the texture of her mother’s life.

It seems inevitable that the details you offer your child today are remembered later, long after you die, when your child is old. My son seems to notice every strand of hair I leave around the house. He folds my hair behind my ears when we hug. He twists my nose ring when he’s falling asleep next to me. Is this his body noticing me? How long will it stay with him?

In the works I’ve so far read by writers at the other end of life, their mothers aren’t always remembered with the same wounds that may have colored younger years, as if scabs have truly become scars. It seems as though these writers remember their mother’s texture, no more, no less. The way you might remember a writer’s imprint on you, whiffs of words that haunted you or held you.

In the last book of poems Ursula K. Le Guin wrote before she passed away in 2018, So Far So Good, there's a poem called “Theodora,” about her mother:

I think how fine my mother was.
Her doings and her things were lovable.
Her turquoise bracelets, her violet
dinner dress with a jeweled waist.
The way when she was undressing
she’d go around with her nylons
unhitched.
I think of all this now with tenderness
and comfort in the recollection.

Oh I was so angry at her when she died
for dying, but at last that’s gone
and she comes to me again
with silver and turquoise on her wrists
in the sunlight.

I wonder if our youth is spent experiencing, our middle age evaluating and our older age remembering. I wonder how much I might regret not noticing while I had the chance.

Happy Monday,

Jihii

My relationship with reading has been changing over the last few years. In childhood, I was a voracious reader of fiction. In college, I lost steam when it felt like class assignments outpaced my ability to metabolize what I was reading and my social world outsized my capacity to nurture relationships with fictional protagonists.

In adulthood, reading neatly relegated itself into two streams: books for work, usually nonfiction, that helped me do research, and books for entertainment, which increasingly lost their place in line to streaming television and social video streams.

I began to reach for intentional reading only in tenuous moments: to process life, to understand something complex adulthood had not prepared me for, and, more recently, to make friends.

A few months ago, I had a lovely conversation with Christie George, author of a peculiar artifact whose making opened a creative journey for her that’s now lead to many workshops, events, conversations (and last year, this podcast with the two of us!)

I thought she would be the perfect person with whom to explore this conversation I’ve been having with myself about reading. Below, you’ll find excerpts from our chat woven together with my own thinking.

First, some context on her artifact, The Emergency was Curiosity.

Originally inspired by Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, in the early pandemic days, Christie found herself reading closely and copying quotes by hand that she wanted to remember.

And then that just got out of hand and I started doodling and drawing and writing essays about the ways the ideas in the book were relevant, increasingly in my own life and in that cultural moment.

What I didn’t know is that this type of artifact is actually called a commonplace book, dating back to the 17th century, when it was common to collect information from here and there, not read in a linear format and use these notes to make sense of the world. In Christie’s case, she came to this practice from an unlikely place; her career began in independent film distribution and eventually funding progressive media and technology companies.

I think the real departure for me was sort of in the permission to work on something as substantial as this without a goal or deadline or audience or boss or reason. All the writing that I have done in my career has been for a purpose: either to convince someone of something, or promote something or advocate for something.

As the project grew bigger and took more and more of her time, Christie joined a creative group with a few other people, imagining she would stay in it long enough to get one round of feedback from others, as well as offer others feedback on their work. She intended to print three copies of the book report: one for herself, one for her parents and one for Jenny Odell.

I was thinking it was this time-boxed thing that coincided with the pandemic and then it would be over and we would move onto real life.

Instead, Christie kept working on it and decided to also ask some close friends for feedback on her draft. One friend passed it onto another and while Christie was nervous about a stranger reading what felt like a self-indulgent project, something clicked.

She lived in New Zealand and I had never met her but she turned out to be the most comprehending reader of the project. I say comprehending, specifically, because she understood the point of the project more deeply than I ever did in my own searching and questioning the whole time I was working on it: why am I continuing to work on this thing? She was already on the other side in her own practice and journey.

She wrote a 17 page book report about Christie’s book report and sent it to her in a Google Doc.

I was expecting feedback and edits but then I got this whole other thing that was like all of her own experiences, both reading Jenny’s book, her reactions to my reactions to Jenny’s book and all of the rabbit holes that she went down reading my project. And I was just like, wait, is this what happens when you share your work with people?

That motivated Christie to share the project more widely so she self-funded printing 500 copies and make day-by-day efforts to launch it: through an exhibition, talks, workshops, and lots of hand-by-hand selling to bookstores. (You can get it here!)

Hearing her talk made me imagine a tiny cartoon girl, enlivened by a maddening curiosity who creates this inexplicable THING! And then thinks to herself, “I did this thing! Wait, how dare I? Who am I to do this thing?”

I’ve had this very journey countless times before I chose to invest professionally into a creative career. In this sense, both writing and reading have lived in the margins of my life, punctuating heavy transitions, extrapolating difficult to understand feelings, birthing random “things” that come from nowhere when I am suddenly possessed one afternoon and then… ah, catharsis, insight.

As we spoke, here are a few things I started to think.

• What if reading differently is a way into art for people who don’t identify as artists?

  If you actually want to move your life in the direction of having a sustained creative practice, professional or not, you have to take concrete steps. Often, I see people freeze because they aren’t sure what they want to make. What if reading can be one of the first steps toward yourself?

• What if processing life through reading is uniquely human and urgent in the age of AI?

  I’ve been noticing more and more how AI doesn’t allow me to metabolize information before reaching understanding. I get the facts or the insight explained perfectly, but nothing has time to reach my body, where information actually lives. What if reading in a new, generative way, is necessary in this age, not to “get the point” of the book but to have the experience itself?

• What if sharing reading with each other is as important as reading itself?

  My first social experience after moving to San Francisco was joining a book club with friends-of-friends who wanted a social circle. We stayed together for a long while and I read and discussed much more fiction than I normally read and it truly pushed me past the boundaries of my intellectual and social comfort zones in the best of ways. That became a craving and then a habit, and since then, I find reading together being an integral part of new friendship and communities across the board: Buddhist friends, writer friends, mom friends, art friends, family.

So, I asked Christie, can we try to jot some some ways of reading, a menu if you will? Here’s my draft based on our brainstorming.

How to engage with text in a generative, life-connected way:

1. Write a book report. Pick up a book you want to engage deeply and slowly with, and go for it. You can do it for yourself or even gift it to a friend or family member who will never read the book but may love your notes.

2. Start your own commonplace book. Braid all kinds of things in it. Make connections. Make sense of life through your own private curation.

3. Write a book in the margins of another book. I haven’t made a book report in a long while, but I do secretly write new books in the margins of other books. Sometimes, while reading, I just can’t stop the process. Then, I transcribe my writing onto a blank document but I preserve the form: my writing is in the margins of the page. The center is blank. It’s weird, feels like poetry, I never share these, and I love it.

4. Schedule a bookclub that suits your intentions.
   I’ve seen so many cool kinds:

   1. bookclubs on a theme (motherhood, cookbooks where everyone cooks 1 dish from the book)

   2. bookclubs that run monthly (rotate who picks and vote) for the social connection

   3. bookclubs that simply meet 1 time to discuss 1 book that feels worth discussing

   4. groupchats to discuss the book as you’re reading them because sometimes you just want to dump your live thoughts to someone else having the same experience

5. Write a fan letter. Or find another way to engage with the writer of a book you loved. Christie does this and I find it so awesome. Why don’t I write to authors more often?

6. Build a constellation of books on a theme to help yourself understand something. I did this, for example, when I was dealing with the choice to become a parent, and read my way through my feelings.

7. Pick up a book explicitly to help you process life or help someone else do so. I once interviewed two friends who would recommend books to each other to navigate life experiences and eventually started offering this service (bibliotherapy) to others. How brilliant! Ask a voracious reader you trust for a suggestion on what to read to process something: a transition, a question, grief, curiosity, fear, a mood.

If you do none of the above, I’ll leave you with one more idea that Christie sparked when she said:

I feel like I mark time now by the books that I’m reading. If you gave me a date, like, April 2024, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you anything, but if you gave me the title of a book, I could tell you when and where I was while I was reading it. Both literally and in my head or in my life.

I completely agree. Do you?

If you were to jot down what was happening in your life during the last 3 books you read and why you even picked them up, what might emerge?

Happy Monday,

Jihii

My mind and heart have been a mess lately in a way I’ve not really experienced before. I rarely get twisted when it comes to the news. I’ve always been intentional about my relationship with media, committed to curiosity alongside outrage, prone to wanting understanding alongside action.

But something is changing.

Some of it feels like a side effect of parenthood: witnessing human cruelty feels more gut-wrenching when you’re constantly witnessing human innocence. Side-by-side, they wreck you. Seeing power seized and used against people so forcefully and abhorrently feels intolerable now that I have a small human I'm tasked with raising and protecting. And being attuned to the well-being of other people's children has become a daily practice — it's a natural instinct at playgrounds and in the neighborhood and even in community spaces to consider what other children and other parents need.

And some of it feels like it’s because this isn’t about my relationship with media anymore, it’s about my relationship with America. I’ve found myself twisted in knots by the news because it doesn’t feel like news anymore, as if the media was once a fence between me and danger, and in the last few administrations, it’s vanished and I’m standing in the open in front of my country.

My approach to tricky knots has never been brute force. I need to sit back, look at it from a few angles, and then decide my approach. While I rarely share raw first thoughts to this degree, here is a letter I wrote in my journal to my son this weekend. I’m sharing it because perhaps you are also dealing with a growing knot.

Journal Entry, January 25, 2026

Outrage is starting to feel insufficient as a posture for the long haul. I’m so moved by the political action citizens can and are taking and I am also so unsure of what I trust is a solution, outside of this particular moment, to the forces at play across the world. Regime, culture and technological change, all at once.

I wonder if there is a version of first principles that might help me assess what citizenship means to me right now. According to this post on FS about reasoning from first principles, that requires taking everything I know about citizenship apart and looking at what’s true. I liked this:

If I hand you a house made from Lego blocks, you know it’s possible to make a house. Thinking at the first layer, you might move a few blocks around and, in the process, slightly improve the house. Most people stop here. They are presented with something that already exists and they endeavor to make it slightly better. Going a layer deeper and breaking the Lego house into individual pieces opens the door to possibility: not only can you build a better house, you can build something entirely different.

I have no idea what else to build but I do feel close to knowing the values from which to do so. I can’t stop thinking about how to offer at least this—the values that come before politics—to my son, almost 2, now getting verbal.

How will I respond when he starts noticing fear and systems bigger than us, and receives information he never gathered with his own senses? What will I tell him about what it means to be a member of society? What skills will I help him develop that foster leadership?

Here is a first draft.

Dear [child’s name],

I think it’s time to talk about how people organize themselves in America. That’s the name of the landmass on which we live. You’ve seen some of it, but there is so much more you haven’t seen yet. It’s a very big place with big oceans on both sides and countries above it, below it and all the way across the oceans.

There are many ways to organize large groups of people, and if you look at different places, be they little towns or big countries, you’ll notice that they are all organized in different ways. Each place has a story and each has changed over time.

Kind of like you and me. Before you were 1, you couldn’t see much past your fingers! When you are 5, you’ll be able to not only see people and things but also how they all connect, the invisible ways. And there will be a lot of feelings inside your body as it learns to organize itself in new places as you grow up.

Sometimes, the way a group of people is organized stops working well. Often, it’s because not everyone can participate in decisions, so a smaller group takes over. But that small group may care more about what they want than what’s good for everyone. It’s hard to agree on what’s good for everyone in a really big group of people!

It’s not unlike when you pinched B’s nose this week because you wanted a turn at the slide. Can you imagine if 20 people wanted a turn at the slide, and 20 people were already in line for it, and they all started pinching each other’s noses or, worse, they asked the biggest, loudest ones to pinch the smallest ones of the other group?

In these scenarios, it can look like the most important thing to do is to stop the pinching, and yes, for everyone’s safety, please, stand up when you see someone getting hurt.

But after you get home and you have a moment to eat some food and sit down and give or get a hug, it’s important to try to understand how to stop pinching in the future.

In places like America, people tried to make rules so the same people couldn’t stay in charge forever and more ideas about what everyone needs could be tried out.

But those rules were made a long time ago, before there were so many people here, before the internet, and before we were all so connected to the rest of the world. It used to take days to even travel to another city or contact someone far away!

Still, we try to use those old systems and make updates as we go. It’s kind of like living in an old house built at a different time. Remember how we showed you where all the old knob and tube electricity in our walls used to be? It had to be taken out because it’s not safe anymore, with all our computers and lamps and TVs!

But going through change is very hard. We have to be good at keeping our eyes open to the big things and the small ones at the same time. We have to make sure people don’t get hurt when we break old things, and we definitely can’t hurt each other when things don’t go our way.

Here is my best advice about how to do that:

Even if you feel small and like you haven’t seen most of the country and you’re a little bit scared, try to come up with ideas for how you think people should be organized and what they need.

Because trying to come up with ideas is itself a way of living. A very important way.

Even if your plan doesn’t work or no one listens, the next time you see people hurting each other, you won’t feel as scared or angry because you’ll understand why they are doing this and what alternatives could be.

It’s kind of like how mamas always have something in the bag to make their babies feel better, or teachers have doubles of special toys. They don’t always help, but it can be overwhelming not to have anything to offer someone who is having a hard time.

When people live together, big feelings are common. And when feelings get big, people often use the easiest way they can think of to get what they want. Choosing to prioritize everyone’s safety and well-being isn’t easy, but I promise that it’s worth it.

Here is why: It’s the happiest happiness.

If you want a turn at the slide, sure, you can find your way to get one. But what if you could find a way for everyone to have fun at the same time? It’s harder than just taking your own turn, but when you find that way, you will be happier than you ever could have been alone, or if only your group of friends got what they want.

You won’t believe me until you practice it once or twice, so try it out.

Easy ways are to start in lower-conflict situations, like, if you are bored or lonely, can you come up with a way to get the neighbors out to play together? I promise it will feel more fulfilling than finding your own toys to play with at home.

To develop the ability to do this, you can’t be afraid of people. You have to practice being someone who wants to spread friendship, especially with people who are either more quiet than you and don’t say hi first, or with people who are louder than you and hurt your ears.

Try to find a quiet moment with each type of person and ask about their life. Then, make plans to do something fun. Over time, when things happen, like the time we all lost power for a few days or the big storm came or something scary happened and the police and fire trucks came, you’ll call on these friends and want to make sure they are safe and you’ll feel connected to them. This is what I mean by happier happiness.

Sometimes, it might feel like happiness is a funny goal to have in life, but it actually should always stay your biggest goal. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s silly.

Because actively pursuing it for yourself and other people at the same time unlocks your best thoughts and best feelings and best plans. When you’re older, I can explain to you how I learned this from my Buddhist teacher and you can study it more carefully.

If you practice living this way, you'll find it easier to understand why things happen the way they do, in school, at work, in elections, in faraway places. And you’ll also feel really clear about what to do. Especially when you see people being hurt. First, help protect them.

Second, ask yourself: who is trying to get what and why? Is there another way to work on this? In my experience, not enough people spend a lot of time on the second question, but it’s very important that we do, even if it’s not our job and we don’t get paid for it. If you want to live amongst people anywhere, you have to see and nurture the invisible strings between them. This is called interconnection, the invisible strings between people that hold communities together, no matter if they are organized this way or that. It’s a life-level thing, like how you feel about your stuffies or the earth.

Doing so will make sure you never fail to protect someone weaker than you, and also that you never close your heart or mind to bullies. In the end, we are all people trying to get what we want and feel connected to each other. This is absolute truth. Even the person getting everyone to pinch each other is trying to get something done — but that doesn’t mean we let them pinch.

Here is where it gets important.

Every time you see the nose-pincher, you have two choices: you can either think, Oh No! It’s them again and hide, or worse, get angry and band together with your friends and call them names.

Or, you can take a deep breath, keep your body safe, and ask people you trust about how to help. The cool thing about living in a world with so many people is that there are always people who know more than we do about how to solve certain problems. We just have to find them.

Then, come home, give or get a hug, eat something and work on the future.

I know that sounds like an indirect way to deal with the nose-pincher, but sometimes, we can’t stop someone from doing something in the moment. But imagine if all your friends (and even new people you haven’t met yet) had the guts to walk right up to the pinchers and take their spot in line?

In the world of grown-ups, people with lots of money and people who like to be mean often get to be loudest about how things should be organized.

There are many ways to address this imbalance, which we won’t get into today. But one thing we can do is make sure people who care about everyone's happiness also have resources and loud voices. That's part of why we build strong friendships.

But today, what I want you to know, is that if you want to work on the future, it’s important to always look at the world the way a bird at the top of a very tall tree would see it.

That way you’ll be able to see things like: how was this organized in the past? How do the loud people want it to be organized in the future? Where am I now? And all the while, building deep bonds with the people around you.

When you see things from the top of a tree, you’ll be less afraid when scary things happen and you’ll be quicker to take the right action without hesitation, while making sure your friends who care about the happiest happiness, find their way to loudness. And when happy people get loud, well, I hope to see that way of organizing people spread more and more.

Many places in the world have had to go through these processes over and over until they began to feel safe and happy. None of them are perfect.

But remember, we live in a place that is still very young compared to many other places and quite a bit larger. Imagine being younger than everyone and also having the most feelings to organize. It’s a tough job!

Our way of organizing America is only 250 years old. There are other places that are already thousands of years old.

In those places, lots of mean people tried to organize things in their own way and hurt a lot of people along the way. But lots of kind, happy people grew into leadership that helped many others as well.

In short, let’s be patient, brave and work hard to build strong groups of friends who don’t believe in nose-pinching. That starts with taking care of our bodies, talking about hard feelings and having the courage to dream up a way of organizing people that you believe in.

Love, Mom

The knot loosened tremendously after working through this with myself. Sometimes thinking about what you would say to a child holds the most honest answers.

In the adult version of this, I am making two promises to myself as a citizen this year:

Promise 1: Take action based on convictions and a plan, not reaction.
This requires keeping the long game in mind no matter what. If outrage is my main catalyst for action again and again, I get tired and sad and only act when anger is loudest. Holding complexity means making a plan for the year on what change I want to invest in through sustained actions (be they targeted donations or political action or education or working through my own blocks). All of that requires energy and effort—especially to willfully hold complexity and understand power. Why hasn’t this been scheduled in my calendar like my child’s care and my personal goals? I’m disappointed in myself for not approaching citizenship with this level of rigor. It’s time to step it up.

Promise 2: Build strong friendships in every spare moment possible.
And trust that these networks will turn into power. Healthy people make courageous choices. They also tend to build stability that lets them take risks for others. I think this isn’t named enough. Practiced compassion and network-weaving lead to increased trust, information gathering and safety. Together, people with strong bonds and humanistic values and access to wealth can become a political fabric we haven’t seen enough of yet. I thought I was building community for my own fulfillment, but I’m realizing it’s the longest long game.

Happy Monday,
Jihii

For the last two weeks, I’ve been in a deep work hole, sitting with old projects and new ideas, unsure of how to get myself to complete something that’s begun to feel stale when most of me wants to emerge into something new. It’s a major problem of the artist’s life, and one that I haven’t really encountered great solutions to.

For me, work often emerges alongside lived experience; a blessing and a curse because I can turn almost any life experience into writing or art, but if I’m not living with the material, it’s incredibly hard for me to want to invest any time into it. Once I feel I understand something I don’t want to sit with it any more.

So I found myself revisiting my own artist’s statement for inspiration. It tells me that I work on definitions—finding words for the things that are hard to describe or poorly described by existing vocabulary. Longtime readers know that’s essentially what I do when I write about journalism or motherhood or caregiving or work. All stale words for much deeper processes that are quite powerful if we let them be.

In this I realize the shift I find myself ready to make, and perhaps the source of my “completion” problem is that I’ve spent most of my career defining these things against existing models. Journalism is X, but that doesn’t work anymore, so what is it, other than X? Motherhood is X, but that model didn’t serve me well, how can I make it something other than X? Caregiving is X, but that feels invisible and overlooked, how can I make it more powerful and visible? Technology is X, but that limits us in Y ways, what else can it be?

While this interrogation has served me well and you’ve sat through over 100 letters of me riffing on some version of these questions, I’m finding myself moving toward a new practice—how can I define things for a reason, rather than against an old one?

Some familiar examples:

• What would it mean to examine journalism as something that ought to exist for the public good, not as a correction to what it’s become? (hi, news futures)

• What would it mean to examine motherhood as a window into navigating all of life, not just a rebuttal to the models we’ve inherited?

• What would it mean to approach technology as something that invents new approaches to life, not a just a tool to augment what’s slow or broken?

These questions extend to everything, from the personal to the existential:

• What does it mean to create family for a future you envision, not just against the version you’ve come from?

• What does it mean to build a product for the life you want users to have, not just against the competition or the market as it exists?

• What does it mean to build a company for the people inside it, not just against the models you've seen fail?

• What does it mean to stay in a city for what it offers, not just against the places you've left?

• What does it mean to pursue health for vitality, not just against illness or aging?

• What does it mean to engage with politics for the world you want, not just against the one you fear is taking hold?

The most inspiring people I know already think this way. I’m just catching up.

Already, I notice that my posture when exploring in this way is radically different. I’m not hunched at a computer writing. I’m sprawled on the floor in large formats.

I think this is a good sign.

What would you like to define for rather than against this year?

Happy Monday,

Jihii

I am currently reading a series of interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most inspiring writers of her time.

It feels like the best book to end the year with because Le Guin’s approach to life has helped me punctuate many of the things I am metabolizing from this year, most importantly, that common human work is fuel for writing and art.

This especially:

If I was “free,” as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is a privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.

If I could boil my deepest lessons from the year into two, they would be these:

1. Feeling incapable, outsourcing difficulty, placing responsibility for one’s emotions on the world, is the fastest route to unending despair.
   
   There is a magic to finding your way through difficulty. It gives one access to this feeling of: What more can I do? What more can I learn? I think this is what the will to live feels like. I want to live.
   

2. Letting go is far more expansive than I ever allowed myself to believe.

   
   There is a line in the book Crying in H Mart, where Michelle’s mom tells her that she always keeps a small percentage of herself only for herself, in her marriage. I adored this idea when I encountered it because I, too, have always been someone who refuses to allow anyone in entirely. There was always something to protect.
   

   But this year, boundaries dissolved into a safety that feels more powerful than self-protection—a safety that comes from investing in generative care, in the future, in safety for all of us, not just me.

It’s a strange transformation, to slowly give up autonomy and live life in a dance of permanent partnership, permanent mothering and permanent community-building. This year, the boundaries of you, me, us, we, all blurred in ways that felt metamorphic. I enjoyed it. I am grateful.

My eyes are wide open to the remnants of patriarchy and invisibility that still plague so many of us. But somehow, I find that creation is more powerful than resistance. That families and communities can move together in a million different ways if someone is willing to name and lead the cultural currents within a home with intention. That there is more me in us than I realized.

I hope you, too, can end the year relishing whatever common human work allows you to both create and feel safe.

And I hope it’s not alone.

Happy New Year,

Jihii

One of the chapters I most love in the home as a care studio project (see image below) I’ve been noodling on is home as a site of creative work.

Perhaps it is because in this chapter of life, it’s something I’m leaning so heavily into. Making art at home, integrated into the rhythms of care, is its own kind of practice.

In addition to my own creative work, for the past year+ I’ve been spending time in the company of so many people who identify as mother-artists. (Join us if you are in SF! https://www.mothersinartanddesign.com)

I never would have imagined identifying as an artist, but in the slow road from journalism to writing to motherhood, it feels most right to me at this moment.

Art, for me, is the act of metabolizing life. Writing is not always that. Writing can be art but sometimes it just describes life, documents life, communicates life. To metabolize life means to make something new from it, to use our experiences to allow life’s lessons to reach the deeper places in our bodies, or, sometimes, access the lessons that our brains alone can’t fathom. In this sense, writing as art is alchemy, metamorphosis, craft.

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed alongside Christie George on the podcast Mother of It All (Substack / Spotify) about how motherhood and creativity fuel and/or constrain each other and it helped me articulate, for the first time, what it is I’m doing.

And as you know, to be able to name what it is you are doing can be difficult, if your role in the market and your role in your life don’t feel like the same thing.

This past weekend, MAD (Mothers in Art & Design SF) held our first retreat, and what a delight it was to be in the company of mothers and children in nature for a weekend. We cooked for each other, talked and talked and made art and reflected.

I also facilitated a workshop to help us articulate what it means to be artist-parents. Together, we wrote about and discussed 7 questions that aren’t about art or parenting separately, but what happens at the intersection.

For anyone who feels like they are an artist-parent and would like to name more clearly what that means, I include the questions below. I deeply believe in writing a statement for your work, particularly if you’re doing work that doesn’t fit neat categories—like being both artist and parent. While most writing and art about parenthood can alienate non-parents, I actually feel like art can build bridges between them if we are clear about our work.

So here are 7 questions about art + motherhood (or parenthood!) that can help you write that statement.

We opened the retreat with the poem “Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver, so before you dig into reflection, I want to share it with you:

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

7 Questions about Art + Motherhood

About Your Art

1. Why do you create?
   What drives you to make things? What questions, desires, or obsessions pull you toward your practice?

2. What is your relationship to process?

   What does your process look like now—in this season of life? Is it slow, fragmented, urgent, hidden, joyful, devotional?

3. Why this medium?
   Why do you work in the form you’ve chosen—visual, written, material, performance, sound? What draws you to it?

About your Mothering/Parenting

1. What do you hope your children take from you?
   Not just artistically—but in how you live, make choices, hold time.

2. How has parenthood changed your art (or how you see art?)
   Has it sharpened anything? Softened anything? Broken something open?

About Your Children Witnessing Your Art

1. How do you hope your children will understand your creative work?
   What do you want them to feel when they see you in process? When they see what you’ve made?

2. What do you want your children to believe about art?
   About who gets to make it, what it can be for, what it’s worth in the world?

I think what I’ve learned in the last year is that art is something that is rich, immense, limitless fuel for caregiving. And at the same time, it is the one of the more effective ways to understand what it is we are doing as parents.

Whether you identify as an artist or not, I hope you’ll find a small pocket of time to make something—even just for yourself. It’s a wonderful feeling.

Happy Friday,

Jihii

P.S. For those who are newer here, this is the project I’m referring to. Home is powerful! I’ve compiled all of this thinking—plus additional exercises and resources from past essays—into a full module on Home as a Site of Creative Work. You can find it on my library alongside other modules in the Home as a Care Studio series.

This is my 100th letter to you. I am not sure where in this journey you signed up or what you expected to receive. But, as milestones invite us to, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned along the way.

I think writing is the only way for me to gain authentic perspective on life when I am unable to zoom out. On the ground, I’ve always been a “miss the forest for the trees” sort of person. On the page, I am all forest.

Mostly, this is why I write.

This newsletter, which I prefer to think of as a series of plain old letters, has a modest following—a little under 1k subscribers, which, in the world of “internet media” is not very big. But in the life of a writer who is still young, still learning her craft, and still hatcheting a path carrying private burdens through a world that, most of the time, feels complicated and large and a little bit scary, that is a lot of people to be speaking to.

I see myself as a small person, mostly because I don’t like to take up very much space. Feeling compact, accounting for my presence, these are my natural state. I am always a bit flattened in the presence of people who are unabashedly expansive.

Over time though, I have come to see this flattening as something I could enjoy. In earlier chapters of my life, flattening felt like erasure. In this one, it is my preferred form of art.

Writing, for me, is an attempt at precision, my own version of surgery, my way to access those parts of my body that are also inside yours—my incision tool, if you will, in a way that feels safe and quiet.

Here are a few things I have felt while writing these letters:

• It took me about 25 letters for the self-doubt to emerge — I wondered why I was writing at all

• By 75, I started to find the courage to be selfish—writing on the internet tends to force one to pursue growth, but truly, I’m writing for me the most

• Now, at 100, most weeks I feel rather dependent on this little text editor to ensure I have not stopped walking…to wherever it is my body seems to want to go

And here are the brightest spots that have come with developing a public practice:

• I have made countless friends through writing — someone reads something and thinks of someone else and the reciprocity expands and suddenly we are a circle of friends. This has happened on so many themes. It is my favorite proof that processing the world in public is one of the rare ways to both work and steward at the same time.

• I have read (and found myself remembering) more than I could possibly digest in silence. I feel like I am always in school. And I love this way of learning.

But most of all, putting this stake in the ground has allowed me to grow around it, rather than wither under the weight of the hundreds of private notebooks from my first 30 years of life that are piled in my office. In the last 5 years, writing to you, I have learned to keep my windows open.

Someone told me recently that it is difficult for readers to connect with ambivalent protagonists, that they want emotion, stakes, politics, advice. But in hearing this list, I felt immediately that those are the very things that discourage me from reading: emotion, stakes, politics, advice.

I prefer to locate myself in someone else’s ambiguity. It is most exciting when, in that ambiguity, a loud, clear, precise voice emerges to say one urgent and timely thing.

When I first began practicing Buddhism as a shy teenager, this is the passage from my mentor that reached me most deeply:

True individuality and character never come to full flower without hard work. I feel it is a mistake to think that who you are right now represents all you are capable of. If you passively decide, “I’m a quiet person, so I’ll just go through life being quiet,” you won’t ever fully realize your unique potential. Without having to change your character completely, you can become a person who, while still basically quiet, will say the right thing at the right time with real conviction. In the same way, a negative tendency toward impatience could be developed into a useful knack for getting things done quickly and efficiently.

But nothing is more immediate, or more difficult, than to confront and transform ourselves. It is always tempting to decide “That’s just the kind of person I am.” Unless we challenge this tendency early in life, it will become stronger with age. But the effort is worthwhile in the end, as I believe that nothing produces deeper satisfaction than successfully challenging our own weaknesses.

In this sense, I suppose writing is my hard work. An active effort to challenge my own desire to be a quiet person while at the same time, inviting more people to be quiet.

In that spirit, if you stay for the journey, let’s move together toward 200 letters and in them, I hope you, too, find a simultaneous safety and thrill in our search for precision through ambivalence. If there are knotty things you, too, feel ambivalent about, especially regarding your relationships with care and media, let me know and I’ll try to follow them down the road alongside my own knots.

Because without ambivalence, we cannot be quiet and without quiet we cannot hear and without hearing we cannot be precise.

This illustration by the French artist Cécile Metzger captures what most days with this text editor have felt like—private delight with an open door.

Thank you very much for reading.

Jihii

Lately, it feels like I’ve had countless conversations about the strain on our generation. The confounding, catastrophic, competing winds of…

• living through and witnessing violences that you feel powerless to do anything about

• witnessing a government that is acting in spite of its people, pushing the boundaries on legality at breakneck speed

• depending on a media system that is your only real access to keeping up with all that is happening nationally and internationally — and yet, at the same time, feels like it often hurts more than it helps

• navigating information that’s coming in streams from the networks you are connected to—sometimes helpful, sometimes generative, sometimes heartening and other times adding pressure to an already overloaded nervous system dealing with real-world responsibilities

• and now, achieving a strange intimacy through AI — information gathering and processing that feels like relief, but can be remarkably disorienting and misleading too.

This feels like a brand new reality. But is it?

In quiet moments, I keep finding myself circling this question:

What parts of this are actually new? How have people in the past navigated periods of overlapping political, technological, and interpersonal shifts? How did it feel to them? What did they have to learn? What did they have to give up? Who evolved and who got lost?

Someday far in the future, when my child tries to ask me about the times we lived through, I want to be able to offer something in words I’ve actually thought about.

I want to be able to locate us on a map. I want to try to be able to say, “Here is where your grandparents were. Here is where we were. And here is where you are. It’s a mess, and the coordinates are approximations, but I think maps help. Where would you like to go next?”

That, and information always feels like a hug when I’m lost.

I am no cartographer but, if I could try to be one, I would start with time.

Here is my first draft:

If I was to design a retrospective and forward-facing cultural history of media navigation, tracing what we were trying to do, what we built, what we scaled, and what we forgot to care for…. how would I organize it?

Era 1: Speaking Knowledge

Era 2: Printing Knowledge

Era 3: Broadcasting Knowledge

Era 4: Democratizing Knowledge

Era 5: Curating Knowledge

Era 6: Co-creating Knowledge

In each era, what would I want to map?

• how did each system affect our sense of agency, safety, and identity?

• what kinds of attention and emotional labor went unrecognized?

• what kinds of responsibility were deferred or misallocated?

On Mapping Infrastructure

A reader once pointed me toward the work of media sociologist Sandra Ball-Rokeach on Communication Infrastructure Theory, which revealed something I’d been sensing but couldn’t quite name: information without infrastructure is just noise.

Her research shows that people engage civically not when they have more information, but when they’re embedded in a “storytelling network” aka when local media, community organizations, and neighbors are all part of the same conversations. Put another way, having access to storytelling resources in a community is key to civic engagement.

In her words:

The key to building community among residents of urban areas is residents’ storytelling about their community. A complete “storytelling neighborhood” network consists of residents, community organizations, and local media that together are generating and sharing stories about the community. The most effective thing that media and community organizations can do to strengthen community is foster storytelling about and within that community. Community organizations, for instance, can use their activities as the proverbial backyard fence or front porch around which people used to gather to share stories. Local media can help spread those stories and spark new ones, perhaps drawing on community organizations as sources that can provide real news and insight.

I think journalism has always been about how we find and exchange knowledge, long before we had a name for it. I think people have always struggled with too much information and too little clarity. But what I love about her framing is that it doesn’t contend with the information products. It contends with the human experience of news, anchored in place, anchored in agency, with the ultimate goal of fostering belonging. Because belonging precedes action.

From this lens, I can’t help but think the questions we ought to ask about how we’ll navigate the media era ahead of us are pretty similar to the questions humans have always had to navigate in previous ones.

If you would frame it differently, I’d love to know. If you’re an expert in any of these eras or questions and want to help me explore them, also let me know!

In the meantime, I’ll be reading.

Happy Friday,

Jihii

A few days ago, I found myself sitting in a daze at baggage claim at SFO after a very early morning flight home. As I sat on a bench with my toddler, grateful for coffee I’d grabbed after deplaning and sharing an egg sandwich with him, I couldn’t help but notice all the people… taking care of their bodies.

Yes, we were all waiting for our bags, but we were also using the bathroom, getting water, stretching. Kids were running around after being stuck in seats for long hours. Dogs that had been in carriers were stretching their legs, waiting to go potty.

It felt as though I could see everyone more clearly because my own body experiences flights differently now that I have to regulate both myself and a tiny human during travel, and the relief of a quick stretch or sit or snack has become tremendous.

When you notice we all have bodies, the distinctions between us—our jobs, our genders, our outfits, our ages, our vibes—disappear. It’s funny how we build entire identities around everything except this most basic fact.

And then there are those of us who spend most of our lives living in our heads, worshipping and exchanging the insights generated within our brains as wiser than anything that comes from the rest of our body. But that’s not true, is it?

One of the reasons I’ve been noticing bodies so much lately is because of feedback I recently received on a memoir I’m working on: that my body is missing from the story.

Without giving too much away, it’s a memoir that explores the idea of waiting and how much periods of waiting can change us. And yet, while I suppose it is very much about a body stuck in time, in my first draft, I wrote very little about my body.

As I’ve been going through the manuscript and challenging myself to insert my body—how did I feel in that scene? where was it located in my body?—I’m learning that the body is the specificity that makes a human experience universal. But wow, is it hard to write about. Actually placing my physical self back into my memories is… unlike any other experience I’ve ever had.

So today, I thought I’d share a few books that have helped immensely with this process.

For those who want to observe our bodies differently:

What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World - An invitation to rethink how we interact with the built world through a series of stories from the lived experiences of disability and the innovations that emerged from them.

Some of my highlights:

• “Disability reveals just how unfinished the world really is, in its mundane forms and in its most aspirational politics—a contemporary reality tested most acutely under conditions of global pandemic, requiring fundamental shifts between our bodies and the world, and mutual trust despite deep uncertainty. That unfinishedness is the engine of the stories I report in this book—disabled people with their design experiences at the creative heart of adaptation, people in the active work of building and rebuilding their worlds, with insight and high stakes implicated for everyone.”

• “What is any technology doing, any tool, any implement, if not offering assistance? It is the very nature of all of our stuff to give us help. Think now of all the ordinary objects that extend a body at any point in the course of a day: eyeglasses, knife and fork or chopsticks, perhaps a walking stick for hikes or a plastic arm that can throw a ball for a dog. Consider the infinite extensions and outsourcing of tasks that happen via mobile phone, whether augmented by “smarts” or not. Open your kitchen catch-all junk drawer: paper clips, toothpicks, elastic bands, pushpins. These are the commonplace prosthetics and assistive technologies that are at home in the world with all our many bodies. Tools for holding the world intact when it threatens to fall apart in a mess—tools for reaching, bracing, connecting, the low-tech and the high-tech kind, together.”

• “There’s a reason historians locate some key origins of human civilizations in the periods where deliberate tool use is evident. The stuff we use between our bodies and the natural or built world—these augmentations are how humans organize and get life done.”

For those who want to be better in touch with their own body’s emotional experiences:

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk - Pretty much the foundational text on how trauma lives in the body and how we can process it through embodied practices.

Some of my highlights:

• “For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”

• “The challenge is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened but learning how to gain mastery over one’s internal sensations and emotions. Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recovery.”

• “If you have a comfortable connection with your inner sensations—if you can trust them to give you accurate information—you will feel in charge of your body, your feelings, and your self.”

For those nurturing little bodies:

Brain-Body Parenting by Mona Delahooke - Probably the best parenting book out there right now, which helps explain how to nurture a child’s mind-body connection, rather than managing their behaviors.

Some of my highlights:

• “The only way infants communicate is through their bodies. Understanding the “bottom-up” (or “body-up”) experiences that precede the development of the child’s thinking and formation of concepts gave me a better way to understand children at all stages of development… it’s essential to help a child calm down—to regulate the body—before talking, reasoning, or offering incentives can succeed. More importantly, they based their model on the idea that the only way that humans successfully regulate their bodies is through attuned, loving, and safe relationships.”

• “Children with vulnerable platforms are prone to being vigilant, worried, and disagreeable as well as yelling, crying, having a tantrum, running away, striking out, or even shutting down. Humans are not always in intentional control of our behaviors—children aren’t necessarily consciously choosing these behaviors. Rather, many reactions and behaviors serve to protect the child from a deeply and subconsciously felt sense of unease or threat. Here’s a remarkable insight: We can understand a child’s level of sturdiness or vulnerability by tracking what’s called allostasis, the process by which we maintain stability in our bodies.”

• “Although we are not always aware of our body’s metabolic budget, everything we experience, including our feelings and actions, becomes deposits or withdrawals in our body budget. A hug, a good night’s sleep, playing with friends, and a healthy meal: All of these are deposits. Then there are withdrawals: things like forgetting to eat meals or drink enough fluids, being deprived of deep sleep, or being isolated or ignored…Our best parenting decisions aren’t focused simply on our child’s behaviors or thoughts but rather on our child’s body and the unique way each child continually processes, interprets, and experiences their world.”

• “What I have learned from these scientists and therapists formed this book’s core message: that regulation in a child’s physical body supports healthy relationships and loving interactions, in turn building the infrastructure that eventually enables the child to use reasoning, concepts, and thinking to flexibly manage life’s challenges. With this understanding of the two-way communication between the brain and body, I shifted my practice from focusing on eliminating children’s disruptive behaviors to understanding them as the body’s way of communicating its needs.”

Happy Friday,

Jihii

I recently binged a Netflix series called Wayward about a school in Vermont for troubled teenagers. The premise of the school [spoiler]: a small town has collectively decided not to have children until they can solve intergenerational trauma. Instead, they pour all their resources into caring for the kids at this residential school. The arc of the show is an investigation unpacking all that goes wrong in that process.

But the premise—pressing pause on birth in order to repair—really got me thinking.

We have so much language now for intergenerational trauma—how patterns of pain and poor health get passed down through families. But what about intergenerational wellness? What about all the invisible work we do every day that actually builds health and resilience and joy across generations?

The lesson I’m taking into this year

This week, I turned 36 and in doing so, I’ve been reflecting on my own experience of these very things—what work was done (and by whom) to ensure I could enter into adulthood feeling well, and what things am I doing to ensure that continues into older adulthood. And by the same token, in this new year, what more can I do for the people around me—for the generations before and after me?

The parenting piece of this feels easy to articulate because I’ve spent most of my 35th year reflecting on it:

Unlike the fictional town in Wayward, most of us are doing the work of healing intergenerational trauma while actively raising children and caring for aging parents. We’re not waiting until we’re perfectly healed to have families—we’re learning to create wellness in real time, in the messy middle of actual life. Put simply: I’m in a season of learning how to build while building. I don’t see this as just “parenting” or “working” or “maintaining a household.” It’s a practice of designing conditions that will allow multiple generations to flourish.

But the part I want to expand and understand has to do with something else:

As my personal life has expanded to include more and more parents, and I can finally see the differences in the things we talk about in different spaces. Parents talk about care constantly. But with other friends, it’s often a sidebar, an emergency, a personal issue, or, in acute political moments, an effort to unite to organize.

Deep conversations and well-informed choices about wellness, navigating a scary world, solidifying foundations, and planning care for emergencies don’t need to be relegated to parenting—they could be a standard of adult social engagement. We don’t need biological children to invest in the generations before and after us. This is something I had to learn the hard way—through a long, unpredictable fertility journey that forced me to ask: if I can’t control how or when I mother, how else might I care?

Here’s what I believe so far:

Intergenerational wellness flows in multiple directions at once—it includes the work of parenting, sure, but also the work of caring for neighbors, communities, elders, mentoring younger people, organizing and creating systems and culture that will outlast us.

In other words, intergenerational wellness has an invisible architecture: the daily acts of care, creativity, and connection that compound over time to create more resilient, loving, capable communities—it’s not just emotional labor, it’s design work (that we never learn). And it requires us to hold vision, practicality, creativity and patience, all at once.

In a world where the choice to birth children has become wrought with anxiety, I can’t help but wonder: What if we looked at ambivalence about parenting differently? What if the choice is actually: what kind of care work do you want to do, even if it’s not parenting? And even as a parent, once the fog lifts, even a little, why not push ourselves to ask each other: what kind of care work do you want to do for people that aren’t your kids?

A Birthday Reflection Exercise

Here is an exercise I did privately this week to help myself see and value this work—because language helps me. Doing it helped me realize just how much invisible care I actually practiced this year.

Prompt: What did I actually do this year that contributes to intergenerational wellness? And what might the long-term impact of those actions be?

For each category, I wrote down a few things. Here are some questions you might consider as you do yours:

• Family & Relationships: Did you navigate a difficult conversation with compassion? Support someone through a major transition? Establish a boundary that protects everyone’s wellbeing? Orchestrate gatherings that strengthen bonds? Model healthy conflict resolution? Care for aging or tiny relatives?

  Examples of long-term impact: Teaching emotional skills, creating family stability, building trust, helping someone survive, showing that relationships can weather hard things together

• Community & Connection Did you mentor someone? Organize mutual aid? Strengthen neighborhood bonds? Show up consistently for people in your life? Create spaces for gathering? Build networks of support?

  Examples of long-term impact: Weaving safety nets, expanding what people think is possible, creating belonging, strengthening collective resilience

• Creative & Cultural Work Did you make art that tells important stories? Write about difficult experiences? Preserve traditions or skills? Create resources that help others? Organize for justice? Shape culture in small ways?
  Examples of long-term impact: Expanding imagination, providing language for hard things, preserving wisdom, creating more just systems for future generations

• Healing & Growth Did you do therapy? Break a harmful pattern? Learn to regulate your nervous system? Develop self-compassion? Model that healing is possible? Create conditions for your own flourishing?

  Long-term impact: Breaking cycles before they reach the next generation, modeling that wellness is worth investing in, building emotional and physical resilience

• Systems & Sustainability Did you establish routines that create stability? Build financial security? Create sustainable work arrangements? Make environmental choices? Design household systems that reduce friction?

  Long-term impact: Creating conditions for sustained wellbeing, reducing stress for everyone, preserving resources and environments for future generations

• Knowledge & Skill Transmission Did you teach someone something important? Share hard-won wisdom? Pass down stories? Develop expertise you can offer others? Document experiences that might help people?

  Long-term impact: Ensuring valuable knowledge doesn’t die with one generation, helping others navigate similar challenges, building collective competence

After doing the exercise myself, I felt compelled to write to friends I haven’t had the chance to connect with in years and say—this is what I’ve been doing this year, this is how it’s really going.

If you feel that way too when you’re done, write to them.

Maybe this is the missing component of adult life: learning to see how our daily choices and systems create the conditions for long-term wellness across generations. And talking to each other about it.

Happy Sunday,

Jihii

A friend sent me a message a few weeks ago, after Charlie Kirk was killed. It took me far too long to respond because I didn’t have the words. But then, last night, I was asked to speak with a small group of undergraduate journalists and everything started to become clear.

She and I met in journalism school and our careers took very different paths—she works for a large conservative media organization, I freelance in the media/care/research worlds. But we’ve always deeply bonded over our commitment to openness and tolerance and need for spiritual and faith traditions to ground us.

My response to her came out as this letter, and I’m sharing it with you in case you, too, ever find yourself struggling with ambiguity or anger.

She wrote:

So much emotion this week and I’m doing some soul searching. In the middle on politics, crippled, unable to choose a side. There’s things that are morally right on both sides. I always thought my moderation was a gift, but is it? Why, when I tell people I don’t associate with a political party, do people look at me like I’m morally bankrupt? Why are we letting politics dictate morality anyway?

In the middle on religion, I’m Christian but have my own version of faith. Not a practicing Catholic…I feel like everyone just has faith in what they believe. Why can’t I just commit to something?

In the middle on having a kid, totally cannot decide. I asked God to show me some clarity on all three of these. I have to think I was made the way I am for a reason, but I am mad at myself for being tolerant this week when people I know relished that Kirk was dead and I heard them out and didn’t retort. I’m just entirely too tolerant. Is that possible?

Hi,

I’m sorry it took me forever to respond. I’ve been thinking over and over about what you said, and then, last night, something clicked.

As you know, I also am a person who’s always in the middle, who’s always willing to look at all sides of something, and I actually do see that as a skill. I feel like there’s a very tiny minority of people in the world who are willing to practice that skill. Journalism, in its theoretical form, teaches us to do that—but the industry itself doesn’t reward it.

Last night, I gave a workshop for undergraduates at my alma mater who are working on reviving the student paper (kind of my baby when I was in college). Talking to them forced me to go back to my own roots and ask: why was I interested in journalism in the first place? What is the humanistic lens on what journalism, as a practice, could do?

In my notes, I found a quote I had saved from Lee Bollinger (former president of Columbia) that goes like this:

The most valued trait is having the imaginative range and the mental courage to explore the full complexity of the subject. To set aside one’s preexisting beliefs, to hold simultaneously in one’s mind multiple angles of seeing things, to allow yourself to believe another point of view as you consider it… That kind of extreme openness of intellect is exceedingly difficult to master, and, in a profound sense, we never do. Because it runs counter to many of our natural impulses, it requires both daily exercise and a community of people dedicated to keeping it alive.

This feels like what you’re describing, doesn’t it? I think it affirms for me that being in the middle isn’t weakness: it’s a practice. Most people take sides because it’s easier—our bodies are wired to want to belong in order to feel safe, and the world rewards big emotions.

There are, however, some things, or maybe just one thing, that I feel like I can always take a clear stand on—and that is affirming and respecting life. This comes from my own Buddhist tradition as you know—I absolutely don’t believe it’s ever okay to take someone’s life. You can disagree, you can even hate someone, but you cannot erase their humanity. I guess that is where I’m at right now.

Other thoughts that have been floating through my mind this month, if you find them helpful:

1. Your note made me think again about media critic Jay Rosen’s “View from Nowhere,” which I’ll excerpt here:

[Philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title] says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.”

But there are limits to this motion. We can’t transcend all our starting points. No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Our ability to step back and the fact that there are limits to it– both are real. And realism demands that we acknowledge both.

It makes me wonder, when you’re constantly pressured to have a reaction, to choose an opinion, and you try to be “neutral” to resist that, what are you actually choosing, if no one can be truly viewless?.

To take it further—Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View from Somewhere argues that objectivity has often been used to exclude—that journalists from marginalized positions were forced to perform “neutrality” in order to be legible, while those in dominant positions could pretend their view was universal.

Here’s the solution he offers on this podcast:

BROOKE GLADSTONE So now that we’ve established that neutrality and objectivity can’t be the principles at the heart of our journalism. For one thing, they’re mythical. What should we place there instead?

LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE Curiosity, for me is at the core, that’s like the center, the beating heart of what a journalist does. Asks questions and stays open. And this is where I see the gift that activism can give journalism is the commitment to justice and accountability, and the gift that journalism can give activism is a commitment to curiosity. And that’s why it’s such a beautiful thing to bring the two together.

In other words, I think it takes work to stay neutral. It takes curiosity and imaginative empathy and patience and being willing to take a breath to understand why our neighbors feel the way they do and do the things they do. And while I have a hard line against violence, it doesn’t mean I will write off my own curiosity about why people do bad things and why other people react to those things in the way they do. I think you feel the same?

2. It also reminded me of this piece I tried to write a few years ago on consuming the news in times of crisis and how amplifying content or offering comment are not our only options when reacting to crisis.

What I still find relevant here is this invitation to zoom out, from Japanese philosopher Tsunesaburo Makiguchi:

In his A Geography of Human Life, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi argued that every individual requires three different types of self-awareness: a local awareness, of being rooted in one’s own community; a national awareness, as belonging to a nation; and an awareness of being a citizen of the world.

In other words, by retaining a strong foothold in our awareness as members of a local community and citizens of the world to avoid being swept away by the evils of nationalism, we can deepen mutual understanding as good neighbors and good world citizens at the level of both the community and international society and enjoy shared prosperity.

Makiguchi advocated broadening and elevating our outlook by alternately looking at the world from the perspective of the local community, and seeing the local community from the perspective of the world.

Which is hard. But what if looking at all three levels is the only way to locate ourselves?

3. A few days after Kirk was killed, I read this article with some Buddhist friends and it clicked into place for me: What if committing to the act of generating hope is actually a way to take a stance? If outrage gives the illusion of moral clarity, hope requires us to sit in the tension.

Ikeda writes:

There may be times when, confronted by cruel reality, we verge on losing all hope. If we cannot feel hope, it is time to create some. We can do this by digging deeper within, searching for even a small glimmer of light, for the possibility of a way to begin to break through the impasse before us.

In this sense, I think your capacity for tolerance isn’t a failure, it’s part of the work of making hope. But how do you actually sustain that posture—day after day, conversation after conversation? For me, the answer has always come back to Ikeda’s writing on dialogue: “When we stop looking at ourselves, when we no longer question ourselves, we become self-righteous and dogmatic. Our discourse becomes a one-way street: we cannot hear others, and real dialogue becomes impossible. The kind of dialogue that can create peace with others must start with an open and earnest inner dialogue.”

4. Which brings me back to Sam’s words [Sam Freedman was our reporting professor] in Letters to a Young Journalist that I will always love:

   To be a moral journalist, you must retain your humanity. You might think I’m stating the obvious. Yet the ideal of objectivity calls for journalists to be detached from those whom they cover… human beings cannot help but be subjective… Journalism is about channeling emotions, not turning them off. Part of your challenge will be to learn and master what you don’t know rather than to hide behind your ignorance… It takes time to acquire expertise. It takes time to hear out the innermost truth of individuals.

In other words, I think holding complexity is a discipline. It requires daily exercise, and companions to practice with. And if I’ve learned anything from Buddhism, from journalism, from the people I love who sit in their own contradictions with courage, it’s that we need people willing to hold space for the full complexity of being human.

In short, I think you’re practicing journalism as a life skill, not a profession. For the questions about violence, I do think choosing a belief matters. But for almost everything else, sometimes, saying “I’m not sure what I think, I’m still listening,” is the choice that opens paths.

TL;DR — I think you’re being brave.

Jihii

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about actions that don’t yield immediate results, but are worth investing in for the future.

Small, personal examples: saving a book for a season it will land deeper; training my anxious dog now, to help us navigate the toddler years ahead; nurturing new skills for work I’ve not quite imagined yet; gaining literacy in a new way of thinking before actually knowing how to apply it.

I find this kind of work deeply satisfying. Taking the long-view is rarely gratifying in the short-term. It never gets applause or recognition. But it’s foundational in the same way a building cannot come up without a solid base.

Yet training ourselves to invest in longview, culture-shifting work can feel very difficult in a productivity-focused work culture. When I feel alone with the questions in my head, I remind myself there are structural reasons for this isolation: knowledge work outside academia has no professional infrastructure beyond publishing pathways that serve elite audiences; I've spent three decades being conditioned to achieve and demonstrate measurable growth; invisible work that happens in private is hard to discuss or find models for; we lack vocabulary for valuing care or creative work, and without words, it's hard to sustain motivation.

So I've been collecting words to build my own vocabulary. Today, I want to share a question that I have found the most helpful so far: What if certain kinds of work feel unsupported because we've miscategorized them?

Looking for Miscategorization

Miscategorization shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Beyond personal and cultural barriers, there's a larger reason why long-view work feels so unsupported: We've systematically reframed certain forms of care and knowledge-building as private choices or individual burdens, rather than shared public responsibilities. Here are two examples.

Example 1: Social Reproduction

I first came across the term "social reproduction" when I was introduced to feminist economics through my work with IAFFE. I was captivated by the idea that the work of sustaining daily life is also what keeps society running—so much so that I ended up taking a course on it at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. The more I learned, the more I realized why feminist economists rely on this concept to explain why so much essential work ends up invisible and undervalued.

In a recent New York Times piece, Emma Goldberg discusses the work of economist Nancy Folbre, who argues that our so-called "fertility crisis" isn't about selfishness or cultural decline—it's the direct result of a society that refuses to support caregiving.

She writes:

“There’s a point at which, if you just keep ratcheting up the price of doing something that’s socially valuable, if you just keep ratcheting up the private costs, eventually people give up,” Dr. Folbre said. Today’s plummeting fertility rates suggest that potential parents are doing just that.

Economists have long had a response to that precise problem: When private costs lead to underproduction of something with social value — solar panels or electric cars, for example — the government helps pay for their production with subsidies, tax credits or other incentives.

Could we really do that for parenting? The scale of the problem means that it wouldn’t be cheap. But, Dr. Folbre and other experts argue, it would be worth it.

In other words, the problem isn't declining birth rates. The problem is that society has offloaded the work of reproduction onto individual families while stripping away the infrastructure that makes that work sustainable.

Example 2: Civic Infrastructure

Reading this immediately reminded me of a 2021 piece by Darryl Holliday, who makes what I think is a parallel argument about journalism: Local news isn't dying because people don't want information—it's dying because we've treated journalism as a private market good rather than civic infrastructure.

In his words:

For decades, we have invested so much time, money, and hope in the idea that a small group of individuals who are experts in their field can solve the enormous, complex challenge of building and supporting an informed citizenry. But the longer I’ve worked in this industry—and the more I’ve grappled with the core questions of what and who makes journalism in the public interest—the more clearly I’ve seen the error of this thinking.

This is not a problem that journalists can solve on our own. The best response to the current crisis in journalism is to get more people involved, at a level at which everyone is willing and able to participate. Not just as news consumers, but as distributors and—most important—producers of local information.

Just as we wouldn't expect roads or water systems to be profitable, we shouldn't expect information systems to sustain themselves through market forces alone. Yet we've organized journalism around advertising revenue and subscription models, rather than recognizing it as essential democratic infrastructure.

The Pattern

These examples sit side-by-side in my brain because they reveal the same destructive pattern: essential forms of care have been reframed as private goods when they should be public goods—perhaps even shared civic responsibilities.

What strikes me is how many other fields this extends to: environmental stewardship, education, elder care, mental health support, even media literacy… all treated as individual responsibilities rather than collective investments.

The Personal as Infrastructure

Living in this space between institutional work and private life (doing full-time care and knowledge work), I'm starting to feel, viscerally, that when we treat care work as private burden rather than public good, we erode the foundations of collective life.

Framing things this way has helped me understand why I feel so committed to my own long-view posture in daily life. The choice to spend time, in small ways, on the far future of my personal life feels akin to investing in stronger public infrastructure. Training my anxious dog isn't just about my family's convenience—it's about creating a household capable of modeling calm for a small person who will eventually move through the world. Gaining literacy in new ways of thinking isn't just professional development—it's preparation for cultural shifts I can sense but can't yet name and will inevitably have to guide young ones through.

These investments feel isolating precisely because we've been taught to see them as private choices rather than contributions to shared infrastructure. But what if we understood them differently? What if the work we do in private to prepare for uncertain futures is actually a form of civic engagement? What if building the muscle for collective long-term wellness in private can help me bring it to bigger public work when the time is right?

I'm still working through the implications of this, so I’ll leave you with a question: Where in your life are you investing in something that won't yield immediate results—but matters anyway?

Happy Tuesday,

Jihii

As we approach fall, I've been slowly transitioning to a work schedule that feels like my old life—full days of work. But explaining to myself what that work is has been surprisingly hard. Consider this letter the story of how I designed myself a compass.

Before having a child, I identified as a journalist who sometimes did other writing on the side. But after taking over a year off to be with my son, I realized I've somehow emerged as a writer, who sometimes does journalism. It might seem like the smallest shift, but in it, I’ve fallen into a fascinating portal.

For a long time I've wanted to see a map of the grayness between the things we see as life and the things we see as work. How did crucial parts of being human become "jobs"? In an age when technology is upending all that we thought was "work," it seems like one of the most important things to understand. I've come to think of this space as the gray zone between practice and profession.

When a shared human practice—something that exists in homes and communities—becomes a profession, what do we gain and lose along the way?

The Gifts of Professionalization

For those who have been reading for a while, you know that I've been wrestling with these questions for a while now—reimagining journalism as art rather than news, approaching creative work through seasons rather than daily habits, and designing work around what matters when you're a parent.

And while I’m certainly not arguing that everything should become a job or that all practices need to be paid, I am very interested in professionalization as a design tool—a way to build structures, training, rhythms, and growth paths around work that matters. Because, fortunately or unfortunately, the language of work helps.

If, for instance, we viewed home as a care studio, rather than just a backdrop to life, we’d have the language and tools to invest in it well and value it as a system whose job is to produce work that affects other systems: cultural, emotional, economic, even political.

On a personal note, it’s been through intentional design—building community, investing in mentorship, defining projects—that writing has moved from the margins of my life into the center of my work. In other words, through structured investment, I’ve moved what used to be a personal practice into a profession.

And while unpaid, the same is true of caregiving at home. Cooking for my son, for example, is something I’m working to “professionalize”—I want to get good enough at it that it doesn't consume my whole life, while also doing it well enough to help a small person grow. Treating it like work gives me a standard to strive for, a way to measure progress, and incentive to design systems around it.

The Costs of Professionalization

Still, the more I invest in such design, the more I find I have to check myself to avoid falling into the trappings of market thinking. When practices become professions or "industries"—a word I have come to understand as a mechanism for scaling talent and keeping certain people out of the talent pipeline—often, as much is lost as is gained.

Here are three examples of how this plays out:

Example 1: Nursing

I'm currently reading the book Taking Care, a history of the nursing industry, in which journalist Sara DiGregorio documents how nursing went from a ubiquitous practice—home, family and spiritually based—to a profession. With its milestones, such as the formation of American Medical Association, came gates. The rise of physicians came hand in hand with the exclusion (and even persecution) of unofficial medical providers, like midwives and lay practitioners who had been providing care for centuries. While professionalization brought important standards and recognition, it also meant that many traditional ways of caring were suddenly deemed illegitimate.

I find nursing is particularly interesting because the practice of nursing is something that has always existed and can never really go away. DiGregorio does a beautiful job showing the role nursing played in the development of civilization—whether or not you heard about them, nurses were always there.

Example 2: Journalism

For very longtime readers, you know that this practice vs. profession tension is something I’ve struggled with in journalism, a field where I've worked on both sides of the professional divide. As I've written before, while the boundaries surrounding 'professional' journalism are clear in the eyes of its producers and gatekeepers, the same is never really true for news consumers. And while, technically, journalism is a profession with institutions, ethical codes, and credentialed pathways, in reality, we all practice journalism when we share news in our circles, publish newsletters, or investigate something ourselves. Great investigations have come from so-called "non-journalists," and harmful reporting is produced by professional ones all the time.

Professionalization here has created important scaffolding—but it has also drawn boundaries that are, at best, porous and, at worst, exclusionary without actually ensuring quality.

Example 3: Home

Home is the trickiest gray zone, because it is perhaps the only place one gets to escape the trappings of productivity culture if one chooses to. Cooking for pleasure—and most other hobbies—is something I don't actually want to professionalize because it is filled with art, leisure, improvisation. As much as I want to elevate care work appropriately, at home, efficiency isn’t needed everywhere. And as I experiment with my own systems design in my home, I have to keep reminding myself of this. Sometimes, moving on a whim is the point.

Thus, the tricky tension of the gray zone: professionalization can give us structure and dignity, but it can also cut off possibilities, erase variations and divide people.

And so, I felt in need of a map.

A Map of the Continuum between Practice and Profession

Here's how I've been trying to sketch the gray zone between practice and profession. Think of it as a spectrum with three columns: on the left, practices; in the middle, the gray zone; on the right, professions.

Caring for someone who's sick at home is a practice. The gray zone is becoming a full-time caregiver to a dependent parent or working as an uncredentialed night nurse using years of family experience. On the profession side, you have nursing as an industry—registered nurses deployed in hospitals, part of a large health infrastructure.

Journaling or writing personal essays is a practice. The gray zone is something like drafting a book with editors or accountability structures. On the profession side, you have published authors with contracts, deadlines, and an industry around their work.

Sharing news with family or in a personal newsletter is a practice. The gray zone is independent newsletters or grassroots investigations that look like journalism but live outside institutions. On the profession side, you have newsroom journalism—codified and gatekept.

Cooking for pleasure is a practice. Cooking for a child—where efficiency, growth, and health matter—is a gray zone. On the profession side, you have chefs, nutritionists, or licensed meal service providers.

What I like about mapping it this way is that it opens up a view to consider the gains and the losses. The left column is improvisational, cultural, varied. The right column is structured, designed, scaffolded. And the middle is where the tension lives: where practices become work (sometimes by choice, often not), and where we have to decide what we want to keep soft and what we want to professionalize (again, by professionalize I mean invest in good design and systems).

If you want to play with your own gray zone map, here is an exercise you can try.

A Design Tool: The Gray Zone Map

Draw the Map: Try the map yourself. What are some things in your life that you do professionally? What is the practice version of them? What do you do as a personal practice? What's the professional version of it?

How you can use it:

• To reflect on your priorities: I imagine for career changers or retirees, you could have entered through the other door, too. What did you used to do professionally that you now continue as a practice, because you care to?
  For example, I used to do journalism professionally, but I now see it as a personal practice—I’m very diligent about information research and sharing and approach more decisions through journalistic research. I used to write as a personal practice, but I now treat it as my profession; I invest in training, community, and structured practice.

• To understand the power/access structures around your work: How does choosing to push in one or the other direction change who's in the room, who gets paid, and what counts as "expertise"?

• To redesign your professional work: If you could redesign something you do professionally by borrowing from its practice version, how might you do that?
  For example, in an interview, DiGregorio shares that if she could redesign nursing based on the inherent strengths of the actual practice of nursing, she would deploy many more nurses into community spaces as public health educators and workers because their work could be a tremendous investment into preventative healthcare. Why should we meet nurses only in the hospital rooms after we are sick when they are master listeners and health educators?

I'm still figuring out where I want to draw these lines in my own life, but mapping it this way has helped me see that maybe the question isn't whether something should be work or not but which direction I’m moving in and why.

Related Reading/Listening

I'm currently working through a few histories that are helping me understand these gray zones. Here is the one I mentioned and another I recommend:

Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World by Sarah DiGregorio — A cultural history of nursing that chronicles how caregivers at the intersection of health care and community have always worked to change the world, often invisibly. DiGregorio combines personal narratives with nuanced reporting to examine both the successes and failures of how we care for each other. Here is a podcast with the author.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen — A sweeping global history of work from hunter-gatherers to the present day. Lucassen examines how humanity organizes labor across households, tribes, cities, and states, exploring the constant tension between cooperation and subordination at work. Here is a podcast with the author.

Happy Monday,
Jihii

This Month's Pick:

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess

Why this, why now?:

In a world that feels like it's on the precipice of irrevocable culture change due to emerging tech, Hess does something I have found myself craving… she holds up a pretty clear mirror to our most intimate digital habits. The soothing allure of our phones during vulnerable moments, the intensity with which we can experience a "what if" just because we can go down a rabbit hole, the way online norms shout louder than in-person wisdom.

What question does this help us ask?

Are we truly aware of the impact that technology has on our psyche as parents or parents-to-be (or honestly, really anyone who has ever brought health or wellness questions to the internet)?

How it's structured:

From the publisher:

As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own.

In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess's baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable—more than ever—to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession.

As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children.

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, "freebirth" influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology's distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son's early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

How to read it:

Format: Hess has a compelling reading voice so I recommend the audiobook (it's on Spotify Premium).

Vibe: It's not fast or riveting, and if you are a pregnant person or have a young child, it may hit a little too close to home. So I would suggest pacing yourself for parts of the day when you feel like you want to do some background thinking on a topic that is very familiar, but someone is putting into clear words and offering reported history behind.

Where I am in the process:

I'm a little over halfway through the book and I also participated in a book discussion with some local moms about it last week.

My biggest insight so far: the internet feels much louder when you don't have IRL people to talk about these things with. The same info coming from a person in real life is not as loud as it is on social media. Maybe our best chance at navigating digital life is to invest better in real life?

Longer notes in progress in The Library.

Happy Sunday,

Jihii

This week called for metabolizing what I feel about the things I’m studying and experiencing: how and why our relationships with care are just so hard to get right, and how wonderfully padded with ease this life of ups and downs can feel when supported by trusted systems and relationships.

So I wrote a poem.

No One Told Me This Was Work
(what invisible labor feels like)

No one told me this this was work:

No one told me that
making three meals a day and
finding the language
to express how something feels
without fighting, flighting, or freezing
is a day's work.

No one told me that
staying in touch
is work.

No one told me that
finding a way to connect over distance
(especially the worst kinds,
like age and life stage and closed hearts)
is difficult work.

No one told me that
developing trust in yourself
is work.

No one told me that
keeping a place
clean and safe
while also
staying well
in your body
is work.

No one told me that
caring for both
yourself
and an environment
at the same time
is a complicated negotiation
of competing priorities.

No one told me that
navigating trade-offs
is work.

No one told me that
keeping your innermost self
alive and fed
while tending
other fragile hearts
is work.

No one told me that
holding your past,
your present,
and an unknown future
all at once
without letting any of them
become a landslide
is work.

No one told me that
feeling safe
takes work.

No one told me that
learning someone
well enough
to offer them
just what they need
takes time,
patience,
and design.

No one told me that
design
is work.

No one taught me how to work:

No one taught me
how to build a calendar
that makes everyone feel seen.

No one taught me
how to make a morning
become the engine
for a good day.

No one taught me
how to track multiple,
overlapping moods.

No one taught me
how to navigate
the landmines between
want and need and must.

No one taught me
how to create
a micro-culture
that gives
more than it takes.

No one taught me
how to share space
with people
who sometimes
hurt you
without meaning to.

No one taught me
how to receive criticism
as information,
not insult
until I realized:
it was work.

If care were a job,
we might be able to say:

I'm still learning:
I'm good at this part,
I need help with that one.

I need a break:
the scope of my work outgrew
what I have capacity for at this moment.

I'm proud of how that went:
it took long hours to get here,
I learned so much along the way.

I didn't do so well this season:
I want to do my best the next—
can you help me figure out how?

If care were a job,
I might have the guts to say:

She is not kind,
she is working.

He is not talented,
he did his best.

She is not maternal,
she is offering presence.

They are not capable,
they are trying.

He is not steady,
he has trained himself
to hold the weight.

They are not selfless,
they are practicing
the skill of restraint.

She does not yet love you,
but she wants for
you to feel loved.

We are not naturals,
we are working.

We are not confident,
we are experts
in self-doubt.

We are not healed,
we are creating spaces
that hurt less.

We are not running from tradition,
we are architects
collecting data
on invisible infrastructure
so we can build:
our work.

To all those who worked before me:

Did you know that
you constructed
an impossible result
with no training
and no words?

Did you know that
when you tried
to break the norms
around you
you were defining a field of work?

Did you know that
even when
you were not so good
at your job,
your best efforts
became muscle memory
for those who received your care?

Did you know that
even your worst efforts
became valuable data
for those of us
getting ready
to work?

To all those working alongside me:

I hope we can use our words to see our work.
I hope we can feel it in our bodies as work.
Not grief or burden
from which there is little respite,
but work.

Because work:
work demands support
work demands training
work demands intention
work demands a team
work demands mistakes
work demands practice
work demands patience
work demands failure
work demands innovation
work demands fulfillment

And workers demand grace.

I hope in my work:

to make many new mistakes,
because new mistakes are only possible
when old ones are seen
as someone trying their best
to work.

Happy Monday,

Jihii

It’s almost July! This month’s craft note is about figuring out how to write the way your mind works.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a brilliant residency for writers working on fact-based stories (memoir, historical fiction, nonfiction). As I tried to immerse myself in my project, which required developing scene and emotion in short fragments—something new to me—I found my brain resisting. Stray ideas kept sparking in the background, with nowhere to land.

It left me thinking about what it means to write in a way that actually matches how your mind works—not how you wish it worked but how it really moves through a day. I read a lot about writing, but I can’t always see myself in the ways writers teach. I’m not good at shutting off my curiosity and focusing on the page when I need to. The world tugs at me, and I follow threads, even when I know I should be stitching something closed.

So, naturally, I started thinking about my tools.

My own education in writing has been half intuitive—shaped by a lifetime of private journals—and half journalistic, shaped by training. Through this blend of “journaling” and “journalism,” I have always been drawn to subjects that feel deeply personal, specific, and somewhat mundane. And in them, I’ve inevitably realized: when it comes to the stuff of life, we all have the same secrets.

But as I try to figure out my voice as a writer afresh, from the remnants of these legacies, I realize that perhaps I have multiple, separate processes going on that get a bit too tangled together. And perhaps they each need a little bit of space.

Your Mind Has a Shape

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that everyone’s mind has a kind of native shape. I can hear it when someone talks.

Some of us think in outlines, some in webs. Some of us need to lean into stream of consciousness to even figure out what it is we are saying. Some of us need silence, solitude and blank pages to summon the courage to let something private out. Some of us need an audience, or the words just won’t come. And some of us think best mid-sentence (🙋🏻‍♀️).

Still, we try to force ourselves to write in a way that works for someone else’s mind. We borrow habits that look productive from the outside, even if they don’t feel natural inside. What if, instead, your system—your notebooks, your structure, your rhythms—could evolve with your mind, instead of against it?

Diagrammatic Thinking

For example, in the last year, my writing system has had to grow up with me—not just to meet a life of interruption and short bursts of time, but to match the way my brain actually works—like a giant, never-offline, extremely organized filing system.

I can’t help but encounter new information—be it an interesting person, a book, a piece of art, a bit of news, or an idea that emerged on a walk and wanting to immediately file it alongside everything else that is relevant to that constellation in my mind.

Some people collect photos, some scrapbook, some collect gems, some curate art. I curate information. It’s just how I work.

For a long time, I thought I might be procrastinating “real work,” because of this compulsion. But eventually, I realized: this is writing.

Honoring the shape of my attention, honors the way I learn, which honors the way I write.

For a few years, I worked at a design studio housed in a library, and the things we played with in those spaces were fascinating to me. Curation + Technology = my happy place.

But at home, I needed a system that could work.

Countless people have recommended tools and frameworks that allow me to map things the way I think—Obsidian, the Para Method, Zettelkasten—which all have resonated at different times but also felt a bit too structured for the organic (moody?) way I work.

I like things to feel hand-made, even when using tech to build them.

In other words, the process of writing for me is not pulling files but continually designing a map. In fact, I like writing, the actual act of putting words to thoughts less than I like research and idea development in a curatorial way.

Other Shapes Your Mind Might Take

Not everyone thinks in constellations or builds systems like filing cabinets. You might be someone who:

• Writes best in blank spaces—one page at a time, one thought per day

• Relies on rhythm over logic—sound, cadence, and repetition are your entry points

• Needs linearity and structure—outlines soothe your nervous system

• Draws first, then writes—sketches, mind maps, or visual moodboards

• Thinks by talking—your best sentences come through conversation

None of these are better or worse. But each one needs a different kind of support. You might even need a few. And they will certainly change over time.

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ve seen this unfold in real time. Back in Issue #14, I wrote about clusters, constellations, and what it feels like to be inside a nonlinear mind. Then, in Issue #80, I introduced the Library as a public way to trace those thoughts over time. Now, seventy-some issues later, I’m refining the system again—because I’m still learning how my mind work.

Systems are living things. They should grow as your thinking grows.

The Library and The Garden

Recently, I’ve come to understand that I need two distinct kinds of space to support my writing life.

One is open and alive with possibility—where ideas arrive half-formed, overlap, make odd connections. It borrows from the reporting process, but lives in a public notebook organized by this season’s work. This is the library.

This is how it looks this month. It’s likely to keep evolving, but for now, it works—because it allows me to build references, organize them quickly by active projects, and stay somewhat disciplined about formatting since it is public. (In private, my notebooks are absolute chaos.)

The Library

The other space is more inward. It’s a private space, connected (by Notion) to The Library, where I can begin to shape chapters or essays by tending to pieces out of order. It feels a bit like gardening.

The version I’m sharing now isn’t a final form—it’s simply what fits this season: a rhythm that matches my current life, attention, and creative metabolism. I share it not as a prescription, but as a mirror, in case you’re in the process of redesigning your own.

Inside are:

• Half-written essay fragments I’m still deciding on,

• Little pieces that might one day become chapters

• A running list of what I touched that week

It allows me to see all threads at once, but focus on one at a time.

For You: Some Prompts to Try

So, if you want to try mapping the shape of your own writing process, here are a few places to begin. You don’t have to answer everything. Just let one question lead you into the next. (Hat tip to my CM for help developing this list.)

1. What is your origin story as a writer?

Did you begin by journaling? Blogging? Reporting? Doodling in the margins? Was your writing life born in solitude or collaboration? In freedom or in form?

2. What kind of training have you received?

Formal or informal, academic or emotional. Who taught you how to write? What parts of that training still live inside you—and which ones are fading?

3. When you have a new idea, how does it arrive?

Do you hear it as a phrase? Feel it as a hunch? See it as a diagram? What do you need to catch it before it floats away?

4. When it’s time to actually write, what helps you begin?

What conditions help you enter language? A timer? A prompt? A walk? What slows you down—or speeds you up?

5. How often do you iterate your system?

Do you expect your structure to stay the same, or shift with your life? Are you designing a system for the writer you were, the writer you wish you were, or the writer you actually are?

6. What do you want to keep private? What are you ready to share?

Not everything needs to be published. But not everything needs to be hidden either. What part of your process might be ready to be seen?

These are the questions I’m holding right now as I try to understand who I am as a writer—not just in the past, but in this season, as a busy parent who thinks in constellations, and needs both a public studio and a private garden to feel whole.

However your mind works—whether it sketches, collects, repeats, or maps—if you can see it more clearly, I hope you’ll find a system that feels like you.

Happy Monday,

Jihii

Prior to getting married, our premarital counselor asked my partner and me a deceptively simple question that has never left me: What was dinnertime like in your childhood home?

The point of the exercise was to help us understand each other and our respective family cultures better, before joining forces to create a new one.

How would you answer?

When you were a child, did your family eat together at the table? On the couch in front of the TV? In shifts? Did you eat alone? In your room? Was dinner fresh? Frozen? Takeout? Canned? Cooked by a parent? A grandparent? A sibling? You?

I think the reason the question has stayed with me over all these years is because while it’s easy to box into a simple reflection on culture or class, examining a simple meal routine actually opens up insight into so much more:

• How time is structured

• How emotions move in a room

• How space is or isn’t held

• How care is distributed—or withheld

• Who holds responsibility and power

I’ve had to think about similar things in my event design or community engagement work over the years, but I totally stopped thinking about it at home. But the power part, especially now that I hold so much as a parent, is fascinating. We rarely talk about power dynamics within the home. Yet power is one of the most invisible and influential forces in any environment—whether at home, at work, or in a relationship. Our access to power often becomes the defining motivator for our choices in life, love and work. Is it possible our first site of education in power is our most overlooked?

Home as a Site of Power & Resistance

If you read last month’s essay on viewing Home as a “care studio,” consider today our first class together in the series, where we explore the design, labor, and emotion embedded in the domestic spaces that shape us. Here are some notes from Module 1: Home as a Site of Power & Resistance.

I. What do we inherit in our homes?

After renting small apartments for most of my adult life, we recently became homeowners of a 112 year old Edwardian—a complicated privilege and responsibility. In the Bay Area, old homes are part of a complex history of wealth-seeking and climate-battling. Edwardian architecture, which emerged in the early 1900s, marked a quieter, more practical response to the ornate Victorian style that preceded it. While Victorian homes—especially in San Francisco—are known for their decorative trim, turrets, and more segmented interiors, Edwardians featured simpler facades and more open layouts. Larger living and dining rooms signaled a shift toward day-to-day livability, appealing to a growing middle class navigating modern domestic life. Still, San Francisco in 1912 was a place where white homeownership was subsidized through government policy, Black families were redlined out of these neighborhoods for decades and Asian families continued to face displacement and racism. After a city-destroying 1906 earthquake, what got rebuilt and for whom was not politically neutral.

When we moved in, I couldn’t help but wonder: What was this house originally designed for? What have these walls witnessed? And what kind of home am I building inside it now, in an era of wild economic volatility, climate change and rapid technological acceleration?

Making a home, I realized, includes basic domestic chores but also tremendous cultural choices—raising a child, hosting guests, managing space—which is to make a thousand small decisions that signal who belongs, what’s safe, and how much power I’m willing to share.

II. Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) - bell hooks

I decided to pull from a few different disciplines to try to understand how home can be a site of power. At the end of this essay is a list of readings. But if you only read one, let it be bell hooks’ incredible essay, Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) from 1990.

In it, she explains, in the simultaneously nuanced and direct way only bell hooks can, how Black women carved out spaces of love, dignity, and resistance within their homes, even under the most dehumanizing conditions.

She writes:

This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. This task of making a homeplace, of making home a community of resistance, has been shared by black women globally, especially black women in white supremacist societies.

My favorite part of the essay is a section in which she takes to task Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative, specifically a section in which he tells the story of his birth and how he never got to see his mother, an enslaved black woman who had to work 12 miles away from home during the day. Because she was a field hand and had to be at work by sunrise, she would only be able to see him at night, when she would walk all the way home to put him to bed and then leave before he woke up in the morning.

hooks’ critique:

After sharing this information, Douglass later says that he never enjoyed a mother’s “soothing presence, her tender and watchful care” so that he received the “tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Douglass surely intended to impress upon the consciousness of white readers that the cruelty of that system of racial domination which separated black families, black mothers from their children. Yet he does so by devaluing black womanhood, by not even registering the quality of the care that made his black mother travel those twelve miles to hold him in her arms. In the midst of a brutal racist system, which did not value black life she values the life of her child enough to resist that system, to come to him in the night, just to hold him.

The whole section made me cry, but especially:

Holding him in her arms, Douglass’s mother provided, if only for a short time, a space where this black child was not the subject of dehumanizing scorn and devaluation but was the recipient of a quality of care that should have enabled the adult Douglass to look back and reflect on the political choices of this black mother who resisted slave codes, risking her life, to care for her son. I want to suggest that devaluation of the role his mother played in his life is a dangerous oversight. Though Douglass is only one example, we are currently in a danger of forgetting the powerful role black women have played in constructing for us homeplaces that are the site for resistance.

This opened up everything for me. Of course we can’t compare the circumstances of slavery to the environments in which most of us get to mother today, but we can consider that any environment in which one mothers is a site for political choices. The way we approach the most mundane acts—making a bed, cleaning a kitchen, holding a child—can be politically and emotionally charged. Even the way an Indian-American woman like me, from a traditionally patriarchal society, chooses to raise a son, becomes a political act. And these acts are shaped by the systems we may be resisting… and the ones we unconsciously reproduce.

So, if homeplace is where care can become resistance, how do we begin to see the shape of power in our own homes?

III. A Noticing Prompt: Can you trace the flow of power?

Let’s do a small noticing practice to see if we can see power in the home.

When I was in journalism school, a reporting professor encouraged us to always look for the flow of power in a room, which can often be done by noticing: Which direction does information flow in a community? Who holds the power in the flow?

I think this can be applied to noticing power in any environment, built or natural or, like home, somewhere in between. For instance: We exert power when we decide who we feel comfortable hosting—and who we don’t. We exert power when we choose which rooms are for kids, which are for adults, and which stay closed. We exert it when we keep certain community or family members at a distance, not out of cruelty, but as a form of emotional self-protection. It might seem minor, but we even exert power when we install baby gates, not just for safety, but as a way to manage overwhelm and reinforce structure. I’m doing it now, juggling a toddler and a puppy who like to fight over toys without language. I exert power by managing space and setting boundaries—trying to keep everyone safe.

So here is a prompt for you →
How does power move in your home? Can you see it?

[Note: The point here is just to notice. Not judge or evaluate.]

If “power” feels abstract, start small. Every home has a structure—emotional, architectural, cultural. And that structure teaches us something. What, exactly, is it teaching?

Here is a small list to get you started:

• Who cooks, and who chooses what’s cooked?

• Who has keys to the house?

• What kinds of locks are on which doors?

• Who is expected to clean up after whom?

• What’s the most private space in your home? Who gets to use it?

• What kind of power do objects hold? (e.g., baby monitors, smart locks, family photos)

• Who decides what stays on the fridge?

• Who dictates the schedule?

• The money?

• The privacy rules?

• Which rooms feel emotionally charged?

• Who is invited in—and who is kept out?

Some of these details are common across homes because they simply mirror the safety and survival requirements of being human. But others might actually be more arbitrary—or loaded—than we realize.

What I’m realizing—both as a child of parents and a parent to a child—is that they shape how children understand the world, how emotional labor flows, and how power is granted, exercised, or withheld.

It may not mean we have to do anything different immediately, but perhaps we can at least name what we are doing as we are doing it. Noticing is how patterns emerge.

As I try in my own home, I’ve been noticing how many of these choices I make without thinking. But they add up to the building blocks of my entire posture toward other people.

And I know my kid is watching.

Further reading

I’ll pause here to spare your inbox, but if you want to read more, you can read the extended version, with additional references and notes, in the Library Module → Home as a Site of Power & Resistance. Here is the reference list:

• bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance”

  Published 1990, essay from Yearning

  A foundational text exploring how Black women created spaces of resistance, dignity, and emotional restoration within the home—especially under systems of racial oppression. Read the essay

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  Published 1958, Chapter 1: “The House, From Cellar to Garret”

  A poetic meditation on how spaces within homes—like attics, closets, and thresholds—impact our inner lives. Read Chapter 1

• Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

  Published 1996, selections from Introduction + Chapter 3

  An architectural theory text analyzing how modern homes were designed as visual performances. Read the book

• Exhibit: The Faces of Ruth Asawa, Cantor Arts Center

  A long-term art and life project in which artist Ruth Asawa cast the faces of guests in her home—transforming domestic ritual into archive. (Side note: she even requested her ceramicist son to fire her ashes into clay, so her physical presence is literally included in the exhibit 🤯). Explore the exhibit

This essay is part of a monthly study on care—one of three rotating themes I’m exploring this year alongside media tools and creative practice.

Next up: observing ourselves through our use of AI.

If you’d like to follow along, subscribe here or share with a friend.

Happy Sunday,

Jihii

P.S. If any of this resonates (or confuses you!), I’d love to hear—just hit reply.