#personalessay — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #personalessay, aggregated by home.social.
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Richard Marcus examines the important of queer line dancing in the context of creating safe(r) spaces for queer folks across the world.
Read this important essay in volume 7 of Rainbow Rodeo!
https://www.fourquartersrecords.com/products/rainbow-rodeo-vol-7
#QueerCountry #Americana #CountryMusic #RootsMusic #LGBTQMusic #QueerMusic #LGBTQMusician #lgbtq #essay #PersonalEssay #LGBTQHistory
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Friendship Is Harder Than People Admit When You’re An Adult
There is something I have been thinking about a lot this year, and honestly, it is something that has been sitting in the back of my mind for quite some time. Friendship is hard. Not just making friends. Not just keeping friends. Not just finding people you click with. The entire process of having friendships as an adult can be surprisingly difficult, and 2026 has made that reality particularly obvious to me. So far this year, I have lost multiple friends. Some of those friendships were […] -
Richard Marcus examines the important of queer line dancing in the context of creating safe(r) spaces for queer folks across the world.
Read this important essay in volume 7 of Rainbow Rodeo!
https://www.fourquartersrecords.com/products/rainbow-rodeo-vol-7
#QueerCountry #Americana #CountryMusic #RootsMusic #LGBTQMusic #QueerMusic #LGBTQMusician #lgbtq #essay #PersonalEssay #LGBTQHistory
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I learned early rest was for the weak. Everything my family taught me said so.
My father taught hours, my mother graded late. The message was clear.
What voice drives you forward, and is it speaking with kindness or fear?
#discipline #selfcompassion #wellness
#hustleculture #productivity #guiltfreerest
#personalessay #reflectivewriting #embodiedpractice -
🌈 THE RAINBOW
From Childhood Folklore to a Symbol of Human WholenessA childhood Ibibio folklore, a rainbow after the rain, and a lifetime of changing perspectives. This is a reflection on how one symbol came to represent wonder, memory, and human wholeness for me.
🔗 Article link below
🎨 Visuals created with AI.
#Writing #Medium #Rainbow #Folklore #Ibibio #PersonalEssay #Spirituality #Nature #Consciousness
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REVIEW: Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, Ten Years Later | 🔗 https://brennan.day/review-sufjan-stevens-carrie-and-lowell-ten-years-later/
#MusicReview #PersonalEssay #MentalHealth #Grief #Family #Suicide #MediaCriticism
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SBSK is The Most Important Channel on YouTube | 🔗 https://brennan.day/sbsk-is-the-most-important-channel-on-youtube/
#PersonalEssay #YouTube #SocialCommentary #Disability #Community #Advocacy
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Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers! | 🔗 https://brennan.day/knitting-the-web-we-need-interlinkers/
#PersonalEssay #IndieWeb #WebDevelopment #Community #Blogging #LinkCulture
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L'IndieWeb en français québécois? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/l-indieweb-en-francais-quebecois/
#PersonalEssay #LanguageLearning #Linguistics #IndieWeb #Technology #SocialCommentary
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Beeminder: Getting Back on the Horse | 🔗 https://brennan.day/beeminder-getting-back-on-the-horse/
#PersonalEssay #Productivity #HabitTracking #Beeminder #Self-improvement #CommitmentDevices
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It Was Always a Love Story, Actually | 🔗 https://brennan.day/it-was-always-a-love-story-actually/
#PersonalEssay #MediaCriticism #Gender #Love #Television #Anime
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Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad. | 🔗 https://brennan.day/adding-thousands-of-lines-to-your-codebase-isnt-impressive-its-actually-bad/
#PersonalEssay #WebDevelopment #AI #CodeQuality #Programming #SocialCommentary
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Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs | 🔗 https://brennan.day/mea-culpa-when-somebody-writes-your-wrongs/
#PersonalEssay #Writing #Criticism #Scrupulosity #MentalHealth
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What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-really/
#PersonalEssay #Writing #Research #Productivity #KnowledgeManagement #AcademicResearch #Criticism
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Broken Chair
I rescued the chair from outside someone’s apartment with the hope of fixing it and having it become a welcome member of our family.
But, as often happens, it sat around in various places waiting for me to find the time to repair it.
Finally, I decided it was one more project I did not have time for, and so yesterday I put it out on the sidewalk in the hopes that someone would take it home.
It sat out there all through yesterday in the rain and the sun, lonely, awaiting a new friend. A few people paused to look but then drove away. Periodically I would look out my window to see it still sitting forlornly there.
Then this morning I noticed an older gentleman walking past who began to inspect the chair. He picked it up, put it on his back and walked away.
It is a beautiful chair. It just needs to be repaired, and I am sure its new owner will do just that.
I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot like that broken chair, waiting for the gentle hands of someone to put me back together again.
I wait, broken, with the hope that those hands will touch me, I will be healed, and I can have a purpose again.
July 10, 2015
#beautyInBrokenThings #beingRestored #Brokenness #compassion #everydayParables #FaithAndLife #foundObjects #gentleHands #Grace #Healing #Hope #humanDignity #innerHealing #Loneliness #metaphor #ordinaryGrace #personalEssay #POETICAORAREContemplativePoetryPrayers #Purpose #Redemption #renewal #repair #rescuedChair #restoration #secondChances #sidewalkStory #SpiritualReflection #urbanReflection #Waiting #WordPressTagsBrokenChair #woundedButWorthy #Writing -
The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-true-unglamorous-life-of-a-writer/
#PersonalEssay #Writing #WritingCraft #Blogging #Creativity #CreativeNonfiction
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Outside my window, a sapling tree stands dead—Sometimes the land itself seems to grieve. Read the full piece here: https://unenlightenedgeneralists.com/dead-tree-dead-bird/ #PersonalEssay #Memoir https://unenlightenedgeneralists.com/dead-tree-dead-bird/
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Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/why-does-conor-mcgregor-get-a-comeback/
#PersonalEssay #SocialCommentary #Sports #Culture #Feminism #Politics #UFC
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REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons' | 🔗 https://brennan.day/review-missing-missing-richard-simmons/
#PersonalEssay #Review #MediaCriticism #SocialCommentary #Privacy #Ethics
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Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/is-the-juice-worth-the-squeeze/
#PersonalEssay #Philosophy #Values #IndieWeb #Mortality #Purpose
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To My Readers: What Do You Want To See More Of? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/to-my-readers-what-do-you-want-to-see-more-of/
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There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write | 🔗 https://brennan.day/there-are-people-who-would-give-anything-for-your-ability-to-read-and-write/
#PersonalEssay #Literacy #Writing #SocialCommentary #Philosophy #Gratitude
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A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI | 🔗 https://brennan.day/a-case-for-the-ethical-treatment-of-generative-ai/
#PersonalEssay #AI #Philosophy #Ethics #SocialCommentary #Technical
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This account, this corner of the fediverse, has become one of the places I let those questions be noisy in public. What does healing mean when the conditions that harmed you are not gone, only rearranged into more respectable shapes? What actually happens inside a counselling relationship when disability or neurodivergence is present but unnamed, or misnamed, or politely ignored? How do we begin to notice the ways power and unspoken norms travel through even the most well-intentioned helping professions? How do we hold culture as something we are constantly creating and being created by, something we may need to grieve and interrogate and occasionally celebrate, often all at once, sometimes in the space of a single conversation?
I keep circling back to the interior labour of this work. The slow, repetitive practice of building emotional regulation when your nervous system's default setting is red alert. The awkwardness of learning self-compassion when sharp self-criticism has been your most reliable survival tool. The moments that feel like failure because you find yourself reacting in an old way, when in reality this is precisely how recovery moves, looping back on itself, revisiting old ground with slightly different eyes. The way trauma and joy can sit shoulder to shoulder in the same hour, the same therapy session, the same breath, and how unnerving and holy that can feel.
Rauch and Ansari suggest that silence can be deliberate and strategic, a form of self-regulation rather than withdrawal, a boundary rather than an absence. I think about this in relation to the freeze response, to the moments in my own history when going quiet was not giving up but holding on. The body stills because there are no safe words yet. Sometimes the silence is the story. And learning to hear it as such, to receive it without rushing to fill or fix it, is one of the things I am still practising, in music and in therapy and in the ordinary, unglamorous dailiness of trying to stay present in a life that sometimes arrives all at once.
I am not arriving anywhere with a finished theory of how any of this is supposed to work. I am coming, again and again, with fragments and questions and a stubborn intention to tell the truth as I understand it in the moment I am writing. That truth is often partial, often shifting. My understanding of myself, of trauma, of disability, of care, keeps moving, and I want it to. I would rather be inconsistent and alive to new information than seamless and rigidly wrong.
If you are still reading, you are already participating in something I care about. A space that treats complexity as ordinary rather than excessive. Where being too much is not an accusation but raw material. Where intense feeling and rigorous thought are both welcome at the same table. Where healing is not a linear journey toward a fixed destination but something more like learning to live inside unresolved chords without pretending they have resolved. Where music is both metaphor and method, both a way of speaking about change and a way of practising it in the body.
True silence does not exist. What we call silence is simply what we have not yet learned to hear. The fullness of life in quieter tones. The heartbeat of thought. The whispered rhythm of resilience. The steady murmur of healing is underway. And when we learn to tune into the music between the notes and into the truth held in breath, we do more than survive. We begin to sing again. This time, in a voice that is entirely our own.
I am not here to introduce myself so much as to keep turning up alongside you. To keep writing from the middle of things, not only from the rare polished moments that look good in hindsight. To keep noticing the small, ordinary, unglamorous ways humans find their way back to themselves, even inside systems that were never set up with them in mind. If any of these threads brush against something in your own story, then you are part of the imagined audience I write towards. And maybe, in a slow, imperfect, occasionally dissonant way, part of the choir that is still learning how to hear itself.
#AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Blind #Deafblind #Disabled #DisabilityJustice #MadStudies #Psychology #Counselling #Therapy #Trauma #TraumaRecovery #Neurodiversity #MentalHealth #ChronicStress #Healing #WindowOfTolerance #LivedExperience #CareWork #Culture #Power #Normality #Access #Inclusion #Ableism #Music #ClassicalMusic #ChoralMusic #Choir #Singing #Writing #PersonalEssay #Silence #LongPost #Fediversea (2/2)
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JAPA — When the Grass Looks Greener from the Other Side, Until You Cross Over
“Japa” is not just relocation.
It’s hope stretched across distance—and the truths we only meet after crossing.This piece is not against leaving.
It’s about what movement doesn’t automatically change.🔗 Link in the first reply.
#JAPA #Migration #Nigeria #Diaspora #Identity #Belonging #PersonalEssay
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"In the months since the fire, I have taken on a new, unpaid job: I have become an archivist. I ask myself: How to write the disaster when it is the disaster that leaves writing in ruins?" —Vanessa Holyoak for The Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/one-step-removed-from-ash/
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A quick read. Sorry about the paywall. "My Immortal Lifecycle":
https://daisybrain.medium.com/my-immortal-lifecycle-47f9129bd803#personalessay #blogpost #essays #nature #lifecycles #memoir #mylife
