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Spin like the wind. Last Week Today Latest Seven Yrs Later (7YL) essay: On Leaving. While I talked about my expedition through the arts since birth, I imagine that finding what you want to do is an odyssey everyone has. Artist or not, the breaks can feel like wreaks, but eventually you see shore. I don’t know why “washed up” is negative. Swimming is tiring; get a tan. And if this wasn’t in your ether already, I’ve been releasing a lot of Notes to Self, my longer journal entries from Seven Yrs Ago. A fav from the last cycle is “So here’s what it is….”. It’s freakishly straightforward which I find very funny. 7YL Theme Song Art Star by Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Spotify / YouTube) In case there wasn’t enough violence. 7YL Theme Media “Live Episode! Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams: Jeni Britton Bauer” from How I Built This with Guy Raz (Spotify / NPR) If this doesn’t inspire you to make something, it will at least inspire you to eat ice cream. How I Built This is a rad interview podcast with well-known entrepreneurs and their winding stories to success. Enter Jeni Britton Bauer, a pink-haired art school dropout who threw essential oils into grocery store cartons. Could’ve been an artist, a pastry chef, or a perfumer, but she went with ice cream maker and we’re stickier for it. I will say Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams are expensive af, but the flavors are as enticing as her charisma. I’ve ordered delivery of a pint or two and you can get the scoop nationally. Rule of the Game At the top of each essay is a little prompt taken from my journals from Seven Yrs Ago. If the prompt is part of a longer Note to Self, I link the note in the essay as it usually examines the topic of the note. If you read this essay’s note (another conditional, but hold on), you would have discerned that my question on leaving was not about my career path, but about burnout and depression. Having just written The Middle, I didn’t think there was more nuance to rediscuss at length, and a friend had alluded to how I didn’t explain the moment I knew I didn’t want to be an architect. To be clear, there wasn’t a moment, but a blooming cloud of dissatisfaction. When mixed with my conviction to produce the best I can, I didn’t know why I should work so hard at something I stopped caring about. Simply, I didn’t want to work less hard. I wanted to find something worth working towards. Whatever the parameters, I want an arc in my projects as, like you, I get tired of hearing the same things. The point is you can make the rules and bend them. Just know why you’re doing either. Honorable Tweet Seven Yrs Ago thinks there’s nothing wrong with that:
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