Knife-Price Culture Is Broken 💔📚 Why I Won’t Sell My Books to Rude Buyers

Knife-Price Culture Is Broken 💔📚 Why I Won’t Sell My Books to Rude Buyers Have you noticed how easy it has become to treat sellers like they are disposable, like they exist to absorb every rude message and unreasonable demand until the price hits rock bottom and the soul of the sale goes with it? I grew up among secondhand paperbacks that still smelled like old rain and pencil notes in the margins, and I swear those pages raised me.

When I list a book, I am not listing clutter. I am putting a small piece of my history on the shelf and hoping it finds a reader who will love it the way I did. That is the part the worst buyers miss when they lowball with insults, accuse sellers of fakery just to force a discount, or type things they would never say to a human face. We can talk about market forces all day, but the real crisis is manners.

Selling books should feel like matchmaking. It should feel like watching a favorite character leave for a new adventure, a little bittersweet but right. Instead, too many interactions feel like auditioning for the privilege of being disrespected. I do not say this lightly. I know how the internet works. I know that scale breeds speed and speed sometimes deletes empathy. Yet somewhere between the scroll and the send button, a lot of people forgot that the person on the other side is a human being with a life, a memory, and a shelf where that book sat through breakups and birthdays.

I grew up on secondhand shelves. My first edition of anything was a miracle and everything else was a treasure anyway. The notes in the margins were conversations with ghosts. Library discards felt like rescues. When people say it is just a book, I think about the nights that book kept me company when the world felt sharp. When I started selling, it was not a pivot to profit as much as a recycling of meaning. If I am moving cities, if I need to clear space, if I have two copies because a friend gifted me a title I already owned, I do not dump a life. I look for a reader. That is why I say I am not only selling. I am adopting out.

Then comes the message that sours the whole screen. You know the one. The buyer begins with a accusation-laced question. Is this legit. Are you scamming. Why so expensive. The tone is an audit disguised as curiosity. The goal is to make you defend your honesty so they can push the price lower while you are busy proving you are not the villain in a story you did not write. I have had people throw around threats of bad reviews before they even said hello. I have had people insist a pristine copy is worthless because the sticker residue on the back is not a museum piece. I have seen grown adults perform tantrums the way toddlers perform hunger, only with more typos.

The sad part is that this is not about the five dollars they want to shave off. This is about a culture of contempt. It shows up everywhere service exists. Waiters know it. Ride share drivers know it. Artists at weekend fairs know it. And sellers know it. The internet made it easy to buy and a little too easy to belittle. The screen acts like armor. People type what their mouths would never risk in public. Meanwhile, the people on the receiving end keep showing up because this is how we pay rent and buy groceries and keep the lights on. In my case, it is also how I keep books moving into the hands of people who love them.

As a writer, I think about language for a living. I notice the words people choose when they want to dismiss value. They say only a book as if that reduces the work an author poured into it, the labor of editors and printers, the careful shipping, the careful storage, the cost of time. They say secondhand as if that means it is lesser, when secondhand often means proven and loved. They say you can get it cheaper on a big platform and sometimes that is true, but it does not change what this specific copy is. It does not change the fact that the independent seller answering your questions is a person, not a faceless warehouse.

A lot of this comes down to respect for context. That signed copy from a local event is not the same as a generic reprint that arrives in a padded mailer. The copy you held at the Boston International Book Fair carries the memory of aisles and excitement and conversations with strangers. The Barnes & Noble paperback you dog eared during commute seasons has weight in your palm that no new-ink catalog can replace. When you sell a book like that, you are passing along a story about a story. If the buyer sees only a chance to flip it for profit, they will miss the point entirely.

I have learned to walk away. It took practice. I used to feel obligated to answer every combative message because being polite felt like the only power I had. Now I understand that my power is the ability to choose my customer. If someone starts with disrespect, I do not push the sale. I step aside. The right reader will arrive and the conversation will sound different from the first sentence. They will ask with curiosity instead of accusation. They will say they have been looking for this edition and the cover art means something to them. They will understand why the shipping cost is not a personal challenge but a reality of distance and packaging. You can feel the difference instantly. It reads like kindness.

Kindness gets framed as extra in some circles, like a topping on the sundae of commerce. I believe the opposite. Kindness is infrastructure. It is the road that every sale travels. When the road is cracked, the journey breaks. That is why I am happy to donate books to drives when the buyer pool feels toxic. I would rather hand a pile to a student who lights up at the idea of free literature than sell to someone who treats me like an obstacle. There is a privilege in being able to donate and I am not blind to that. But when I can, I do. It reminds me that books are better than the worst attitudes attached to them.

There is also the personal layer. I am autistic, and for me words are literal. I say what I mean. I do not lace a request with a sneer or a smiley face that hides a threat. I write the way I would speak face to face. It does not make me perfect. It makes me consistent. It makes me allergic to manipulation disguised as negotiation. I respect a fair offer. I respect someone saying a price is out of their budget and asking if I can meet them in the middle. I even respect a pass. What I refuse is the idea that disrespect is the same thing as bargaining power. It is not. It is just noise.

If you are reading this and you are part of BookTok or any corner of the internet that celebrates reading, I am asking for a cultural reset. Let us make buying feel like joining a conversation again. Ask sellers about the book’s journey. Celebrate the old bookstore stamp on the inside cover. Share the story of the last time you found a note from a stranger in the margins and how that line changed your life. Tell sellers when you cannot afford a price and ask if there is wiggle room without framing them as adversaries. If you are a reseller who is actually respectful and transparent, thank you. You are the reason many of us keep listing.

Platforms are part of this story. Large marketplaces make everything look interchangeable. The search results flatten nuance. An independent seller becomes a tile in a grid. That is why I often describe the listing in full sentences instead of bare specifications. I want you to feel the texture. I want you to know the edition, the condition, the postcard tucked inside the jacket. I want you to know where the book has been. I do this on Amazon listings when possible. I do it on local platforms. I do it in captions on YouTube when I show a haul. The details are the difference between a transaction and a meeting.

I keep thinking about the first time I realized a stranger valued a book the way I did. It was a message that said thank you for keeping this in such good condition and for describing the tiny crease on page 214 because it made me laugh when I got to that exact line. That is the energy I want to replicate. Not because it flatters me, but because it treats the whole exchange like an act of care. If you are rolling your eyes at the idea of care in commerce, I get it. The world can be cold. But we are the ones who decide what happens in our small corners. We decide how we write to each other.

So here is my plea and my promise. I will continue to price fairly, ship carefully, and describe honestly. I will continue to say no to buyers who weaponize suspicion as a tactic. I will continue to donate when the cost of dealing with disrespect outweighs the sale. I will continue to recommend books I love, from Barnes & Noble to the stalls at LA book fares, to indie sellers who wrap a paperback like a present. And I will continue to believe that most readers are still readers at heart, which means they understand that stories are not disposable and neither are the people who share them.

If you are a buyer who has been guilty of snapping at a seller because you were stressed or because you wanted the thrill of a bargain, you can change that today. Send a message that begins with hello. Ask a clear question. Make a reasonable offer. If the answer is no, accept it and keep moving. The world is full of books waiting for you. The world is also full of people who make a living by getting those books to your door. Treat them like partners, and watch how much better the whole experience becomes.

The next time you hover over send on a message that treats a seller like a wall instead of a person, ask yourself a simple question that might change the internet one purchase at a time. What kind of story do you want this book to carry about you?

E-reader Is Convenient, But Paper Still Hits Different ❤️

E-reader  Is Convenient, But Paper Still Hits Different ❤️ If your e-reader is a suitcase, a physical book is a house, and that is exactly why the story you finish on paper refuses to leave you.

I own an e-reader and I am grateful for it. It is slim, quick, and quietly heroic when I am stuck in a line and pretending the line is a life choice. It holds entire shelves without judging the weight limit of my tote. I can highlight, sync, and search, then flick to a new chapter before my coffee cools. But when I sit down with a physical book, the experience changes in a way that still feels a little mystical and a little scientific. The weight is real. The edges are imperfect. The whisper of the page turning is not an animation cue but a small ceremony I can feel in my wrists. As an autistic professional who spends long hours inside screens, this sensory grounding is not a cute aesthetic preference. It is the difference between consuming information and actually keeping it.

Here is what happens when I read on paper. My attention narrows like a lens that finally finds focus. Notes in the margins become miniature conversations with the author. Dog-eared pages are breadcrumb trails that my future self will thank me for. If I highlight a line in an e-book, I know I will find it again. If I underline a line in a paperback, I know I will remember it again. That is not a diss on digital. It is an observation about memory and how the body likes to participate. My brain associates the lesson with a location in space. Top left corner. Page with a coffee stain. Chapter title that looked like it was set in old metal type. When I need that idea during a client call, I can see the page before I recall the paragraph. The book becomes an index card drawer for my thoughts.

My daily life is not a quiet library. It is a juggling act of deadlines, scripts, and thumbnails. I flip between an Amazon KDP dashboard, a content calendar, and a riot of drafts that all want to be published yesterday. I research on my e-reader because it is efficient. I finalize ideas with a physical book because it is effective. Portability is the e-reader’s crown. Presence is the paperback’s throne. When I close a physical book, the lesson lingers in my hands like warmth from a mug. I remember the scene that made me grin on a crowded train. I remember the footnote that sent me to a rabbit hole I did not regret. I remember the recipe-like precision of a sentence that felt hand carved. Presence builds memory, and memory builds better writing.

People ask me if this is just nostalgia. I love nostalgia, but I am not running a museum. I am building content that needs to rank, convert, and actually help people. Print helps me slow down, and slowing down helps me ship faster. That sounds backward until you have tried it. When I plan a long review or a commentary piece, I read a relevant chapter in print first. The low-level friction of turning pages gives my brain time to metabolize. I start seeing transitions before I write them. The thread that connects the introduction to the thesis to the call to action shows up earlier. My edits are calmer. My voice is less frantic. I spend less time rewriting paragraph seven because paragraph one finally had a spine.

There is also a creative confidence that arrives when the book is a thing you can put on a desk. I annotate with mechanical pencils and a wicked sense of optimism. I layer sticky flags like a color coded argument. The page becomes a map of the story I intend to tell in my video. That tactile map makes me bolder on camera. It is easier to land a point when you can literally point to it. Even if the audience never sees the paperback, they can hear the weight of it. A script sourced from a screen reads like a good note. A script sourced from a dog-eared paperback reads like a conviction.

MIBF rolls in and the book tables look like a carnival for introverts. Every aisle is a discovery feed without an algorithm deciding your taste. I still love the algorithm when it does me a favor, but I like choosing my own rabbit holes. Physical browsing is not only about selection. It is about serendipity. You pick up a title you never would have searched for, read a page you never would have clicked on, and your next month of content changes.

Since I also publish, the debate gets deliciously meta. E-readers are merciful to indie writers. One upload, global reach, instant delivery, and dynamic pricing. That is a miracle. But when readers send photos of my paperbacks sitting on their desks with tabbed pages and unruly notes, I feel what I can only describe as proof. The stories left the file and entered a life. There is a difference between a finished export and a lived experience. Print makes the relationship visible.

As an autistic reader, I notice how print reduces the background noise in my head. There are fewer toggles to touch, fewer temptations to skim. The book asks for a single channel of attention and rewards me with a slower kind of dopamine. The reward is not only the plot twist. The reward is the rhythm of comprehension. When I say the smell of books is memory, I am not being precious. I am describing a sensory link that helps my workday stabilize. The scent of paper signals focus. The sound of a closing cover signals completion. These cues train my brain like a friendly ritual. When I pick up my e-reader, my brain hears, get stuff done. When I pick up a paperback, my brain hears, go somewhere real.

Digital loyalists will say the new e-ink screens are gentle, the dictionaries are built-in, and the annotations are shareable. All true, and I use those features daily. I am not anti e-reader. I am pro context. If I need to sift through ten sources in one afternoon, my device is the hero. If I need one source to change my mind while I write, the paperback is the mentor. The choice is not a war. It is a workflow. Writers and readers thrive when our systems fit our brains, not the other way around.

Workflows are also where the humble paper bookmark embarrasses a fleet of productivity apps. A rigid strip of card stock is not smarter than an app, but it is more honest. It says you are here. No notifications. No rating prompts. No badges. Just a location. When my brain is fried, a clear location is a kindness. I slide the bookmark in, close the book, and the task ends cleanly. I do not blame my phone for the way it keeps trying to save me from silence. Phones are very proud of being helpful. But silence is sometimes the help I need to finish a paragraph that refuses to be born.

So which team am I on? Team Both, with a very public crush on paper. The e-reader is my commuter buddy. The paperback is my mentor. The device handles volume. The book handles gravity. On a frantic Tuesday, I lean on digital to keep pace. On a strategic Wednesday, I lean on print to set the pace. If you are stuck on a draft, try this very unsexy tip. Read one chapter in paper before you outline. Watch what your brain does in the next hour. If it feels like the ideas stop sliding around and start standing still, welcome to presence.

There is a cultural layer here too. Bookstores are not just retail. They are rehearsal spaces for thinking. Barnes & Noble, Fully Booked, National Bookstore, the pop ups during MIBF, even the tiny secondhand shelves tucked beside a café table, all of them teach you that attention is a public act. People reading in the open is contagious. You look around and your phone suddenly looks shy. Reading becomes normal again. Creativity borrows that courage.

I will never stop praising the efficiency of digital platforms. I also will never stop championing the strange, slow, satisfying work of turning pages. The future of reading will not cancel the past. It will collaborate with it. Your shelf and your screen can be friends. The algorithm can help you find a book, then the book can help you find yourself. If that sounds poetic, it is because paper lets me be poetic without apologizing. For me, books are not just information. They are anchors.

So here is my challenge. Tonight, put your e-reader on the nightstand, pick one paperback from your shelf, and read ten pages with your phone in another room. If those ten pages feel heavier than a hundred digital highlights, ask yourself the question that still rewires my workflow every month. What exactly did the page say that the screen could not?

It’s My Birthday And I Took The City Hostage With Cake, Rings, And A Skyline Mood 💍🌆

 It’s My Birthday And I Took The City Hostage With Cake, Rings, And A Skyline Mood 💍🌆 If a birthday is a plot twist, mine opened with a mystery hand pinching my cheek, a small cake at midnight, and a frog who thinks he is a therapist. Are you ready for a vibe check that smells like frosting, bookstore dust, and a faint whiff of personal growth?

Birthdays are weird because they’re soft resets disguised as parties. You blow out a candle, pretend you have your life together, and the city lights nod like stage crew. This year, I wanted something small, almost private, the kind of celebration that looks like a casual story post but secretly means everything. I was out with my close knit gang, the ride-or-dies who will hype your dreams and then roast your outfit by the next corner, and we ended up at a rooftop with a skyline that felt like an open document. I pointed at the horizon like an author begging the page to behave. Someone snapped a photo while I was mid monologue. It looked like I was directing traffic for destiny. It also looked like I was telling the stars to get their act together because I have deadlines.

The night started earlier than it should have, because apparently the universe loves a chaotic timeline. First came the surprise: a tiny delivery cake that arrived like a clandestine love letter. It had enough frosting to power a small village and exactly one candle, because symbolism is a prankster. My friends sang off key, the kind of off key that turns into laughter halfway through, and I felt that kid version of me return. There is something about small cake energy that bulldozes cynicism. I held it up like an offering. I took a bite that was basically a lawsuit waiting to happen, and someone caught the moment my face got pinched by a mystery hand from the side of the frame. Consider this the official entry of a recurring character named Mr Wise Frog, who showed up later with a voice of reason and a moral of the story, even though he is very much an inside joke and not actually amphibious.

We drifted through places that make a birthday feel like a secret quest. Neon storefronts that whisper stay a little longer. Stairwells that turn you into a main character. A late night café that serves patience in ceramic cups. We talked about everything and nothing, the kind of circle conversation that loops between high stakes dreams and low stakes gossip. I kept touching a ring, a gift that shone under the city like it had its own agenda. The ring felt like punctuation. Not an ending. Not even a period. More like a comma that says keep reading.

There is this moment, when you are somewhere high enough to see the city breathing, where you understand that a skyline is not a view but an attitude. It is the visual version of a pep talk. I stood there with my tiny cake and my gnawing gratitude and thought about how chapters do not wait for you to be ready. They simply start. People assume birthdays are about new goals, but mine felt more like a memo to self. Keep the softness. Keep the curiosity. Keep the joke about the frog who knows more about your life than you do. Keep the ring finger steady when the camera turns on, because there is nothing wrong with flexing the shimmer that arrived after so many cloudy days.

The next day, because writers are chaos gremlins who self-soothe with paper, I went bookstore crawling. Los Angeles is full of shelves that look like labyrinths and windows that trap sunlight for readers. I walked through aisles that smelled like old ink and ambition. I let my thumb ride the spines like a playlist. You know that feeling when you find a line in a book that was clearly stalking your thoughts for months? I collected a small stack of those. A memoir that reminds you not to apologize for changing your mind. A novel that treats city nights like confessionals. A tiny poetry pamphlet that hits harder than a three hundred page doorstopper. I paid for them like I was buying talismans.

Somewhere between the travel cup of coffee and the receipt tucked under my phone case, the truth followed me like a shadow. I am still in a battle with my health. It is not dramatic every day. Sometimes it is just boring and inconvenient and invisibly exhausting. It is taking vitamins when all I want is dessert. It is getting the sleep hygiene lecture from a friend who loves me enough to be annoying. It is rescheduling plans without rescheduling joy. People see the cake and the ring and the skyline and think the story ends there, but the story is not performed joy. It is practiced joy. It is claiming softness even when the plot is spiky. It is holding on to the wise frog in your head who tells you to drink water, stretch your legs, and finish the page before you doom scroll.

The birthday taught me a new rhythm. I am learning to celebrate in lowercase. The small cake is enough. The ring is a bright reminder that gifts do not erase the grind but they do light it up. The skyline is a classroom where patience is the subject and hope is extra credit. I used to think survival meant pretending to be bulletproof. Now I think it means letting people see your armor on the chair while you sit there in your hoodie, absolutely human, absolutely still choosing to be here.

As a creator, I kept turning the night into content in my head. I saw the cuts for the YouTube vlog. The thumbnail with the cake and the ring. The TikTok text that reads tiny cake, massive feelings. The Blogger headline that calls it a love letter to bookstores and city lights. There is a part of me that will always tell the story while it happens, but I gave myself permission to live it first. We laughed more than we filmed. We ate more than we posted. We stayed longer than our notifications wanted us to. The footage I did keep looks like you are there. The faces are lit by neon and birthday candles. The audio is mostly crosstalk and the kind of overlapping jokes you can only have with friends who know your origin story. 

Sharing this precious ring gift with you guys. It is blessed on the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels at LA :

Mr Wise Frog, by the way, is the patron saint of not spiraling. He appears when I am being dramatic and turns the dial down so the present can breathe. He told me, in his croaky metaphorical way, that birthdays are not performance reviews. They are not deadlines for becoming the unreal version of you that some stranger invented. They are checkpoints on a road that lets you be new again without pretending your past is gone. I let that sit. Then I ate more frosting.

After the rooftops and the bookstores and the ring that caught every light like it was auditioning, we drove to a quiet spot that felt like a secret. No fancy plan. No grand effect. Just a group of people who are good at being people. I watched my friends talk in circles with the kind of warmth that makes even the cold sidewalk look like a couch. The city moved around us like ocean waves. I put my phone away. I breathed on purpose. I thought about the pages I still want to write, the readers I have not met yet, the version of me who will look back at this night and laugh at how dramatic she was about a tiny cake.

Here is the truth that stuck: it is possible to be battling something and still build a life that feels like good cinema. You can carry your health like a backpack without letting it steal the scenery. You can collect quiet joys and let them be loud in your memory. You can make space for the parts of you that are tired and still dance on a rooftop when the playlist demands it. The skyline does not ask you to be perfect. It asks you to show up. I did. I will again.

When I finally got home, I realized the candle wax had dripped into a shape that looked almost like a question mark. It made me laugh, because of course the night would sign off like that. A question, not a period. What will you do with another year, Arabella? What will you write, who will you love, how gently will you treat yourself when the plot gets tangled? I took a picture of the wax, slid the ring back into its box for safe keeping, and put my new books on the nightstand like anchors. Then I set an alarm that I knew I would ignore once, just to prove I am still human.

There is only this soft promise, repeated until it sticks. I will keep celebrating in lowercase. I will keep reading lines that find me before I find them. I will keep laughing at frogs, real or imagined. I will keep pointing at the skyline as if I can direct the whole play, because sometimes pretending you are in charge of the lights is exactly how you remember you can brighten your own scene.

Why Writing Is My Forever Love: The One That Never Ghosted Me ✍️💘

  Why Writing Is My Forever Love: The One That Never Ghosted Me ✍️💘 Here is the messy truth that every creator eventually has to admit: I did not pick writing because it was easy or trendy, I picked it because it picked me first. Reading was the first spark, drawing was the cute crush, but writing is the relationship that kept showing up when the algorithms did not, when the views dipped, when my attention span sprinted away.

If you have ever stood in Barnes & Noble, Fully Booked or National Bookstore and felt a book spine hum like a live wire under your fingers, you already know what I mean. Writing is what happens when that electricity refuses to stay quiet. It is the voice that will not let you scroll past your own life.

I learned to love words before I learned to perform them. Childhood felt like a series of secret tunnels made of paper and glue. I would sit on the floor with a book and vanish so completely that the world had to knock twice to get me back. That was the first miracle. Then came the second one, the one that never stops shocking me. At some point the stories I read started asking for an exit, like a crowded theater that needed a new door. That door was writing. I did not realize it then, but every chapter that gave me chills was quietly leaving tools on my desk. A set of rhythms. A sense of timing. A taste for the kind of detail that feels like you just found someone’s diary and they left it open on purpose.

People love to compare writing to drawing as if they are rivals when in reality they hold hands. Drawing is the image that grabs your collar. Writing is the explanation that saves your life. When I sketch, I catch a mood. When I write, I chase the why. Drawing shows the gleam on a teacup at 4 p.m. Writing sits you down and tells you why that cup is the last clean thing in a messy kitchen and how that matters to a girl who promised not to cry today. Writing is the long exhale that turns a pretty moment into a true one.

There is a reason book culture keeps exploding on the internet. BookTok did not make readers. It just turned the lights on. Suddenly you could scroll and find ten people who cried at the same line you underlined at midnight. Suddenly the shy kid who used to hide their paperback in a bag has a community that will argue about which chapter wrecked them the most. That same energy flows straight into writing. The page is no longer a lonely place. It is a crowded, glittery train station where people are late for their feelings and you can volunteer as the conductor.

Back in the Philippines, in Manila, the annual rush to MIBF hits like a festival of permission slips. You walk into those halls and it feels like a city signed a treaty with imagination. Tables stacked with debuts and deep cuts. Authors leaning over podiums trying not to shake. Readers lugging tote bags that could bench press a scooter. I remember every time I go there I feel the same tug that I get in Fully Booked on a quiet weekday or at National Bookstore while waiting out a thunderstorm. It is the tug that says take this home and turn it into fuel. Writing is my forever love because it lets me repay that debt. Every page I write is a thank you letter with a deadline that only I can see.

There is also the discipline nobody posts about because it looks boring on camera. Writing taught me how to show up at a desk when the day has already taken one hundred small bites out of me. It taught me to forgive bad sentences as if they were practice laps. It taught me that focus is not a thunderbolt. Focus is a faucet. You turn it slowly and the water looks weak at first. Keep turning and it surprises you. On mornings when the words do not want to come I bribe myself with an ugly goal. Write a paragraph that nobody will ever see. Then another. By the time I hit the third, the voice that sounded rusty starts to sound like me again. By the fifth, it sounds like the version of me who got enough sleep and believes in happy endings.

Writing is my forever love because it is honest about the work and generous with the payoff. Drawing gives you instant applause in the form of a pretty frame. Writing asks you to wait for the echo. Sometimes that echo is a comment from a stranger who says they felt less alone because of a sentence you almost deleted. Sometimes it is a friend who admits the piece you posted helped them call their mother. Sometimes it is you, two months later, reading your own paragraph and realizing you finally told the truth about something you used to avoid.

Reading lit the fuse. Writing keeps the light on. I remember the first time I realized a book could be both a mirror and a window at the same time. That is not a metaphor you forget. The mirror told me who I was allowed to be. The window told me there were more rooms. When I write, I am trying to leave both behind for someone else. A mirror that flatters without lying. A window that opens without slamming shut the moment life gets loud.

Let me be clear about the economics because creators need to hear it. The path is rarely linear. Some days the analytics will treat your work like lost luggage. On those days I remember the physical places that raised me as a reader. I picture the maze of shelves at Fully Booked where I fell in love with a paperback I did not plan to buy. I remember lining up at MIBF with a list that I promptly ignored because a debut author read two paragraphs that hijacked my wallet. I think about National Bookstore on a weekday afternoon when a random aisle becomes a time machine. Then I open a blank document and try again. Platforms change. Pages do not. Writing is platform proof in a way that keeps me calm when everything else gets loud.

Another reason writing wins is the way it respects memory. Drawing captures an emotion like a snapshot. Writing lets you track it across a timeline. When I write about a breakup, I can include the coffee stain on the saucer, the text message that landed like hail, the shoes I wore to pretend I was fine, the song that ruined a perfectly good walk. That level of detail is not indulgence. It is documentation. It turns a chaotic feeling into a map that other people can use when their own weather turns strange.

Reading words silently inside your own head is a small magic trick. It makes the voice feel like it lives in your mouth for a second. When a reader tells me they heard me, I believe them. Not because I shouted, but because they let me whisper.

Finally, writing lets me fail in private. I can be clumsy in a draft without burning a hole in the internet. I can try out a risk and delete it before sunrise. I can throw away a paragraph and bring it back six months later when I figure out what it was trying to say. That kind of sandbox is priceless. It makes the public parts better because the private parts were allowed to be messy.

So yes, I still draw. I still fill sketchbooks with faces and furniture and the way rain leans sideways on bad days. I still read like a thief casing the place. But writing is the one that kissed me on the forehead after the party and asked how I really was. It is the one that holds my hand while I turn a hard thing into a true thing. It is the one that will be here when the trend cycle forgets my name.

💘 WATCH: https://youtu.be/9J0twDTNF-E

If you asked me to pick one love to take into the next decade, I would grab a notebook and a cheap pen without blinking. Not because I think writing will make me famous, but because I know it will keep me honest. The only question that matters now is simple and scary in the best way. What story do I not want to tell yet, and what happens when I write it anyway?