Things I'm overthinking

... perhaps in an attempt to avoid considering more important ones

• What “taste” means and how we attempt to derive objective rankings—of works of art to sportsball players and beyond—from subjective experience

• Which thoughts are worth being a Post here on Substack and which should be relegated to Notes

• How happy am I that last month I actually put the Substack app on my phone and then discovered Notes?

• If no longer posting on Instagram is going to hurt my future chances of a book deal

• If I should have just “niched down” and leaned only into dog stuff on Paws and Reflect (couldn’t I have given myself space to write and think and do other things outside of that corner of the internet? Maybe there’d have been value in a more cohesive brand, actually)

• If I am ostracizing people who might have otherwise connected with me/Scout on social media by leaving social media

• If my “I’ve been reflecting on my relationship with the internet for over a year now” thing is just, gosh, very foolish and tired

• Why external voices feel so LOUD today

• If I will ever be able to properly remember what it was like to be myself in the dog world seven years ago and thus make my manuscript ring true—make it truly possibly maybe matter to someone else

• Why I keep comparing myself to caricatures of extremes (brainwashed person in my small-ish hometown vs ludicrously accomplished polymath) and thus oscillating between intense feelings of “I am amazing, I love me!” and “I am literally a failure”

• If I should have a more cohesive “visual feel” on this blog (collage featured images?!)

• If continuing to obsess over tiny details like featured images is part of my procrastination problem (actually I’m not really overthinking this one—the answer is yes)

• Why I can’t seem to open any application on my phone—from Instagram to Substack to my family’s group text—without feeling small (and not in the “I’m looking at the stars and it’s amazing” way)

• If I’m stressing Scout out too much lately

• If I’m fulfilling Scout enough lately

• A well-written article I read the other day by a 24-year-old “virgin” woman and whether I should lean into my urge to occasionally write about sex myself

• If I have anything remotely interesting to say about sex

• If saying anything (interesting or not) about sex will make people shake their heads

• If I only asked that above question because I’m obviously not over (cliche alert!) growing up religious

• Why online spaces go in circles—for example, Dogstagram is once again arguing about whether or not it’s okay to play fetch with your dog, and it took me barely 30 seconds of scrolling weakness to encounter several insistent opinions

• Why I keep boxing myself in—why I keep feeling boxed in?—while trying to embrace multiple interests and topics and ways of sharing

• If I spent too much time trying to crop my sock out of this list’s cover image

• Comforting nihilism vs apathetic nihilism

• Semantics, always

• If hitting “publish” on this list will do anything

• If hitting “publish” on anything will do anything

• What “do anything” means?

Anyway. I hope something wonderful happens to you today. One of my wonderful things was Scout pressing her face against my face, which doesn’t “fix” everything but always comes so close as to feel like magic: