1

The truth about making creative work is that once you get good at it people will want it for themselves. A little piece of you. You let them; the whole point was to make a living doing this, wasn’t it? In order to live, you have to survive first, don’t you? But I hadn’t been honest with myself. I was already capable of living. The truth of it is that I was scared I was mediocre. But when mediocre buys Michelin meals and stock market gains, can you really call it that? It’s all a matter of perspective. Everything is relative. I don’t deal in cliches, but I talk in them sometimes. I saw the photograph then read Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot a few years back as part of my self-designated learning plan to educate myself in matters outside of productivity hacks. Years later, I write a poem about a colour like I do every year. Pantone, take that. For 2025 it’s a dirty blue I dub Dot Dot Dot, a few hundred days and degrees from 2023’s Re-blue. Murky and vague, nothing figured out. Somewhere between sky and ground. Like crash landing in the middle of nowhere en route to a dream life. A puddle or a mirror dusted over so you can no longer see yourself. I was floating away, tethered to the machine. In a trap I happily participated in. Enter the sky. Almost every one of the books I read, didn’t matter if it was novel or memoir or nonfiction, had a story that started with the sky. It tells you where you are, how much time you have left in the day, and that's it. I think I get it. I am thinking too far ahead. A mediocre day done 1% better is whatever that is. A mediocre day done the same is still a wild anomaly is still a life. A light in the tunnel of my doom-scroll, a spin on a cliche: You don't live once. You die once, but you live every day. 1% toward the needle, from self-preservation to whatever else I am capable of. I can’t see it for a reason. You can’t see the thing you’re inside of.

2

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, about a year after the first website went live, the Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photograph of earth from 6 billion kilometers away. Suspended in a beam of light, our planet appeared as a tiny pixel: the now-iconic Pale Blue Dot. One single photograph, showcasing the power of scale to shake our sense of importance. And just as our knowledge of the universe expanded outward, it also turned inward, not just into vast distances but into subatomic spaces, down to the quantum level—changing what we know about how the universe works, and along with it, how we feel about our place in it. One of my favourite childhood stories suggested the same. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she goes through her own child-friendly perspective shift, going from big to small upon the ingestion of magical objects. As if to say that as we grow up and physically get bigger, we simultaneously feel smaller, knocked down a peg to the specks of dust that we are? I used to feel like a big fish in a small pond. Now I feel like a small fish in a deep, dark ocean. Funny, another one of my favourite childhood stories is jing di zhi wa, a Chinese idiom meaning the frog in the well. I’d been primed for perspective shifts for a long time, but it’s another thing to live it.

3

I keep coming back to edges, where things meet, shift, blur. A designated boundary, apparently not as simple as you would expect a line to be. Where a frame becomes the subject, or one colour bleeds into the other and you can’t tell when one stops being what it was and starts becoming something else. Not knowing if you’re inside or outside, if something’s beginning or ending. How much of me is who I think I am and how much of it is what others perceive me to be? Do they even meet? I have been called many things, all of them true, none of them accurate. At any moment, you are simultaneously the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will ever be. There is no line between young and old. It’s all relative until death, the definitive. Now I’m getting older and aging is this slow-moving metronome between feeling like you are closer to an end and feeling like you’re just starting. Scale out a bit, and I wonder: are we closer to the end of the human race, or at the beginning of just another frontier? Revolution means change, but it also means another round again. It’s hard to trace the boundaries of truth, lie, and illusion; we’re probably just making it up and slapping labels on things so that they fall neatly into our linear lives. We’ve become really good at this. But there aren’t really any real lines anywhere. Lines and their cousins, rules and boundaries—they help us get through things. They help us see and make and live.

4

An extended feeling of dot dot dot. Dirty blue and soundless ticking. The only way out is through, or so they say. So I get to work, try to recapture some of the old me before I can’t even remember who she is. The me that always wanted to make something real and beautiful, who gave up before anything started and somehow found herself on a computer all day, trying to find a million ways to tell you this is good shit when I haven’t even tried it. Who am I but the sum of all my decisions? And all in all, they worked out pretty okay. Three cats and a home I own. The best dessert I’ve ever had, and then again at: a campground in Washington, New York City, the island, Shanghai, and the fancy place eight minutes away. But I’m still looking at a sky full of stars, holding out on making a wish in case I’ve already used all of mine just to escape. When the next paragraph starts, will I be left behind? A brief mention in passing, for another generation, two at most. “When I was your age.” I go to the art store, pick up some pencil crayons because it’s 80 colours for under $50 and I’ve always hated the mess of paint. A year later I am on my hands and knees in paint-splattered clothes. Not a prayer, but the work of art. Old me wanted shortcuts. I used to write a line, and then another, and then wait. For what? Maybe for someone to tell me I was going the right way. I've been stretched by every projection and dream of potential, fears of not fitting into any box before the assembly line to success closes. The stars, there they are, still constellating. And I? A dream, a delusion, a dot and some lines coming back down to earth.