This Is Me
December 3, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Blank Space by W David Marx
Listening: Meddle in the Mold by Banks
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Climate Risk
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Brain Eras & the pod is on Thirst
This week’s Writing & Such is called So Much Everything Else
This Is Me
An age ago, long before I would have reason to wonder whether my creative work might someday make any money, I was challenged by an art teacher to try something new—maybe fewer ninjas and robots, she suggested, perhaps a little more realistic, less comic book-inspired. Learn to draw the human figure, maybe try some still-lives. Flowers and vases, she gently implored.
Poppycock, I thought. This is my style. This is how I do art. This is me. To cast aspersions upon my robots, ninjas, and robo-ninjas is to besmirch my name and honor, flowers and vases be damned.
Well-meaning suggestions that I try something new, expand my horizons, thus felt like an attack on my creative character and artistic worth.
This same general pattern repeated across other aspects of my childhood.
Don’t like how I write? Too bad, that’s how I do it. Believe I’m wasting my time eating junk food and playing video games all day? You clearly don’t get me. Think I should try to expand my friend group beyond people who think and act exactly like me? No way man, stop trying to stifle my flow.
The people calling out aspects of my life, my work, my approach to things as imperfect and possibly improve-upon-able weren’t being pushy, they were trying to be helpful. To me, though, these suggestions felt like judgements, so I psychologically recoiled from them, convincing myself that they had issues, not me. If they really cared, they’d let me do my thing and stop trying to get me to do someone else’s thing.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized many of these people were right. I was much happier with different habits, evolved social mores, a wider variety of friends.
My personal style—in art, in writing, in living—grew richer as I earnestly explored alternative avenues, even if I ultimately ended up back where I started.
Understanding the larger context in which I was operating informed how I made and did and learned and grew, and I never would have caught sight of that context had I kept my feet stubbornly planted, refusing to accept that I might not have all the answers, might not have stumbled upon the one correct way to do everything on my first try.
Part of my issue was that I believed these things, these approaches to work and life, were the entirely of what made me, me, as opposed to interchangeable, iterable, discardable aspects of how I do things.
My ninjas and robots are no more fundamental to who I am than the brand of oatmeal I buy. But especially when we’re young, and especially when we lack a deeper, richer sense of self, it’s easy to be reductive and assume the logos we wear, the hobbies we cultivate, and our current personal style, body type, or dietary preferences are the only important, distinctive things about us.
It’s worth trying to maintain some of our youthful peculiarities, despite the (often quite powerful) social and economic pressures to fully discard them. But these quirks become more interesting, expressive, and specific if we allow ourselves to soak up the big picture and enrich ourselves and our eccentricities with what we discover along the way.
It’s not selling out to learn and grow, and we’re not being untrue to ourselves if we decide to upgrade or replace some superficial aspect of our work, our lives, or our behaviors.
Self-consciousness can make us feel otherwise, as can deep, nostalgic feelings about robo-ninjas, junk food, or whatever else.
Learning, trying, and experimenting isn’t a retreat from familiar ground, though. It’s an act of reconnaissance that grants us deeper understanding and a more informed perspective from which we can then make better us-shaped choices, predicated on a rounder sense of who we actually are.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.
Interesting Links
If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.
What Else
We are absolutely careening toward 2026, and I’m doing what I can to set myself up for a wonderful and productive new year.
Part of my year-end process is checking in on all the things I’m doing and assumptions I’m making to ensure they still hold true, and are still the best options and paths for the outcomes I’d actually like to achieve.
So lots of navel-gazing, lots of analysis, lots of asking myself “Is that what you actually want, or is that what you feel like you should want?”-types of questions.
All of which is generally enjoyable and interesting, though getting into the right mindset for this kind of open and honest assessment can be a task, unto itself.
Say Hello
New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!
You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.
I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or interoception.
Your 80 year old self would give anything to have the day you’re having.
Funny how much of growing up is realising that half the things we once treated as identity were really just habits.