For the Birds: Full moon PSA

This just in: Language is WEIRD.

Thanks for being here! Did you know I create inspiring prompts, exercises, and worksheets for paid readers? Upgrade your subscription and receive gentle, impactful, & weird creative support every single month:

---

Dear Birds,

Language is weird! It’s weird if you’re neurodivergent and it’s weird if you’re not.

It’s one of the only artistic mediums that we use for actual basic survival. We wield it daily: To ask for help, to describe pain, to reply to emails, to apologize, to show concern, or to write about how weird language is.

(Is it just me, or does language always feel meta?)

It’s full of rules! Grammar and propriety and gatekeeping. Meanings are established, but they’re also… kind of entirely made up?

Words have denotations, sure—but also connotations, cultural baggage, made-up idioms, shifting moods, textures, and tone. Words are stretchy! Slippery. Charged.

If you don’t think words are strange little spells, try reading a poem.

Good gawd: try writing one.

If you’ve written a shitty little draft of something, I promise you: There’s no reason to feel bad. You’re making things up! Making things up takes iteration and practice.

By the way, you get to make things up. You have to, really, but you’re also thoroughly, enthusiastically allowed to.

Chris Kraus: “As soon as you write something down, it’s fiction.”

Yaaaaaaasss!

All writing is either more accurate or less accurate pointing. Us writers are all just trying to point well.

If the act of writing is feeling tense these days—if you’re being hard on yourself about your output, or you’re feeling stuck between wanting to write and feeling like you can’t—remember this:

Language is invented.

When you’re a writer, you are also an inventor.

You can write anything you want to, whenever you want to, until you’d like to stop.

You can play, experiment, and mess up.

You can bring your passions, obsessions, and special interests to the page.

If you’re desperate for a place to begin, start with what you love-love, no matter how embarrassing or silly or mainstream.

Some things I love: Guy Fieri. Compression socks. Talking about neurodivergence.

Use prompts to get you started. Or invent your own!

Try making:

• A tiny field guide on how to take an interesting walk.

• A list of words about how you feel right now, but with poetic definitions.

• A recipe for turning grief into pleasure, or a recipe for turning pleasure into confidence.

• A bad poem about the moon.

Language is weird! Which means writing can be silly, sacred, defiant, bizarre, or indulgent. It can be a space to stretch out, to unmask, to misbehave, or simply to experiment.

Today’s full moon might be pulling the tide in your brain. That’s okay! Write the tide. Point well—you’re capable. Laugh about all of it, if you feel compelled to.

Your creativity is here for you. So are words.

Enjoy them!

---

Dear reader,

→ What would happen if you wrote something silly on purpose?

→ What’s one tiny obsession or odd joy you’d like to capture in words today?

→ If you trusted yourself unconditionally, what might happen on the page?

I hope you’ll let me—& all of us—know.