kradeelav | advice from three decades

(I posted this a month or two back when turning 30. archiving on here before deleting it on twitter, as per my usual comment scrub.)

Turning 30 real soon. tbh, I never expected to live past my mid-twenties. and yet, i've clawed my way to experience manager for brands you've heard of, creating irreverent sleazy art i've always wanted to see, and... never been happier.

three pieces of advice, a post.

1) if you're told to ignore/not read Something ... it's crucially vital that you do. single most important thing you could read. at absolute *worst* you wasted time understanding naked malice just a little clearer, and the shapes it takes to best avoid it in yourself.

at best? all of the moments i matured into a better person was borne of those deliberate choices of pushing beyond what 'was comfortable to read'. self censorship is a slow poison to the soul.

2) almost every case of quarter-life crisis i see in my artistic peers is people snuffing out their personal joy in the name of monetization. authenticity and monetization are inherently corrosive to each other.

“bring your full self' to your job is the rankest lie when your joy is taboo, and authority is punitive towards the nail that sticks out. beat their own game by refusing to play straight. I walked away from patreon, $$, and from ~Cool Status Things~ precisely for this reason.

3) have grace for your fellow meatbags.

love and mercy, even with no affection, no ulterior/useful reason, beyond our own in/out-group biases ... even the groups that we deem sketchy ... never being doormats to active malice-

- but grace as a sense of recognizing the frail tired, lonely human in each of us.

grace simply because one of us desires it for another, in the moment.

god knows we could all use more of this.