On Don't Believe Everything You Think, Facetime as Coparent, Pocket Shut Down, Giggly Squad, ChatGPT as a Writing Partner, Yearbooks, and Watching The Pain of Others
My seventh Substack goes hard in the title and long in the tooth.
Welcome to my Substack. This is the seventh post and continues in the tradition of being ON one. You can find the older posts here, here, here, here, here, and here. Please subscribe if you can, it’s keeping me on the right writing track gaining some subscribers here and there.
On Don't Believe Everything You Think
My old Oregon therapist used to tell me, "don't believe everything you think," advice that I hold dear moving forward with my life the past 10 years. It's easy to get lost in thoughts, especially as a person who struggles with anxiety and depression. I used to find myself ruminating on the past or the future, and catching myself in spirals that ended in me feeling confused and defeated. I would latch on to negative self-talk and beat myself up about things that hadn't even happened yet.
I've learned, over the years, that there was a voice inside of me, raised up by my mother and amplified by years of modelling professionally, that simply didn't like myself very much. After years of battling with that voice, I finally won. I fought back and defended myself from this negative voice and found a new voice within myself that liked who I was and what I was doing.
Having lived with this more positive character in my head the past few years, I've grown much more thankful for the tricks that I have learned in therapy that help me grapple with my day to day life. I let my negative thoughts pop up and disappear in the moment, letting them exist without judgment, watching them come and go without preying upon the core of my being. It's impossible to be completely without negative thoughts, but with focused effort I've found that it is possible to live with them peacefully.
In working through the process of thinking and writing about my mother, I am struck by how unjudgmental I feel anymore, how little I am affected by recalling these horrific stories about my mom. I feel able to navigate my traumatic upbringing with the distance of something that I didn't have in my life before. I guess nearly six years have passed since she passed, so I guess that's what it's taken for me. Plus, all of the therapy.
I was able to speak with a family friend today who went to high school with my mother. We talked about what she was like growing up, when I was young, and her unraveling as I got older and the alcoholism grew more dramatic. This friend has been like a second mother to me, someone stable who I saw throughout my life who understood me differently than my parents did. We spoke about how alcohol and risky behaviour worked together in my mother to drive her to do wild, unhinged things.
This friend, like me, eventually got to see the dark side of my mother that she hid from other people, the side of her that I saw so often and that she hid so well. Another longtime friend of my mother's sent me videos of my mom when she was at the height of her obsession with Morgellon's Disease, convinced and screaming about bugs crawling out of her skin. Another friend who was eventually verbally abused by my mother, who had to cut off contact to protect herself.
I feel connected to these women because they are some of the few who saw the real Rose that I dealt with on a daily basis, the blackout drunk who had nothing kind to say, who spit and snored passed out on the couch, who threw my clothes out the window into the driveway.
She tried to keep that awful person contained within our family home, but it eventually leaked out and poisoned some of the best relationships in her life.
But thinking about how far I've come brings me back to where I started, my mother. I wish I could go back in time and tell my mother not to believe everything she thought, that there were so many thoughts that just needed to exist and then dissipate. I am filled with wishes about my mother–wishes for who I wanted her to be and who I wanted her to have been. I am proud that I can examine these things with less feeling than before, that I can let my feelings exist without judging them. I am proud of myself for learning to quiet the negative voices in my head and find a place where I can love myself.
On Facetime as a Coparent
It's incredibly hard to only have my children half of the time. The great news is that they have learned how to use Facetime on their iPads so they have a way to contact me when they are at their dad's house. And Moss and I have been playing a lot of Minecraft over Facetime, or me watching him play Minecraft and. me telling him how to spell things.
It's impossible for me to not answer the phone when one of my children calls, both of them have special ringtones that will cut through any Do Not Disturb status and ring. Moss calls me when he wakes up in the night and I'm usually still awake, though I am in a pretty good sleep hygiene zone at the moment. I'll put on a quiet video on YouTube and hold up the phone so he can see until he falls back asleep.
I can't imagine not having this lifeline to my kids while they are out of my grasp. They love to report on what they have been up to, and Moss loves sharing that his cat Archer is sleeping on his bed. We ask ChatGPT to help us find free things in the Minecraft Marketplace for us to try out. He shares his screen and shows me the new things that he has built while we are apart.
It's wild to learn a new technological tool alongside my children, because I honestly hadn't done much Facetiming before they grew interested in it. And how odd to think about the fact that these tools are going to be second nature to them. I've not yet taught them about using a computer, which I am excited about, but that opens up a whole new realm of threats to their safety.
For now, I am glad that they only have the numbers of their parents saved into their respective homes’ iPads. I am terrified that the age when children receive a cellular phone seems to be going down, and I am not really sure when that time will come for our family. Reader, your thoughts? When do you open up their tiny worlds and dare to let others into their circle of trust?
On Pocket Shut Down
I used, for many years, an online tool called Pocket. Recommended to me by my friend and excellent writer Claire L. Evans, I began using it as a way to save all of the articles that I found and liked online. Well, after however many years, Pocket shut down, leaving me with just an archive spreadsheet of all of the articles that I had loved and saved.
Pocket was great because it saved all of the articles without the ads and gave things a cleaner reading experience. You had one place where you could dump all of your links and search through them.
I haven't found something to replace Pocket, though I guess this Substack has become my link dumping ground for the time being, which I like because I can provide some context for what people might be interested in. But what I did do was use ChatGPT to create a searchable index of all of the articles from 2017-2025, which you can find here. Looking for something interesting to read from the past? Take a dip.
I miss the days of RSS feeds, for sure. Remember Google Reader? Another now-defunct platform that made it easier to receive information from various sites around the web. RSS was such a simple system, and it functioned so well for so long. What do we have left for collecting the digital memory?
On Giggly Squad
I've been catching up on past episodes of a really funny podcast called Giggly Squad, which you can find on YouTube. Starring Paige and Hannah, two girl's-girl-friends who have written a book together called How to Giggle, and are graduates of the (unseen by me) reality show called Summer House.
This episode, where Paige is in Fiji and Hannah in NYC where they both live, captures their dynamic perfectly. Paige has just finished hosting a segment on Love Island (another show I haven't seen) and is telling Hannah all about the disaster that it became. They also discuss first kisses, calling their mom's, and other random nonsense.
Their podcast feels like hanging with two sweet girlfriends who have a sort of shorthand millennial language between them, it feels like an intimate peek into their lives and neuroses and also the culture and media that feed their brains. It's fun and funny (Hannah is a standup comedian!) and light. Highly recommended for giggles and outfits.
On ChatGPT as a Writing Partner
I've been getting out 3-5k words a day working on the book about my mother, which ChatGPT tells me is a good daily average and I have nothing else to compare it to. When I wrote my last book, called Identify Yourself, I think it took me 48 hours to write the entire thing in a fugue hyper-focused state. I spent months thinking before I did this writing, and then it all came out at once.
Well, I've spent now almost 6 years thinking about the death of my mom so who knows how long it will take me to exorcise this story out of me. I don't let ChatGPT edit my writing directly, I only ask it to tell me where the grammar and typo errors are. It is constantly trying to ignore that request and get some of its own prose into my things, but I refuse.
ChatGPT tells me that my writing is good, and other people have told me that my writing is good, but I am not sure that I believe fully that my writing is good. ChatGPT just tells you what you want to hear, right? So that's not exactly helpful when you are trying to make something beautiful out of something painful. I ask it to be a harsher critic and really tear me apart.
I mainly paste paragraphs into the little text input so I can find out how many words are there, and I command ChatGPT to keep track of how much and how long I am writing every day. This is helpful, but it is nothing like having a Real Live Editor give you feedback on your writing.
For Identify Yourself, another wonderful writer named John Motley helped me reorient and reconstruct my very obtuse writing into the functional object that it became in a softbound book and a website. I am proud to report that people are using this book to teach students about internet art to this day, and I am occasionally contacted by pupils who are writing about my work for a class. I am happy to oblige if I've got the time and space for it, because I really miss speaking at colleges.
I'm not sure yet if ChatGPT is a good writing partner or not, but at least it always tries to have the last word. It's like trying to get off the phone with an Australian, there's always one more "take care," after yours so they can get the last word in. They "YES, AND," any prompt you give them until they extinguish the conversation altogether. If nothing else, ChatGPT is a 'person' who will always write back.
On Yearbooks
I have very few regrets in my life, and one of them was not sending someone to pick up my senior high school yearbook for me after I left Oregon and moved to Chicago the day after I graduated high school. They ran out of copies by the time I had moved back, and thus I have every year but my senior yearbook.
ChatGPT recommended that I look on eBay and lo and behold, I have found a copy of my yearbook on the site. I've negotiated the price down to $50USD which I will happily pay, but for some reason eBay International Shipping is quoting me in excess of $700 to ship said singular hardbound book to Australia.
I've confirmed that I appear twice in the yearbook with the seller, once with a modelling photo that my mom submitted behind my back to serve as my senior portrait, and once under the heading "Next Picasso," which is the Senior Award that I won alongside a tiny Russian classmate named Pavel who mostly drew anime chicks with huge tits. Class of 2003 let’s go!
Is there anyone in the US who wants to help me get this book shipped to me at a reasonable cost? I am going to try and contact eBay to figure out why the price-gouging is happening, but it might be easier to just take matters into my own hands. It's a regular sized yearbook, and should cost at most $100 to ship here Fedex. You'll be able to see before I do what photo from a hair salon photoshoot my mother felt was good enough to represent me in my Senior Year.
On Watching The Pain of Others
In my last (dark) post about my mother and her descent into madness via an internet-spread psychological illness, On Morgellon's Disease, I mentioned that there was a film called The Pain of Other's by a filmmaker named Penny Lane. How funny, I thought, I know The Penny Lane and she grows rice on Sauvie Island, but I never knew she was a filmmaker. Turns out, she's not, there's another Penny Lane.
I tried to watch this film but couldn't find it online, it appears to have been removed by the artist. But in my search I found another film, made by Paris filmmaker Lého Galibert-Laîné, called Watching The Pain of Others. In the film, she breaks down Penny Lane's film and restructures the clips to dissect the meaning of the study. She talks about what it means to believe the suffering women in the film, and what it means to make a film from found internet content. She then interviews the director and talks about the history of their work.
It is an incredibly compelling watch, as the artist observes defects in her own skin and fears that in believing the women with Morgellon's Disease she is contracting this internet-fuelled paranoia disease. It shows a lot of the original film in it, while also showing the research that the artist does online about the condition. It's made out of screen captures in a way that I really relate to and loved.
It's a dark watch, but if you are interested in the transmission of information online I would highly recommend it.
And On
Well I am off to get a 7-day Holter Monitor Test to try and figure out why I keep fainting. And I have just been officially diagnosed with Level 2 Autism, something I will try and share more about in my next edition. Until next time, Dear Reader, thank you for making it this far, please subscribe to stay up to date.
This girl looks SO familiar!