Dili’s Journal 傾聽你的心 ― dedicated to the people that got me here.

The Emperor’s New Complexion Featured

Nobody is white. This seems like an odd place to start, but look at your arm under decent light. Unless you’ve recently died, you will not find white. You’ll find beige, maybe with olive undertones. Pink if you’ve been exercising. Cream, sand, wheat – the cosmetics industry abandoned “white” as a descriptor generations ago because…

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  • Essay

What We Know

Visit your dentist twice a year. Sleep eight hours in an unbroken block. Floss every night. These instructions arrive wrapped in the authority of science, the reassurance of consensus, the patina of timelessness. They feel like facts discovered rather than decisions made – as though someone in a laboratory, bent over instruments, unearthed them from…

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  • Essay

Forgetting to Check

Last September, eating a peach with chocolate peanut butter ice cream in my kitchen a little after midnight, I realized I was happy. Not in the way you realize you’ve forgotten your keys – more the way you notice your breathing only after it’s slowed. Nothing special about the combination: cold peach from the fridge,…

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  • Essay

The Chrysalis

The most profound changes seem to require us to pull away from the very people who could support us through them. Counterintuitive, even cruel – yet this pattern appears everywhere we look – in nature, in personal growth, in creative breakthroughs. The more I’ve explored this paradox, the more I’ve come to see it not…

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