There’s a specific heartbreak in opening a fresh box of art supplies and loving and resenting them at the same time. That’s my relationship with Faber-Castell oil pastels. Months running now, no end in sight, all because the colours are too good to walk away from.

The pigment quality is genuinely stunning — rich, saturated, buttery when layered. Blending is smooth, the hues feel true, and there’s a warmth to the palette I haven’t found elsewhere. When a piece is working, it’s *really* working.

Then there’s the quality control. Or the apparent lack of it. Some glide like a dream; others drag like sandpaper. You start second-guessing your own technique — was it me, my paper, too much pressure? — and then a different stick from the same set works perfectly, and you realize: it was never you.

Other brands are either duller but reliable, or exciting on paper and worse in practice. Faber-Castell has just enough magic in the pigment to keep me hooked, like a friend who’s unreliable but always shows up with the best stories. Every new stick is a tiny gamble — will it glide, or crumble into dust on my desk? You don’t know until you commit.

I’ll probably never make peace with this. Not a healthy dynamic, not a rational one, but a permanent fixture of my art drawer — crumbly bits and all.

Got a love-hate art supply of your own? Misery loves colourful company.

Life is overflowing with lessons, adventures, and wonders waiting to be discovered. That’s why it stings to admit I dropped my language classes. French and Portuguese had filled my thoughts before summer arrived, but my tinnitus took over, and I realized risking my GPA for something I could learn later wasn’t wise. As a design major who still fumbles with tech, I decided to pour my energy into mastering design software this summer. This isn’t really about academics, though. It’s about perseverance, which feels strange to say after confessing to quitting. But what if I told you it was almost effortless to let go? The money and time lost didn’t matter as much as the relief of not feeling like a miserable old lady or repeating my past of dropping out for a semester. Maybe I didn’t quit at all. Maybe I just shifted my focus.

I started drawing and painting as a child, like so many others, but I can’t remember the last time I truly enjoyed it. Art was always something I began but never finished. In facing this, I realized my favorite way to procrastinate is to dive into something else, anything to avoid what I should be doing. It’s a painful loop, convincing myself I’m busy while drowning in distractions of my own making. Imagine living like this for years.

This isn’t a cure for procrastination, but it’s my own reckoning. It has to end, for my own peace of mind. So I’m taking the first step: drawing every day, letting music in foreign languages I once hoped to learn fill the background. It’s not that I never will learn them, but for now, I choose to stay. Committing to something from my childhood feels more responsible than chasing something new every day. If I can take art classes, I will. If I can visit galleries, I will. I’ll find comfort in knowing my ears are holding me back from some things, but guiding me back to a life I cherished as a child. So why not rediscover it now? I want to see what it feels like to wander the city, to play with paints and colours whose names I never learned.

The sadness will fade.

I have a hard time talking about my tinnitus, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not a tumour. It’s not a disease with a name people recognize and nod gravely at. It won’t end my life. So I learned to treat it like a houseguest who overstays — something to be polite about, not something to complain about. I’d open my mouth to describe it and then close it again, because what right did I have to be this bothered by a sound?

But it is a sound. All day, every day, since some point in 2021 I can no longer pinpoint exactly. It sounds like wind chimes and screaming happening at the same time — something almost pretty, layered directly over something that isn’t. There’s no off switch, no quiet room I can walk into where it isn’t there. It is, in the most literal sense, inescapable.

What surprised me most isn’t the sound itself — you adapt to a lot, eventually — it’s what it does to my attention. Focus is the first casualty. I’ll sit down to read a paragraph, or have a conversation, or just think a single thought through to its end, and there’s this competing layer of noise demanding a cut of my processing power that I never agreed to give up. Some days it’s background hum. Other days it’s the loudest thing in the room, louder than whoever’s actually talking to me.

I think the reason I’ve stayed quiet about it is that pain seems to need a permission slip. If it’s not dangerous, if no one can see it, if it doesn’t show up on a scan — does it count? I’ve decided, slowly and not without some resistance from the old houseguest-etiquette voice in my head, that it does. Something doesn’t have to be life-threatening to be exhausting. It doesn’t have to be visible to be real. Five years of a sound that never stops is, on its own terms, a lot to carry — and I don’t think I need a more serious diagnosis to justify saying so.

I don’t have a tidy resolution here. I haven’t beaten it, outsmarted it, or made peace with it in any complete way. Some days I manage it well — sound therapy, distraction, just deciding not to listen to it as hard. Other days it wins, and I lose an afternoon to a screeching wind chime no one else can hear.

What I do have is this: permission, finally, to say it’s hard. Not as a complaint demanding sympathy, just as a fact about my life that’s been true for five years and counting. If you’re carrying something similar — visible or not, dangerous or not — I hope you’ve already given yourself that same permission. If not, consider this me handing it to you.