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Introducing Big Icky Strings, a new series dedicated to examining the uncomfortable things that shape how we think, behave, and relate to one another. Our first string? Jealousy.

You can say someone is angry with you, intimidated by you, or resentful of you. But suggest they’re jealous, and suddenly you’re the problem. Why is jealousy so socially dangerous to name, and what might we discover if we learned to recognize it accurately?

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“Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.” Twenty-five years after choosing Ravenclaw, I’m finally wondering what Rowena Ravenclaw actually meant, and whether her daughter’s story contains a warning for people like me.

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Turn off the tools. Strip away the polish, the production, and everything that helps your work travel. What’s left? This week, I’m thinking about the God-given part of creativity, the difference between expanding what you can produce and deepening what you can actually do, and what I want to be left holding when the lights go out.

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Sometimes the product works. The idea resonates. The problem is solved. And still…we don’t move. Why? This week, we’re talking about the sociology of caring: how other people’s participation changes our own, why some things become socially legible, and what it takes for a universe with a population of one to become a world.

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What happens when something you genuinely want arrives before the systems required to sustain it?

After a very brief stint as a graduate student, I’m thinking about capacity, timing, and the difference between abandoning a goal and refusing to weaken your current life in pursuit of one.

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As we become more sovereign, our decreasing need can become surprisingly loud.

This is an entry about protecting emerging independence, navigating enmeshment, and learning how to signal sameness without recommitting yourself to it.

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After a brief hiatus, Dear Sovereign Self returns for its second year with an exploration of reputation.

What does it actually mean to have a good one? How much of it can we intentionally build, and how much is simply the residue we leave behind?

This week, I’m revisiting an idea I first explored years ago: your reputation is the residue of your choices. From the reputation of our work to the lived experience of who we are, this is an entry about what precedes us into rooms, what remains after we leave them, and the complicated difference between building a reputation and performing for one.

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In chess notation, it marks the moment a pawn crosses the board and becomes a queen.

But I’ve always thought that little equation contained an entire philosophy about transformation.

This is an entry about the crossing, the capacity it creates, and the strange autobiography of a queen who remembers moving one square at a time.