FRIDAY OPEN THREAD: Ask The Question Or Life Will Ask It For You

Ryan Yates
Sep 29, 2017
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Hi hello and welcome to this week’s Friday Open Thread, your weekly spot to talk about anything and everything and especially about you. How are you doing, what are you feeling, what’s going on over there?

image by Rory Midhani

Sometimes things are going along and they’re pretty okay or they’re awful actually or they just simply are, and then sometimes things are just… stuck. There’s inertia. There’s limbo. You have to wait, but you’re not really sure what you’re waiting for.

Fall is a time for action and explosion and transition and moving forward and taking everything from the year so far and pushing it one step further, keeping what you like and leaving the rest. But it seems like, talking to friends, this year it’s also a time for feeling uncomfortable and stuck and like all there is to do is sit and swim around in the dark. There’s inertia. There’s limbo. There’s reloading inboxes a million times or looking at the someone-is-typing dots only to have them vanish or rolling a problem over endlessly with no clear solution. There are plans without execution. There’s hope but it’s hard to tell what it’s for. There’s work, but no idea of what it’s pointing towards.

everything is fine

So this week, I want to talk about what you do when you’re stuck, or when you can’t control anything, or when you need to just dive completely into yourself — not as a way to block out the world, but as a way to find a way forward within it. How do you feel your feet on the ground and your breath in your body? How do you move yourself forward even when you’re stuck? How do you ask yourself questions so that life doesn’t ask them for you? Tell me your coping mechanisms and I’ll tell you mine. (Mostly mine involve screaming in nature and weeping in public and learning to be patient and still.)

Or just tell me about that neat dinner you made for yourself or how your cat is or what your nails look like today or that sharp new haircut or that thing at work or school or home that you really want to brag or bitch (or both?) about or anything else! Be right where you are. And then let’s talk about it.


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Ryan Yates

Ryan Yates was the NSFW Editor (2013–2018) and Literary Editor for Autostraddle.com, with bylines in Nylon, Refinery29, The Toast, Bitch, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and elsewhere. They live in Los Angeles and also on twitter and instagram.

Ryan Yates has written 1142 articles for us.