Cakelin's Fables

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Memories are not a "normal" we can return to

Memories are not a "normal" we can return to

Until you can recognize that craving "normal" makes you susceptible to fascism and sacrificing others, your resistance will be empty.

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Connection Featured

Contextual Mismatch

Contextual mismatch simultaneously pushes us away from others and pulls us out of our bodies, disconnection and disembodiment. Contextual mismatch is manufactured against all of us, so that capitalism can fill in the gaps around us with comfort, convenience, conditioning, and cruelty.

Box of different colored spools of thread with white hand holding one spool at the bottom. Blue space background.

The Difference in Charge

My problems are only our problems when the solution is to disappear us.

I realize how insignificant I am

I realize how insignificant I am

I dream about a world where tech never existed. I consciously feel like there's no way I would want that. But I am craving something that is different than here and I don't know how it would feel.

White and yellow orbs over a colorful black background with repeating geometric patterns

Dangling By A Silver Thread

How do you bottle up the tangibility of your life and force another to drink it? If you were intimate with my suffering, if I could carry part of yours, what changes would that bring?

Ornate maple leaf in green, blue, gold with words and dashes in a circle around it "it takes the time it takes"

Alone Watching Atrocities

Put your own oxygen mask on first, they say. Before you help someone else. They never tell you what to do if some people don't have oxygen masks and others do but won't wear them.

Stylized image of me on a yellow lyra with colorful stars has been put onto a white hardcover notebook

Tech Fellowship Personal Statement

Yet I practice for me as I practice for you, no matter what you believe, think, or do. Where the world abandons, I welcome.

Wayside

The places and people I used to belong to. Haunts that now haunt me.

White hexagon tiles painted with unique geometric designs arranged in flower pattern, 7 groups of 7 tiles in different colors

Miraculously Mediocre

I am so afraid to sell others because I use all of my energy to sell myself. I'm an entrepreneur who only sells myself on making it through the next day.

In defense of boycott fatigue

In defense of boycott fatigue

These conditioned parts and roles that we often fall into with each other also exist inside of us. The parts of us that are weak and the parts of us that shame our own weakness. The gap between who we are and who we want to be.

T shirt layout without sleeves. "I am here, I am still here, we are, join us" in different colors and repeating patterns

I Need to Do It for My Mental Health

Are you going for self protection or projection?

A 4 picture collage of a full neck choker knit from the insides of a charging cord, with the tails hanging down

Looking and Finding

It's not enough. Consumption is not enough to fill this void. It is not enough to bury the cognitive dissonance and trauma of what happened.

Light up portrait with a face facing right made of colored geometric elements

Pandemic Isolation and Solitary Confinement

Can we find connection without comparison?

Longing and Dreading

Longing and Dreading

There is nowhere to go and nothing to do but survive. You dread the dreading and long for longing.

Did You Make the Right Choices or Were You Chosen?

Did You Make the Right Choices or Were You Chosen?

Here is a bewildering place to be.

Tech Hatred

Tech hatred serves as a warning: why add "founder" to your list of hated identities? That warning chases away the founders and products we need most.

Round doors with colorful lines and shapes.

Open Threads

The odd, the lovely, the perplexing of this moment.

The Homeostasis of Humanity

The Homeostasis of Humanity

Our ideas and networks are evolving, not our bodies. We adapt environments to us, yet we still create and uphold conditioned limitations. I am indefinitely excluded and isolated, yet my art can safely exist in spaces where I cannot.

Collage of 3 pictures of me, a white nonbinary person, holding a large stuffed unicorn poop emoji. Neon art filter applied.

On Being Impressed

Every time you make a change, you bring everyone with you. Not just the people you know, but people you've never even met. Healing is a collective effort with collective results.

A Temporary Narrative

A Temporary Narrative

Despite being close to vaccination, I've had a backward slide to overwhelm town. Am I doing enough? Am I changing too fast? I am always practicing and iterating, just to keep the slippery reassurance of purpose around. While being stuck or stalled gives me that familiar comfort of guilt and shame.

Dear 2019 Me: Who Were You?

Dear 2019 Me: Who Were You?

A glance at the past becomes a pseudo year-in-review. Some things change and some are possibly eternal.. for this human lifespan. I'm rumination royalty now.

The Grace to Give Space

The Grace to Give Space

A memory of an ex reminded me it's okay to pull from the past to stabilize and comfort yourself.

I Regret Adopting My Puppy

I Regret Adopting My Puppy

As my service dog puppy Pepper Ann nears a year old, do I continue to hope things improve during this pandemic or rehome her?

It's Time

I got stalked in graduate school.

It's Okay That Someone Else Got to Be Future You

Policy Featured

It's Okay That Someone Else Got to Be Future You

Together we form an unbreakable net. I believe in a Wisconsin that can enact important human-centered policies like paid leave.