Unquiet
Things

I watched one random video about some Japanese stationery awards and became immensely and immediately influenced. You know how it goes – thirty minutes later I’m adding things to online shopping carts like I’m preparing for the apocalypse and the only currency will be perfect gel pens and washi tape.

The haul arrived, all pristine and beautiful in its carefully designed packaging. Kire-Na highlighters in sweet colors that made my heart do a fluttering thing. An adorable letter set so aesthetically pleasing I wanted to frame it instead of use it.

And then came the familiar paralysis!

I become scared to use the nice things I buy. It’s all so pretty and I start fretting about doing it wrong or stupid or placing a sticker in a not-exactly-perfect spot. The Japanese stationery sits there looking at me accusingly while I continue using my beat-up old pens because what if I waste the good stuff on something crappy and dumb?

This is, objectively, insane behavior. I could get hit by a truck or fall off a craggy cliff or get kidnapped and stuffed into a hyperbaric chamber for four years, and I’d have so many regrets about not using those cool highlighters. (Also, yes, we just finished watching Department Q, which explains the oddly specific kidnapping scenario.)

Anyway, I’d written about this exact tendency before in a post called “Do The Fucking Thing, Little Sarah” that I never actually shared because it was over the summer and I wasn’t posting to social media, but …also because I was scared it wasn’t perfect enough. The irony was not lost on me!

So last weekend I decided to break the pattern. Sort of.

I bought a big ass water bottle specifically to showcase my Rebecca Chaperon sticker collection – accumulated over months of backing her Patreon – because hydration shmydration, this was always about the stickers. But instead of letting them languish in their pristine sheets forever, I enlisted Yvan to help place them. This way I got the satisfaction of actually using them without the anxiety of potentially messing up the placement myself.

Hey, baby steps count too!

I also grabbed one of those beautiful green highlighters and marked a passage in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a bit about how “futuristic” music has become just another retro style, how we’re stuck thinking Kraftwerk still sounds like the future even though it’s as dated now as big band jazz was in the ’70s. Fisher’s pointing out how cultural time has “folded back on itself” instead of moving forward, how we’ve lost that sense of linear progression and ended up in this weird simultaneity where decades blur together. Which sort of felt profound? Something about being trapped in aesthetic loops, about how innovation calcifies into nostalgia. The world did not end. The highlighter did not judge my choice. The book survived the interaction.

These are small victories, but they are good and they matter! Every time I choose to use something instead of hoarding it “for later” or “when I deserve it” or “when the moment is perfect,” I’m practicing a different way of being in the world. One where I get to enjoy the things I bought to enjoy, where the pleasure is in the using rather than the having.

The stickers look excellent on the water bottle. The highlighted sentence glows warmly and weirdly on the page. And somewhere in my brain, little Sarah is doing a tiny victory boogie (a real small one because Sarah doesn’t actually dance) because she finally did a fucking thing.