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I’m Daman Arora (he/him) and I enjoy building things. Read more.
What a Bad Day Turns Into After You Repeat It Enough
A single bad day is a bad day. A bad day repeated enough times becomes something else. It becomes a rule you did not consciously write. The rule, repeated enough times, becomes an identity you did not consciously choose. The useful thing I keep coming back to is that this process has distinct layers, and each layer needs a different response. If you can tell which layer you are standing on, you know what to do about it....
The Hours After You Think You Heard a Dig
The previous post was about remarks you can quote. This one is about the much more expensive kind: the remark you cannot prove, that may not even have been addressed to you, that is built to make responding look paranoid and not responding feel like you let it slide. A direct insult costs you twenty minutes. An indirect dig can quietly cost you a week. The real cost is not the moment....
When Someone Makes It About You
There is a specific move a conversation makes where the thing on the table suddenly becomes you. You feel it before you can name it. The next two seconds decide the next hour, maybe the next week. These are the notes I keep for that moment. If you only remember five lines from this post, remember these: 1. Pause. 3 to 5 seconds. Say nothing. 2. Say "say that again." Flat, no edge....
The Ladder From Victim to Raw Passion: Seven Stages of How People Grow
In an earlier post I wrote about the mental shifts underneath a healthier way of being in your own head. This one is the next layer down: a map of where a person actually sits at any given moment, and how they move from being stuck at the bottom of the ladder to flourishing at the top. It is a seven-rung ladder. At the bottom is the most disempowered a human can get....
You Are a Processor, Not a Victim: Seven Shifts in How You See Your Own Mind
There are seven ideas I have been sitting with lately about how your own mind actually works. None of them are new. None of them are mine. But together they form something like an operating system for how to be in your own head without being at war with it. Here they are, in my own words, with what I think each one is really saying. 1. You are a processor of experience, not a passive victim of circumstance This is the one everything else sits on top of....