Welcome back to another Lines post! A series where I pluck out, dive into, and share some of my favorite lines from recent posts — breaking them down, unpacking the little details, and reflecting on why they matter to me.
I’ll admit, part of me still feels unsure about doing this. Like I’m clipping coupons out of my own journal and calling it a blog post. A scrapbook of “best ofs.” Self-indulgent, maybe. But also… fun.
Since starting my blogging streak, I’ve wanted to do some kind of recap post. My first attempt was with Messy, where I zoomed out to capture insights from entire posts. Inspired by Austin Kleon’s top-10 style newsletter recaps, it felt… okay. I think I did it maybe two or three times.
But Lines feels different. More nuanced. More detailed. More me. In the first Lines, I wrote about my fascination with wordplay — pulling influence from folks like George Carlin and Eminem. Since then, I’ve kept challenging myself to write sharper, stickier sentences. Little blips that can inspire a whole post and sometimes carry the weight of it all.
So here we are, Part 3.
Wind
Feels like you’re fighting this invisible force of nature that’s trying to hold you back. Giving you every excuse to head home.
This takes me back. I still remember that windy run around the park, talking to myself as I moved — all of it captured on my upgraded wireless lav mic, later transcribed from Voice Memos.
I love the alliteration here: “Feels, fighting, force.” “Hold, head, home.” Even a subtle echo of “every excuse” tucked in the middle.
But what makes the line special isn’t just that it’s about the wind (that darn wind). It’s that it’s also about anything that holds you back. Uncertainty. Shame. Fear. All those invisible forces giving you excuses to quit.
Break
Break is breath in the middle of a run. It’s the pause in the music that makes the chorus hit harder. It’s the step back before the work you love rots into the work you resent.
I love the imagery and contrast here. Apparently I reach for music metaphors more often than kitchen ones — go figure.
But the part that hooked me was this:
…the work you love rots into the work you resent.
The mirroring of love and hate. The rhythm of “the work you.” The double-R punch of “rots” and “resent.”
Rots.
That word was a happy accident, but it stuck. Because decay feels truer than a simple “becomes” or “turns into.” You don’t wake up one day suddenly resenting the work you love. It erodes. Slowly. A drip of frustration here, a pile of late nights there. At first it still looks familiar — the same melody, the same shape. But underneath, the rot is spreading.
And that’s why the break matters. Breath before collapse. Rest before resentment. The pause that saves the song.
Post-it
Not just the classic “don’t forget” note slapped on a fridge or wall, that tiny golden square of paper standing guard as the last line of defense.
This post was a very nerdy, very specific love letter — one of my favorites, even if analytics say otherwise.
That “tiny golden square of paper standing guard” still makes me smile. In our house, you’ll sometimes find those bright yellow guardians stuck on the kitchen table or garage door — sometimes mine, sometimes my partner’s. They’ve saved our butts more than once.
I like the imagination in this one: a little 3x3 neon soldier, absurdly heroic, holding the line — yelling HALT in all caps before you head off.
Try
Every hour spent polishing in secret only grew the anxiety. Like grade school again—shielding my test with my forearm, sweating over long division, muttering “not ready!” as if someone was dying to copy.
The feeling of shielding the work with amped-up “it’s not ready!” energy. I wanted to be playful with it, but this bit hit home. It took me right back to my design days.
I still remember: after a meeting, I asked for 2–3 hours alone to design something in Sketch (Figma wasn’t a thing yet). One of the frontend engineers stopped me and asked why we couldn’t just design and figure it out together.
I didn’t have a good answer. My insecurity and protectiveness over my imperfect WIP-WIP-WIP designs weren’t reasons. I hesitated… but agreed.
It may seem small, insignificant even — just an afternoon jam with a coworker. But that moment cracked something open for me. It taught me to be okay with it not being okay yet. To figure out the mess together. And it planted a seed that still shapes how I work today.
These days, instead of shielding my work with an arm, I open it up. Invite others in. To poke at promising ideas. To groan at dead ends. To experience the “OMG, this is it!” breakthroughs side by side. To celebrate the little wins together.
Because waiting won’t bring you clarity. Polishing won’t bring you certainty. The only thing that will… is trying.
I love the rhythm of that closer. Simple. Repetitive. A gentle nudge to just go.
Noise
At work, there seems to be a deafening amount of data. Slack channels scrolling endlessly, chatter about this thing or that—maybe important, maybe not. A symphony of pings and alerts, both loud and quiet, tugging at your attention exactly when you need that attention to stay on the thing in front of you.
Deafening amount of data.
The whole post was born from that phrase. I was making my morning coffee when it just popped into my head: “Noise. Deafening data.” I scribbled it on my left hand — ignoring the fact that I was literally surrounded by stationery in my kitchen, neatly laid out and organized by my past self, ready for moments exactly like this.
From there, I leaned hard into sound. Into textures, frequencies, and volumes: symphony, ping, loud, quiet. Echo. Distance. Resonance. Pitch. Bright. Blasting. Buzzing. Cavernous. Chatter. Clattering. Crowded. (The list goes on.)
Each word a knob, a fader, a dial — all intentional choices to build a kind of soundtrack in your head as you read. That was the goal anyway.
I’ve always been hypersensitive to sound. Physical sound. The best way I can describe it: I get a lot (a lot) of data from it. Echoes, distances, resonance, sharpness, the “ping” of one surface meeting another—metal, wood, rubber, plastic. My brain parses all of it, whether I want it to or not.
I almost cut this section. Even now, the inner critic mocks me:
“Oh, look at me, I’m sensitive to sound. I can tell what a suitcase wheel is made of just by hearing it roll by. La-di-da.”
(That suitcase thing just happened by the way. I’m currently writing this post in a hotel lobby.)
But the point wasn’t to show off. It was empathy. To connect with anyone who knows what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by too much noise.
And tuning out isn’t weakness. It’s discipline. It’s self-preservation. It’s choosing to protect your focus before it gets scattered and spread too thin. It’s an intentional act of editing—like trimming the noise from a track so the melody can shine through.
When I write about it, I imagine a music editing board with a thousand knobs. Fading frequencies up and down. Dropping the clutter so the main line stands clear.
That’s what I try to do with work, too. EQ the noise. Protect the melody.
Wrap
That’s a wrap for Part 3!
I don’t know how many of these I’ll write (3? 30? 300?), but I do know this: I’ll keep chasing lines that make me stop, grin, or mutter “oof, that’s good.”
Because that’s the fun part. These aren’t just scraps of wordplay. They’re sparks. Tiny ones, sure — but sparks that sometimes set a whole post on fire.
So I’ll keep scribbling. Keep stacking. Keep pulling threads until they tangle into something worth sharing.
See you in Part 4. Same time, same channel. (Bring snacks!)