i got a library card
& it changed my life
꧁ ꧂
I unintentionally gave myself a severance package from social media—one month of being laid off without a Christmas bonus.
Exhaustion became my new circumference. Weary of my online geometry, I’ve become shaped by body comparison, someone’s new bag, again, and calculating what the fuck a viral hook is.
I sunk.
I forgot to swim. I forgot how to swim. Pooling my creative resources, I decided to leave the shallow end and become disgustingly fascinated with my real world again.
They say social media isn’t real, but it is. It becomes your reality, and when you close the screen and tap off an app, you find yourself in a mid-panic because you have to meet yourself without a bio.
Who are you without a caption? Can you describe something without abbreviated, shortened language? What is your dialectic?
I’ve been tethered to a tongue that isn’t mine. Tongue-tied, I was lost in my phone, exploited, and I forgot that I was the way out.
2026 is the year I become so entrenched in the way I speak and how words shape my life force that I simply can’t go back. I refuse. I’ve found my God-given geometry in books that open me to pages of my spirit’s speech.
December 5th, 2025: my last post of the year, vacant as a human being. Checked out, I traveled internally.
January 5th, 2026: I spent countless hours in libraries, read more books in a month than I did in a year, started carrying a dictionary, filled a pocket book of new words, left DMs read, became me. It’s only the beginning of January. It’s only me, the embryo.
You can always begin again. Birth is an illusion. Detering from the masquerade of being stuck in a timeline, I gave myself a library card.
You can’t argue with your limitations anymore when you check out books. You start caressing yourself, your daily decisions with solicitous care. You must, because you have to return these pages. You reappear in your inner world. The outside becomes clear of this.
Ephemera dissipates, and you're left with the significance of your personal character.
The protagonist in your waking life develops, and its precision infiltrates you.
You can’t help but disrupt what you thought consumption was before. What at once feels sombre in 5-second videos becomes flowered hills of vibrancy, colored barriers of flora reintegrating into the biome of your brain.
Digestion, in the form of literacy. You’ve missed your appetite, and you had but the faintest idea.
Give yourself one month with a library card.
One month to engulf the barrier between you and who you left behind a screen.
One month to take care of something. My God!
To borrow a book. To act as its breathing umbrella in the rain because you mustn’t get a single noun wet. I’ve mothered library books this past month. I’ve re-parented myself in the process.
Getting a library card has done more for my heart than anything I could ever remember from scrolling. From any product I’ve saved. From any quote I’ve stacked in a digital folder. I stopped buying so many damn matchas out.
Picturesque snapshots of plywood tables under careful lighting, masked by dialed-in latte art, didn’t find me in December. It won’t find me in January either.
I’m at the library. Don’t call my name over the counter. I’m absent, and I’m claiming my real handle again.
Left in the dim corners of myself, I mustered the courage to be my own light source.
I got a library card.
I turn each page, ambition lost on me (exhale), I map out my being like she’s uncharted territory.
I got a library card.
So when you ask what’s new, I’ll say, “I got a library card, and I keep checking out new versions of me.”
xo
sierra
Quotes that have recently devoured me (from library books):
⋅˚₊‧ ୨୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅ “The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.” All Fours, Miranda July.
⋅˚₊‧ ୨୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅ “I then sat with my doll on my knee till the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room.” Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë.
⋅˚₊‧ ୨୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅ “ Any writer may be in or out of step with his or her time, but a great one is inextricably bound to place.” Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz.
How Should A Person Be? Sheila Heti
I just want to hug your writing so close to me!
your writing is DELICIOUS. licking my lips, my dear. “I got a library card, and I keep checking out new versions of me.” THISSSSSSSSSS