What I learned when I decided to publish my own magazine
The desk I spent creating most of the first issue.
You know when you’re in a transitional period of life, maybe you’re in between jobs or deciding whether or not to go back to school. Maybe you’re living somewhere for only a short period of time, and you feel like you aren’t quite where you want to be, but you also no longer resonate with where you once were.
Those transient moments feel so ambiguous, but often I’ve realized limbo creates space for the most growth.
When you’re forced to oscillate between two worlds, there’s a sort of alchemy that occurs. It almost seems as if the universe creates these environments to send you over the edge, toppling you into a different version of yourself on purpose.
That moment just before a phrase you’re searching for comes to you, when it’s on the tip of your tongue and your brain is reaching into the abyss to find some semblance of familiarity. That precipice, right before a freefall. I think life gives us that feeling in order to push us out of our comfort zone.
This is where I was when I decided to create Continental Social. I found myself in a loop of being dissatisfied with my life, but also unwilling to change because it never felt like the right time. I never felt like the right person. I had a sense of where I wanted to be, but I never reached for it because I was always waiting on the feeling of “this is it.”
I was stuck in a loop.
“What’s the point? What if it’s not good enough? What if it’s not what I want it to be?”
Eventually I got sick of being a shell of a person full of resistance. I noticed the rigid world I created lacked play. It seeped into every aspect of my life. I didn’t dress up because I didn’t own the most expensive items. I didn’t decorate because I’d have to move again in a year anyway.
I was living in the before.
I remember waking up one morning and realizing that I was living in a pattern that would get me nowhere. I had a mindshift change, seemingly out of nowhere. I realized if I was going to achieve any of the vast goals I had, I would have to begin, even if I didn’t feel ready.
The morning I woke up contemplating ways I had blocked my own creativity. I remember staring at the sunlight’s shape through my curtains. Something about that morning stuck with me enough to capture it.
It seemed spontaneous, but I think it was a build up of frustration day after day of never allowing myself to exist.
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When I decided to create something for myself, I was deciding against perfectionism.
Throughout the process of Continental Social, I learned to push myself through discomfort. I learned that perfectionism is only a blockage to any sense of expression.
Because expression isn’t about being exact. It also isn’t about the final product in most cases.
What it’s really about is trying. By playing and failing and learning and relearning you carve pathways that wouldn’t have otherwise been there had you not just begun.
When I hit publish on issue one, I was burning to scrap everything. There were many times in the production process I felt like calling it quits because I knew it was never going to be the exact replica of my initial goal.
I had to continuously remind myself that wasn’t the point. The point was to be a part of something larger than me. To find expression outside of myself. To challenge myself to sit in the discomfort of knowing it isn’t perfect.
It was only in the midst of issue two that I began to feel as though I found my footing. It took me years and I had to rehash those discomforts all over again each time they came up, but it slowly became much easier to move through. I could tell my confidence was far greater the second time around.
A full circle moment, Temporizing was an essay I wrote after reading Andre Aciman’s essay of the same name in June of 2024. It states that, by waiting, one ceases to exist, and only with action does one begin to solidify.
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I think the plague of instant gratification has affected us all in ways we might not even realize. It gives us excuses. It creates a false world. Growing up in the age of the internet, it was hard to extrapolate myself from the cycle of more. Even now, I catch myself waiting for a dream life, waiting for moments to happen to me. But it’s important to remember anything worth something takes action, intention, and error.
Many of the books I picked up at the time were, what I believe now, to be the catalyst for my mindset shifts.
Because when you avoid failure, you lose the chance to find your way back.
There’s a quote by Cheryl Stayed from Tiny Beautiful Things that goes:
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
It always reminds me that there is no grand happening to wait for in order to begin. Life is the small moments stacked up against each other. So create for the sake of creating. Create for the purpose of holding something in your hands that could perish in decades time. Know that something is delicate, briefly punctuated, and still willfully adore it in the present.
That is what becomes you.
