Justyna Dorsz

Personal

Social pressure

Have you ever noticed how people dislike when you do something uncommon? I used to be vegan and my colleagues tried to get me to eat meat. I started going to the gym every day and I would hear that it’s “excessive” and “unhealthy”. Even small things have this effect. I remember once a friend offered me chocolate, and I didn’t want it, and yet I was pressured to accept it.

Lately, I’ve noticed the same thing about consuming news. I don’t do that. In fact, I actively avoid news. When someone tries to tell me anything about politics or sports or crime, I often say I don’t want to know. But they persist! Even if you say it a few times, they really feel they need to tell you what they know. I sometimes resort to blatantly changing the topic.

It’s not that I am completely uninterested in what is going on. But most of the news that people want to share are awful things because that’s what elicits the strongest emotions. If I knew those things, they would stay in my head. I would think about them and worry. So, I would rather not know all that stuff.

Expressing myself through cats :)

Do you also feel you really need longer stretches of alone time? I often feel this way. And I know most people don’t understand it.

A lot of my designs express my feelings and this one is no exception:

“I want to be left alone” on Threadless

It’s exaggerated, of course. I don’t think I would need a year or two. But lately I’ve been spending a bit too much time with people, and now I need need some distance.

Last Night

I had never called the police before in my life. Yesterday I called them twice.

I am still shaken after what happened, and I am writing it down here to get it off my mind.

Last night before 11 p.m., my next-door neighbors started arguing — not unusual for them — but it escalated. The woman who lives there was furious, I could hear her cursing, I could hear the man too, but he wasn’t as loud. Something fell over, there was more shouting. A child started to cry, someone was running, and then the child was full-on wailing, “Please don’t,” and “I won’t anymore, please no.” I grabbed my phone, but then I heard their door open and more screaming. I looked through the peephole. A man was dragging a girl to the elevator, she was trying to get away and sobbing, “please don’t.”

I was unlocking my door and trying to wrench it open at the same time, and when I opened it, the man had already pushed her into the elevator and was blocking her way out. I moved towards them but didn’t have a plan, I know my voice was shaking when I said, “What’s going on? I am calling the police.” There was a movement to my right — the door to their apartment was open, and the woman shouted something and the man responded, it was too loud to understand anything. “I am going to call the police,” I tried to yell over them. The woman shouted, “go to sleep.” She left the door wide open, but I couldn’t see her anymore. I turned back to the elevator, the door was closed, I run over and pressed buttons at random, but it must have moved away already.

I got back to my apartment, called the police. They asked a lot of questions, what I heard, how old was the girl (about 10 years old), was it the first time it happened (I heard them arguing before but nothing that bad), and so on. And then the operator said to call again if anything changes. When I ended the call, I could again hear screaming and crying. The man must have returned home. And I could hear the child pleading again. I waited and waited, and I thought that maybe the police were not going to arrive that night at all. The child was crying and there was still yelling. It’s so strange — I told them I was going to call the police, and it hasn’t calmed them down at all? I waited for what I thought was 15 minutes and called the police again, and said that the man and the child had returned home. The operator told me that it has just been 7 minutes since my last call and that officers would arrive soon.

When the officers arrived a few minutes later, they rang my doorbell and asked me to tell them again what had happened. Then they went next door and I could only hear a woman’s soothing voice, “nothing happened, really, everything is fine”, and a police officer insisting “we won’t leave, there’s a witness.” After a few minutes, she let them in.

The officers were there for 20 minutes, and then they left, and I lay in bed for hours, listening. I didn’t hear any more crying.

That’s not the end, though.

Today at 8 a.m. the woman came to my door. I didn’t want to talk to her, she sounded insane last night. But I opened the door. “Was it you that called the cops?” she asked. And I thought, uh-uh, she’s going to hit me, I said “Yes”. She started crying, “I am so sorry for last night. My mother was diagnosed with cancer, she is dying, and this is so difficult, my daughter is not listening to me, she doesn’t want to go to sleep or brush her teeth.” She kept telling me about her life, and how her daughter had anger issues, and was bullied in school, and “Sometimes I have to yell at her because she doesn’t listen, and she eavesdrops on my private conversations.” Next time, when noise bothers me, I should just come to them and say so, she told me, “no need to call the police.”

“What happened last night”, she explained, “was that my husband lost his patience, and it was the first time it happened, so he took our daughter to talk to the security guard. We thought that if the guard told her that she should not scream at night, she would calm down and go to sleep.”

Her husband came over and was all smiling, polite, and said that I did “a good thing, people often don’t react when something bad happens and children get hurt”, and that he understands completely why I called the police, but “no need to involve them next time.”

“Last night”, he continued, “my daughter had a fit, wouldn’t calm down, so I told her we would go downstairs and wait for the police.”

There was a pause, the woman looked at her husband and then at me and turned again to him and said, “to have the security guard talk to her.” They stared at each other, until he finally said, “Yes, exactly.” She was watching me. I smiled, didn’t say anything, just stepped back into my apartment. I barely closed the door, and they were at each other’s throats already.

So, that was my night and today’s morning.

There are a few lessons here. I should have called the police sooner. I should have tried to record the scene in the corridor, but that hadn’t occurred to me until much later. I would have assumed that yelling “I will call the police” might give someone pause, yet it had no effect.

And one more thing to keep in mind, if you are ever assaulted and hope that someone’s going to help you — there are two more apartments on the same floor, that’s four adults, and none of them opened their door when a child was screaming “please, no.”

Weekly Notes

I don’t write weekly notes every week, but today I want to.

This week has been similar to all other weeks during the pandemic: I worked a bit, but not as much as I could, I didn’t exercise enough, overall I felt tired, and didn’t feel like I had as much energy as I used to. But I know how to change all that because this is similar to how I felt two years ago. I was tired and unmotivated back then, and even though I went to the gym every few days, I didn’t really feel it made that much difference to my health.

Then one day I watched this:

I decided to go to the gym every day. And I did!

I was surprised I managed that. I have never liked exercising. There are sports I like, but the gym is rarely fun. When I decided to go every day, I thought it was going to be excruciating — forcing myself every day to go. I was wrong.

I can’t say I’ve ever learned to like it. But I went every day whether I wanted to or not, and after a week or two, I stopped thinking about it — it was just something I did. I didn’t have to force myself — it became a habit.

Those few months were the best time for my well-being. Every day, I woke up and went to the gym first thing in the morning. I slept better and I didn’t have problems waking up, I even stopped drinking coffee. I felt productive and had more free time.

Then the pandemic happened. Gyms got closed. I stopped exercising. Every night it took me hours to fall asleep. I woke up tired, had difficulties focusing on work.

My gym is finally open again. Last week I only went once and didn’t like it. But I remember how much better my life was when I had the habit of going daily. I am going to build that habit again.

#200

Seth Godin wrote:

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.

“The first 1000 are the most difficult”

This is my 200th blog post and I report that I am glad I write this blog.

The beginning was difficult. It took me hours to write a post. Some days I really didn’t have any idea of what to write about, and I would start panicking in the evenings. But I always wrote something, even just a short note about a new design. And now not only is writing a lot easier but also I don’t worry about running out of ideas for posts anymore.

I don’t plan on stopping. Yes, it takes time to write all those posts. But I see many benefits:

  • I got better at writing. I have a long way to go to be a good writer. But I am better at it than I was 200 blog posts ago.
  • I connected with other bloggers and artists! A few people who read my blog wrote to me and it has been great chatting with them.
  • I got to share my process for making and selling designs, and a few designers told me it was helpful.
  • It inspired me to consider other writing-related projects like maybe writing an e-book. More on that soon.
  • This blog is also a place where I promote my online apparel stores, like my Threadless and TeePublic shops, and the games that I made with my brother.

You could write a blog too. In 200 posts, you will most likely report that you are glad you did it.

Newsletter overload

I used to like reading newsletters. Not anymore. There are just too many of them. At any given moment I have emails waiting in my inbox. I can’t keep up with them all.

Oliver Burkeman wrote recently about this feeling of being owerwhelmed by all those podcasts to listen to, all the books and blogs to read. There’s a neverending pile of things requiring our attention. The solution is to accept the inevitable — there’s always going to be an overload of information, and we need to realize that just because something is on our “to-read” list, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be read.

For the past week, I have been unsubscribing from most of the newsletters. I definitely have the feeling of missing out on something interesting. But if I want to create things, then I need more undistracted time. I can’t keep thinking about all the emails and articles I still need to do read.

I don’t want to spend my time consuming what others have created instead of creating my own things.

16 Personalities

A friend sent me a link to a personality test that assigns you one of 16 personality types. I took it for fun, but the test surprised me — it was more thoughtful than I expected.

The questions were easy to answer. What I mean by that is I knew immediately what the correct answer for me was. One of my problems with most quizzes is that questions are often so vague that the only correct answer seems to be: “it depends”. However, the 16 Personalities test is well done and the questions are unambiguous. I didn’t have any problem choosing my answers.

Some questions were so obvious that it was strange to me that anyone could answer differently. For example, there was: “You enjoy watching people argue”, and you had to choose how strongly you agree or disagree on a 7 point scale. It hadn’t occurred to me that watching people argue might be enjoyable. There must be a significant percentage of people who enjoy that, or it wouldn’t have been a question in the test.

Another question that stood out was: “You feel confident that things will work out for you”. I agree. It’s not a belief that by some external force things will work out. Rather, it’s: whatever happens, I can handle it, and I will be fine. This is not only my approach to work. It’s one of my most strongly held beliefs about my life in general.

The result was that I was an INTJ-A type, which is called an Assertive Architect.

You can take the test here: 16 Personalities Test.

Welcome new people

My website statistics tell me that there’s been a 29% increase in traffic in March. That’s — wow — that’s a lot. Reader, what is the reason for your visit?

I wrote a few posts about creating designs for Threadless and other websites. If you are a new artist trying to make a living, then those might be useful to you:

However, in real life, I am not often asked about details of my work or how I earn money, or anything like that. People are more interested in my story: how did it happen that I quit my job? weren’t I scared? is it really possible to earn money on your own? what if I fail? People tell me — and believe me, this surprises me every time — that my story/life is inspiring. That they too would like to be so independent. But, for various reasons, they can’t.

I like the idea of inspiring people to quit their jobs and do their own thing. If you read my blog then I hope you at least get that much out of it — an inspiration, a little push, to quit the job that you hate, that wastes your health and time, and to put effort into finding a creative work that you like, be your own boss. If work for others, then only until you learn enough to work for yourself.

Uninterrupted work

What I like best is when I have a few hours of completely uninterrupted work, either programming or drawing. No emails, no phone calls, no Facebook. I just watched an interview with Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author, and he says the same thing, but about writing. He says he likes to have two 4-hour long sessions of work when there are no distractions, he’s just by himself and he writes.

The whole interview is very inspiring:

He says that writing is his passion, and even if he wrote 100 novels and none of them were published, he would be fine with that. It’s so rare to hear someone say something like that.