🚿 Why the Shower

North-ish is morphing. What began as middle seat notes is now turning water imagery.

When I first started North-ish, I built my publication around the image of writing from the middle seat — a place overlooked and uncomfortable. Writing truths that are hard to sit with. Notes scribbled from the back seat of the car, observing and reflecting on all things whizzing by.

That still resonates with me. I still write things that go unseen or unheard, things that make people squirm a little. The middle seat taught me how to hold discomfort, and that part of me hasn’t gone anywhere.

But over time, I realized most of my thoughts don’t actually come from the middle seat. They come in the shower.

It’s always been that way. When the water hits my body, so do my thoughts. Droplets bead on my skin, the same as on the mirror and tile. Separate at first, sometimes running together into larger streams. As the room fills with condensation, the air grows heavy. But the moment you open the door, the particles release, and everything feels cooler, lighter again.

The shower is also where I strip down, literally and metaphorically. Where I bare myself, with no pretense. It’s where I face what’s hard to hold and practice letting it wash over me without drowning.

The shower carries its own paradox for me. It brings clarity, but it overheats my body. Makes my heart race relentlessly. I’ve had to learn to turn the water cooler at the end. To cleanse. To recover. To regulate. Writing feels the same: cooling the overwhelm into something I can carry.

So North-ish is shifting. You’ll start to see imagery of droplets, condensation, water falling from the shower head, a tub filling with water. The Sparks Scrapbook isn’t that anymore. It’s now called Droplets — a truer representation of my collected thoughts.

I’m not abandoning the concept of the middle seat. I’m evolving into something more.

The shower.

Where I cleanse and recover.

---

Click the piggy bank 🐖 to fuel my writing with boba tea🧋

Click the fries🍟 to share with friends