Be Nicer to My Friend 🌻

June 16, 2026

Hey there,

It's honestly been a while.

I took a not-so-deliberate hiatus from this newsletter series — it was going well in the beginning of 2025, then I took a few weeks off, came back at it, and honestly kept up a respectable streak. But then I feel like I put myself in this trap where none of the topics I'd prepared to write for were actually interesting to me at the given moment, and that made it hard to write.

Luckily, I got inspired recently by other newsletters, and I have some fresh ideas and hopefully interesting content to bring.

"Be nicer to my friend."

That's what my friend told me a few months back, and the friend in question was me.

I was telling her about a recent run I did — it was the Sofia Marathon 10K, my first actual race since I started running about a year and a half ago. Honestly, I did okay in it — a little over an hour, which is pretty much the average. Could it have been better in terms of timing? Sure, but there's always next time.

So I was telling her about the medals, and said something along the lines of "Well yeah, it's not really a big deal, they hand them out to everybody who participates anyway." It wasn't in a self-pity type of way, and I wasn't just being humble, it felt like an honest statement. That's when she clocked me with "Please, be nicer to my friend.", as a way to remind me that I should appreciate my little/big wins a bit more.

At the moment, I think I mainly brushed it off, but it later got me thinking about how we really can be quite harsh on ourselves, and hold ourselves to much higher and stricter standards than we would our close ones.

For example, I can't imagine ever hearing about a friend's achievement and thinking "Well yeah, but that's actually easy / it's not so hard / that's not that big of a deal". We tend to reserve those thoughts mainly for ourselves. And I realised it stems from a deeper place, something that's been a recurring theme in my life — the self-belief that if I've managed to do something, it's automatically not a big deal, because, well, I managed to do it after all, how difficult can it be.

It's a similar feeling to what artists have about their work — "If it's mine, it can't be that good, solely because of the fact that it's me who made it".

I've definitely experienced it when I was doing digital art years ago. There seems to be a fundamental inner contempt, wherein I don't appreciate anything I produce because I know exactly what went into it, what it was supposed to be, and exactly by how much it falls short. It's the delta between the goal and the end result that creates the discomfort, and that's why it seems so silly from the outside. Another person can much more easily appreciate a work of art, because they only see the one final version, and not the multitude of better and different versions that exist in the artist's vision.

And this same concept I think applies to most people's thinking process.

Whenever you do something, you yourself best know how much effort it took, so you imagine another person would be able to do it:

• in half the time
• much more gracefully
• overall faster, better, and cleaner

And that imaginary "another person" is always running a few meters in front of you, no matter what your own pace is. The essence of the phrase "The finish line is always moving.", in a nutshell.

For exactly this reason, it's good to stop sometimes and appreciate the current state of your work, no matter the comparison. Or if you have to compare it to something, try and compare it to earlier versions, as you are your own best competition.

And when you find it difficult to pat yourself on the shoulder, it genuinely helps to have friends to do that for you. 🫂

Weekly Insights

• A recent pastime of mine is trying to make more room for books and movies in my life. In the purely physical sense of the word, it ended up with me buying a few new books to add to my home library. I tend to buy physical copies of books right after I've listened to them as audiobooks, so I don't end up with a huge unread pile at home.
• Also, I'm attempting to make more room for "pretty" in my life. As in, to try and smell the roses every now and then, appreciate the nice views, the occasional good latte art I manage, etc. It's a work in progress, but it feels necessary. 🌹

Book Highlight: Normal People

Normal People is a novel by Sally Rooney, an author whose forte seems to be specifically in the realm of messy human connections. You may have heard of it more from the popular TV series featuring Paul Mescal, which follows the same characters.

Overall, it follows Connell and Marianne, a boy and girl from Ireland, as they grow from high school into college and even after, and the honestly messy dynamic between them. What starts as a secret relationship slowly spirals into a complicated experience where both parties deal with their own avoidances through each other.

The bittersweet thing was how honest and, well, normal the plot felt — the whole time you're thinking "Why can't these two just talk it out?", and then you remember the multitude of times when you were in eerily similar situations. A very sobering read, and the end wasn't what I was expecting.

Also, a very cool experiment I did was watching the show and listening to the book in between the episodes. Felt like they both emphasised different aspects, so it was like looking at a painting from a few angles at the same time.

A very solidly B-tier book 🎉 (speaking of, I put a few tierlists for things I've read/watched over at my library tier-list).

Worth Watching This Week

Uniqlo: The Clothes Designed to Be BORING but Brilliant. by The Science of Products — a sharp look at how "boring" design becomes a deliberate, brilliant strategy.

how i stopped existing and started actually living by Lindsiann — a gentle, reflective nudge towards being a bit more present in your own life.

Track of the Week

Closing Thoughts

Till next week, stay safe, stay curious, and keep kicking. ✌️