from PinterestJust a note: I have a 20% discount running until the end of November if you subscribe through this link! If you also love reading, watching movies, and podcasts / video essays, I post a weekly syllabus every Sunday and daily journal prompts every month. This is an entirely reader supported publication and am so thankful for your support.[part i of my how to get my life back together series — if you like this, consider upgrading your subscription because the other parts will be for paid subscribers!]In all honesty, my biggest concern and secret in the last two years that I’ve been out of school is that my brain has slowly been melting away. And by slowly melting away, I mean that I can physically feel my mind’s growing reluctance to concentrate, to truly think, and my attention span slipping out of reach. I sit at my job and create documents and spreadsheets that seem completely meaningless for eight hours a day. I get home and make myself dinner, stirring with one hand and scrolling on Twitter with the other. I turn on a rerun of a show that I can almost recite line by line (I am a chronic rewatcher). I’m currently reading a book together with my friend, and when he said “remember this part?” I did not.In other words, I feel like my life has become mindless and thus a bit meaningless.One of the biggest and most significant things I had to grapple with post-grad was the notion of not being a student anymore, that academic learning was not a required daily task in my life anymore. During the first few months after graduation, I felt like I was physically shouldering the burden of learning, on my own shoulders for the first time in my life. All my life, I had been accumulating knowledge and learning something every day in school, without even thinking about it. But out of school and at a job, where one day always seems to bleed into the next, the responsibility to remain intellectually curious fell on me. And I haven’t been that good at it.Something I’ve