the spring digression

be reborn with me

historically, spring has always been my least favourite season — i don’t really like the rain and i think i used to vaguely resent the fact that every part of the natural world except me was having sex at the same time. but i’ve grown and changed and come to realize that spring, like all seasons, has incredible aesthetic and ontological potential.. it just has to be lived with purpose!!

here’s the gospel: no makeup, lots of good perfume (get cheap-but-good dupes at dossier), fresh flowers in hair (go on a walk in an expensive neighbourhood and steal them from the gardens of the rich; always carry little clips in your pocket so you can attach them gracefully wherever you go). find direct sunlight, bake something, buy lots of ribbon, smoke mint and lavender. windows open as often as possible, especially when it rains!!! 

big shirt, ugly underwear, and flip-flops is an outfit that CAN be worn outside. i know this because it is literally all i wear. (use discretion, of course — letting myself appear unmade in public has been incredibly useful in mitigating depression & helping me get out of the house, but my experiences are not universal and the choices i make for myself are still often objectively inappropriate! i don’t want to romanticize this but i would no longer be an agent of the truth if i tried to pretend like walking around tits-swinging in a t-shirt and boyshorts isn’t fun). if the big shirt/panties combo feels unavailable to you for any reason, i think you can catch a similar feeling by wearing weird eyeliner and a huge skirt with NO underwear. 

i live in a place where there are cherry blossom trees blooming literally fucking everywhere, and let me tell you, wearing boyshorts as pants and raggedy flip flops as shoes while stumbling bleary-eyed down a hill lined by one million of god’s most beautiful creations as petals float around me in ACTUAL SLOW MOTION … makes me feel one with the universe! i am reminded that i am oh so small and the world is oh so big — i revel in the co-relation of ubiquity and insignificance — and i realize that i am feeling, in this moment, the same existential ecstasy that makes pious young women think they’re having sex with jesus. then i arrive at the store and grab a bag of jalapeno cheetos, which are my favourite snack.

in spring, all my music exists on what I call the hyperpop-homesteading continuum. this is because, for me, spring can be separated into two distinct vibes: 

1. revelling in the unfurling of the natural world before your eyes, feeling the first inkling of a notion that things might someday be good again, that you, too, can be healed and perhaps even reborn, there is sunlight on your skin and the water’s getting warm, you like taking the bus again. hyperpop. 

2. the cocoon of winter is behind you; the hedonism of a neon summer lies ahead. for now, you are humble — you are strong and steady and rough-hewn, you do laundry, you keep your windows open, you neither dance in the rain nor trudge through it but simply accept it upon your face as your ancestors did before you, there is dirt beneath your toes and a straw hat on your head, you would like to grow a tomato plant. homesteading. 

hyperpop.

homesteading.

hyperpop (ish).

homesteading.

and everything in between! i also, for some reason, naturally crave 90s girl angst every spring. maybe it’s hormones.

the key to nailing spring is finding the middle ground between Charli XCX and Bob Dylan, and including both on your spring playlist. mine is here:

when it comes to books, spring is all about expanding your mind. i think everyone makes the mistake of trying to get into the tough stuff in january, when we’re all hopped up on corporate new-year optimism, but the winter is long and dark and you’ll get all tired out by the time the real season of rebirth comes along..! for me, literature consumption is a cycle: spring is for essay collections and other brainy vibes. summer is for beach reads, romances, fantasy novels, sci-fi, and books you loved when you were 12. fall is for atmosphere (secret history, sally rooney, wuthering heights). winter is for all of the above.

i’m currently reading Amia Srinivasan’s The Right To Sex (courtesy of my friend charlie) and Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot. I just started reading Zadie Smith’s Feel Free. for a relentlessly fresh take on mental illness, I read P.E. Moskowitz’s substack Mental Hellth religiously. 

my final, rapid-fire pieces of advice: spend as much time as possible in public parks. talk to strangers. get rid of all the clothes you haven’t worn in a year and hold a yard sale. try to get better. read books with ideas that make you uncomfortable. invest in an offline writing medium like a typewriter or word processor and write for an hour a week in public without your phone. embrace critical self-improvement and reject unending self-optimization. eat beets with goat cheese. make more food than you need and offer it to your neighbors. re-learn how to make flower crowns. this is an untested theory, but i think spring might be the most cosmically appropriate time to try out a pregnancy kink.

— xoxo rayne

questions for you (i really want to know your answers): what are you reading right now? do you have a signature scent? what is it? what’s a small, accessible purchase you’ve made recently that genuinely changed your life? mine is a lint roller.

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thanks for reading! this post is free, but it’s made possible by the support of my subscribers. for $5/month, you can help make internet princess possible & gain access to discussion threads, audio essays, exclusive content, and more. next week, for subscribers only, i’m doing my first-ever podcast episode with eliza mclamb of binchtopia — we discuss mental illness, commodification, dissociative feminism, and more!!