sarah is

The things that made me Sarah.

Less is More.Not Mies van der Rohe's line.Robert Browning wrote it in 1855, in Andrea del Sarto — “Well, less is more, Lucrezia.” Mies made it the sentence modernism was built on, and got the credit.I have always been someone who adds, who multiplies even. The opposite of simple. And yet you look at this page and think: really? Taste is knowing what to delete. Obviously, I made a decision. Simple, or "less is more" appeals now because it holds its ground. It shows a confidence that is rare in anyone who makes things: they know what to say, and they refuse to say more. You feel the weight behind a simple thing because the weight is real. It is everything that was taken out, accumulated. Every unnecessary element removed is a choice, and a long run of right choices ends in something that feels inevitable. as though it could only ever have been this. I want to be the Sarah who could only ever have been this.1The Love Letter

Happiness isn't something you wait around for. It's something you create yourself.Late Spring, 1949.Yasujirō Ozu. The father says it to Noriko, who would rather stay as they are than marry and leave him.This comes from the game that raised me: JX3, the Changge sect, the qin girl [琴娘]. I started at eleven and spent ten hours a day on it for a long stretch. Anything from it still makes me happy at a glance. I quit before middle school. By high school, I had all the freedom to play I could want, and the feeling never came back. I could not say why. Then this year, for JX3's seventeenth anniversary, I shot this series. Not playing it, but making it. The light of that old excitement came back. That is the real thing. The modern fatigue, the ache of never daring to face Guanyin again, dissolved.2Guanyin

Odi et amo.I hate and I love.Catullus 85, around 65 BC.Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. / nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. — I hate and I love. Why, you might ask. I do not know, but I feel it happening, and it is agony.Love and hate are an internal paradox for me. The same thing is the object of both at once. Usually, the moment something gives me enormous joy, I come awake as if from a nightmare and know: yes, this can hurt me just as badly. The second that lands, my amygdala takes over and I start to hate it. It runs the other way too. The first time I look at something and think, god, what a mess, I can't stand this — I can already feel how good it will be if I get through it. The dopamine starts. Yes. That is the kind of person I am.3Myth