Wet Socks - An Introduction

There is a very particular sort of unease that arises from jumping in a puddle with the water wetting not just your shoes, but seeping into your socks. It’s not uncomfortable — it’s just persistently annoying. Your whole day is now a little wet, a little annoying, a little more real than you’d like it to be. That’s sort of what it feels like to grow up. An endless blend of grandiose ideas and petty irritations, epiphanies that strike at inconvenient moments, and questions that remain in your mind far too long.

That’s Wet Socks. A bunch of thoughts that I like to call drips—sometimes profound, sometimes stupid, sometimes somewhere in the middle—seen through my eyes: a teenager making sense of the world. These are not refined theories. They’re thoughts I jotted down because they refused to leave me alone.

And that’s the thing about being a teenager: your mind wanders. It doesn’t shut up.

Some days I’m wondering about optimism and why it seems more difficult than it appears. Other days I’m questioning why people lie or if we’re actually free to make choices. Either I’m ranting about how the internet plays games with our minds, or how people will despise something just because it’s trendy. Other times I just need to ramble about YouTube, or wonder if time travel should even be allowed.

The subjects in Wet Socks are everywhere — but so is teen life. You can flip from worrying about the future to freaking out about the past, to giggling at a meme, to questioning whether AI will ultimately destroy everything… all within the same afternoon.

These thoughts leave me damp, like wet socks. Even after they dry up, you still end up thinking about that feeling.

I suppose what I’m attempting to convey is: life does not slow down for you to take notes. You’re meant to learn from experience, but half the time you don’t even know you had an experience until three days later when you’re in the shower and suddenly it all makes sense. Or doesn’t. Either way, that’s how most of these entries originate.

Before I landed on this, I used to write fiction. Two entire books, to be specific — when I was 12 and 13. Like every 12 year old’s mind, the books were completely unfiltered and absolutely overflowing with imagination. At that age you just feel like Disneyland had spread its roots through the whole world. Imagination was purer back then. Ideas came in waves I was just waiting to surf on, and plotlines were weaved with bliss.

Then came the inevitable phase people like to call growing up. Now, it is hard to imagine something as jolly as those times when my world was a series of storybooks and YouTube Gameplays. My mind became thicker, more complex. Midway through my third book I began to notice the gaps in the storyline: Arcs that never quite finished, threads that were never quite connected. It’s still somewhere in the cloud, a half-finished monument to what happens when imagination is let loose.

Sometime after that, I stopped trying to make something from a whole lot of nothing. I quit trying to create a utopian world and began chronicling the strange, unreliable one in my mind. The actual one. That’s when the words finally felt right. That’s when Wet Socks started.

So Wet Socks is my playlist of drips. Some are tiny drops, some are gushes of consciousness. All of them are mine.

Press play wherever you like — and feel free to step into my discomfort zone: Wet Socks.