The title of my honours thesis back in university was "HOW THE ENGLISH DEGREE WILL SAVE THE WORLD". I wrote about Queering, decolonizing and democratizing literary studies for Generation Z. My Pilot G-2 pen writing frantically on ruled paper, coffee rings blooming across the margins.

An overly-bold and arrogant title, I know. The sort of title you write at 2am when your desk lamp is the only light left in the building. My justification was that I saw far too many undergraduates, and even postgrads, hedge. Too modest and meek to stand up and triumphantly state themselves and their work. Voices dropping to whispers in seminar rooms, eyes fixed on scuffed linoleum floors, shoulders curved inward like closing parentheses.

During my writing, I ended up adding an autoethnographic section—this is a fancy academic term that simply means a research method where a researcher analyzes their personal experiences (auto) to understand broader cultural, social, or political meanings. A first-person account (not very different from creative nonfiction or a blog post, really) which stands as a waypoint for discovering and articulating something important.

In this, I coined the term "bloodwriting".

I shared the excerpt on my Medium blog. This is what I wrote about bloodwriting:

Bloodwriting begins with a pulse. The thrum of your fingers against keys. Flutters in your chest when your mouse hovers over "publish". A quiet conviction that your words—whether they appear as Times New Roman 12pt or 280 characters in sans-serif blue on BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon—deserve to exist in the world. It's not craft or talent or clout. Bloodwriting is the courage to leave a mark, to say: Hi, I am here, I think, I feel, I exist.

When our ancestors painted on cave walls, they mixed their own blood with the ochre to make the images more powerful. More alive. Everything that matters costs us something of ourselves. Every time you open a blank document, post a thread, share a story online, you're creating a small altar to possibility.

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What I want to write about here, instead, is what I'm going to call daywriting.

In 1953, Phillip Larkin wrote the following poem:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

I encountered this poem recently and I have been mulling over it extensively. It already follows the same thought pattern and throughline in which I find myself:

All we have are our days. We do not, and cannot, live in grand moments or holidays or the climaxes of memories. Our brain, though, does an excellent job of curating memory and causing us to believe otherwise.

So, I've decided what I'm calling for here is daywriting: the deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance. The accumulation of days—your days, documented in your words—is how we fight erasure and cultivate joy.

Daywriting is the daily practice of documenting your ordinary existence as an act of resistance and cultural preservation. Unlike bloodwriting's courageous mark-making in public, daywriting is the quiet, consistent archiving of the mundane.

Your neighbor's recipe, a conversation transcribed verbatim, the texture of hoarfrost on your window. Archiving as activism, creating what researcher Michelle Caswell calls "liberatory potential through widespread technologies" like the internet and word-processing software. Daywriting isn't about saving the world, rather it's about ensuring your world isn't erased.

Countless people engage in mundane activism and resistance which contribute to collective wellbeing, yet their contributions aren't fully recognized. To capture and chronicle when we feel unheard, reclaiming our agency through narrative. Scholar Rowen White shares this sentiment:

Writing in times of duress is resistance.

There are many people who would say we live in far too interesting of times right now. Just yesterday, the United States declared that it will 'run' Venezuela after President Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped and taken to New York. I read while making coffee, my screen too bright in morning gray light, my thumb scrolling, scrolling.

And this is only a few days after over 500 Russian drones and missiles attacked Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. Each notification a small electric shock, each headline a stone added to an already impossible weight.

I understand, it can feel as though we no longer have days. No longer have simple mundane life. The gears of the status quo are collapsing in front of our eyes in real-time. And I know my own position here, what I try to tell you on my soapbox. It seems futile and absurd, maybe even arrogant and delusional.

But outside your bedroom, right now, the tree branches are encased in hoarfrost. Nobody is on the road at 7AM on January's first Sunday. The stray cat is curled under your neighbor's porch, and the squirrel is nested in oak tree hollows lined with shredded newspaper. The days still go on. Steam still rises from your coffee. Your breath still fogs the window. The radiator still clanks and hisses.

We persist. And our persistence is as absurd as our existence is itself. Billions of people around the world still work. Punching time clocks with calloused thumbs, stacking boxes in warehouses. Still cooking meals, chopping onions and scraping burned bits from cast iron pans, still measuring rice with the same chipped measuring cup their mother used. Still loving, still kissing foreheads before work, still holding hands on cold walks, still saving the last bite of dessert.

We persist and we resist. The act of being able to stay creative, the act of giving, the act of surrendering our rugged individualism for the sake of a broader community in solidarity will keep us moving forward.

The Archive as Resistance

I ask you to daywrite. To keep track of what happens to you. You don't need to be an artist, you don't need to save anybody. You just need to have an archive of your existence.

The concept of autonomous archiving has become a significant part of the activist toolkit itself. Community archives give marginalized populations an active role in creating cultural memory, like the participatory South Asian American Digital Archive where contributors upload and contextualize records from personal collections.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection and archiving of personal narratives and artifacts contributed to documenting and preserving historical experiences. Your daywriting is part of this lineage, the archiving efforts of those who came before help us learn from social movement history.

Jot down events you want to go to, transcribe conversations with neighbours-turned-friends. Start an index card collection of struggle meal recipes. Keep an idea list of ways you can support even when you're low on cash and energy.

There is real value in capturing life's mundane, everyday experiences, and documentation of these moments can bring us "unexpected joy" in the future. The "turn to the quotidian" is a theoretical move to reemphasize the sometimes mundane domain of the everyday, concentrating on lived experience. Kayti Christian pointedly wrote, life is 99% mundane. A person's life is a collection of all the moments that happen in the middle.

How to Start Daywriting

Let me give you specific, actionable ways to begin:

The 100-Word Daily: Open Notepad or TextEdit. Set a timer for 3 minutes. Write 100 words about today. Not polished. Just: "Woke at 6:47am. Cat knocked over water glass. Bread was moldy. Took last $8 to laundromat. Woman there helped me fold sheets even though we didn't speak same language. Her hands smelled like lavender. Trump announced [something]. Felt afraid. Made rice and eggs. Watched neighbor's kid draw with sidewalk chalk, they drew a house with 8 windows. Saved the photo." This is your archive. This is daywriting.

Sunday Evening Inventory: Every Sunday at dusk, while the streetlights flicker on and the neighbourhood settles into that pre-work quiet, open a document called 2026-weeks.md. Write three bullet points:

• Something you learned from a conversation (exact words if possible: "Mrs. Rodriguez said her tomatoes won't grow anymore because the frost comes too early now")
• One mundane object that defined your week (the chipped blue mug, the grocery receipt folded in your pocket, the sound of your radiator clicking on)
• A small act of resistance or care you witnessed (neighbour's porch light left on all night, someone leaving books in the Little Free Library)

Monthly Recipe Swaps on the IndieWeb: The last Sunday of each month, post one "struggle meal" recipe to your omg.lol blog—real costs, real prep time, real substitutions. Tag it #strugglemealsolidarity. Link to other people's recipes. This isn't Instagram food porn. This is documentation of survival: "Lentil soup: $3.47. One onion, bag of lentils, bouillon cube. Lasted 4 days. Tasted like my grandmother's kitchen."

The Resistance-When-Tired List: Start a plain text file called resistance-when-tired.txt. In it, list small acts: "Share mutual aid posts while coffee cools. Text check-ins during lunch break. Keep granola bars in coat pocket for unhoused neighbors." Number each line. Layer by layer, a stratum of care is created which costs nothing but attention.

The Democratic Web

Think of old GeoCities archives on mechanical hard drives. GeoCities, which began in 1994 and by 1999 was reportedly the third-most-visited website on the World Wide Web, was one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish home pages.

While these sites are regarded only as amateur creations, they were the first flowering of truly democratic digital literature. Anyone could share anything with anyone. Effortlessly. Free. Buried among the animated GIFs and comic sans were blog posts from the late 90s. Raw, sometimes-bizarre thoughts from people who weren't trying to build personal brands or monetize existence.

I'm reminded of Justin's Links from the Underground, one of the earliest personal websites launched in 1994 by Justin Hall. While early websites like his are now often dismissed as amateur, they were among the first flowering of truly democratic digital literature. Anyone could share anything with anyone. Effortlessly. Free. Justin chronicled his life in intimate detail long before the term "blog" even existed. In an interview, he said:

"The best use of our technology enhances our humanity. It lets us shape our narrative and share our story and connect us."

Internet artist Olia Lialina notes that the point about the web before social networks wasn't that you had a profile on GeoCities, but that you had a chance to build your cyber home outside of it. When Yahoo shut down GeoCities in October 2009, millions of pages disappeared overnight. The disappearance marked a shift where personal ownership gave way to centralized platforms, and creative messiness was replaced by standardized templates.

Joy as Resistance

Our greatest weapon has been, and always will be, our collective imagination. If we are able to be clever enough, if we are able to maneuver these marked number days with grace and intelligent determination, we will make it back to the boring. To a stability where we no longer have to choose between food and medicine and rent. Where identity and love will no longer be legislated.

But we also need joy. Dear God, we need joy.

adrienne maree brown's concept of "pleasure activism" centres joy as a political framework, asserting that we all need and deserve pleasure, and that enjoyment gives us energy to bring about social change. Activist Shamillah Wilson writes that making space for joy opposes the pervasive imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ideology that puts pressure on us to constantly produce. The pursuit of joy amid great struggle is a way to tend our humanity when it is most threatened.

Historian Kellie Carter Jackson found that during slavery, enslaved women would sometimes go deep into forests and throw dance parties as a way to remind themselves they are fully human.

We need to have a space, both in our real lives and digitally, for silliness. For the ability to frolic and find merry and whimsy. Your call for silliness, frolic, and whimsy is survival.

Building Our Own Spaces

You are probably glued to your phone every single day. That's okay. That's by their design. I'm not asking you for abstinence, I'm asking you to seek alternatives. Build and create instead of consume. Move from the siloed corporate social media platforms of Meta or the Nazi bar of X to the indieweb, to neocities and omg.lol.

In my recent article about omg.lol, I explained what tools exist for reclaiming your digital space. Daywriting explains why we need them. The IndieWeb is based on principles of owning your domain, publishing on your own site first, and owning your content. As one IndieWeb advocate notes, when you own your domain and host your content, no corporation can delete your work, change the rules, or hold your audience hostage.

Create your own shit, share it with others. These are the first steps towards not just organizing for a better future, but to nurture and cultivate joy.

I'm somebody who is stern, who can be regarded as cold when I am faced with conflict. But this is simply not who I am. I am one of the least serious people you'll meet. In my day-to-day life, I pull pranks, I am plain goofy, and I make awful jokes. I am trying to colour the web with that more. Join me?

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Tomorrow morning, the hoarfrost will have melted. But you will have written down that it was there. That you saw it. That you existed in that specific moment on that specific Sunday in January 2026. That is daywriting. That is resistance.