The Reading Room: Chapter 12
6 pieces on language, identity, humanity, trust and the pieces that shape us
There’s a strange performance that comes with being online.
The feeling that we’re supposed to always have something to say. Something to share. Something to prove. Something that keeps us visible.
For years, that was the part of social media I could never quite make peace with.
I came to Substack because it felt like something different.
A quieter corner of the internet. Somewhere people still cared about words.
And for the most part, I still think that’s true.
But when I joined at the start of the year, my feed wasn’t just full of writers. It was full of conversations on growth.
Post every week. Share daily Notes. Comment more. Like more. Restack. Build your audience.
It was exhausting.
And I know you have to train the algo on what you like, but as a newbie on the platform it was really overwhelming, and I wasn’t really sure that this was the space I wanted to be in.
The more I saw it, the more I could feel myself slipping into a mindset I’d spent years trying to avoid.
I found myself spending more time thinking about how I was supposed to use Substack than what I wanted Substack to be for me.
Then I wrote a piece dissecting the mechanics of social media, and for the first time in a long time, I thought maybe I did have a choice.
Maybe I didn’t have to follow any ‘rules’.
So I stepped back from the daily Notes.
I stopped worrying about momentum. I stopped worrying about visibility. I logged on when I wanted to and started focusing on what had brought me here in the first place.
A place to write. To read. To share.
And I started thinking about what Substack could mean for other people, too.
For the writers spending hours pouring themselves into their work, hoping someone would find it, Friday Faves was a way of seeking those people out.
A small weekly promise to myself to read more intentionally. To comment more generously. To share the pieces that moved me, taught me, challenged me, or simply made me glad I’d opened the app that week.
It was less about growing, and more about belonging in a way that felt honest.
So I kept sharing.
What started as Friday Faves has slowly become The Reading Room: a small record of the pieces, writers and ideas that have shaped how I think each week.
This issue marks three months of turning my Friday ritual into something more meaningful.
For those who have been here from the beginning, and those who are just joining, thank you. Every comment, recommendation, conversation and shared piece has become part of this too.
Showing up for others is also a way of showing up for ourselves. For all the parts that make us human.
In no particular order, here’s this week’s reading list.
Bourdieu: The Price of Speaking by Linguistically Yours!
This was the first piece I’d read from Linguistically Yours and, as someone completely new to Bourdieu, I’m grateful for how accessible it was.
Bourdieu’s argument is that language isn’t judged equally. The same words carry different weight depending on who’s speaking, where, and how closely they match what society has decided is the ‘right’ way to communicate.
What interested me most about this piece was the idea that these systems don’t just shape how people are heard. They shape what people feel able to say in the first place.
The self-correction. The hesitation. The way people slowly learn to make themselves smaller, quieter, safer.
None of it is accidental. Accent, class and confidence can decide who gets heard before they’ve even opened their mouths.
It’s one of the reasons I care so much about supporting writers in all walks of life. For many people, fluency was never something they were handed in the first place.
A thoughtful introduction to both the writer and Bourdieu. I discovered them through The Strategic Linguist, who continues to send me down fascinating rabbit holes.
I Am Not A Single North Star by Anna | bbco
This was a different piece from Anna, and I found myself going back to it again over the weekend.
At its centre is the pressure to become one clear, explainable thing. One direction. One identity. One neat sentence that makes sense in a bio, a business plan, or someone else’s idea of progress.
What I loved was Anna’s refusal of that.
The idea that meaning doesn’t always come from doubling down on one thing, but from the overlap of everything that makes us who we are.
In her piece, she spoke of shrinking the full version of yourself into something more acceptable, then wondering why nothing felt alive. That line in itself really hit home.
There’s so much generosity in the way she shares her own story here. The grief, the survival, the uncertainty, the frustration. Not as something neatly resolved, but as something she’s still living with and learning from.
And I really needed the reminder that not every pause is a problem to solve. Sometimes something is ending. Sometimes something is making room.
I suspect a lot of people will feel a little less alone after reading it.
We Are Using the Wrong Words for AI by Dr Sam Illingworth & The Strategic Linguist
I knew I was going to love this piece when it was announced. I just didn’t know how much.
Sam and The Strategic Linguist take some of the most common words in AI, like intelligence, hallucination and agent, and ask a deceptively simple question: what happens when the language itself starts doing the thinking for us?
What I loved most was the way they revealed the hidden work each word is doing. Not just whether a term is accurate, but how it quietly shapes our understanding of a system before we’ve had a chance to question it.
Because this isn’t really a piece about semantics.
It’s a piece about power.
The words we choose influence where responsibility sits, who gets credit, who gets blamed, and what risks become visible or invisible. Once a term enters everyday language, it starts carrying assumptions with it, whether we notice them or not.
It’s the same thread that runs through the Bourdieu piece earlier in this issue. Different subject, but the same truth underneath. Language is never neutral. It always points us somewhere.
As someone who spent the last year studying AI safety and ethics, I found myself nodding throughout. So much of that learning came down to understanding the words properly, because that’s where risk, responsibility and accountability end up sitting.
This is exactly the kind of piece I wish more people would read. Thoughtful, accessible and genuinely powerful. Much like both of their work individually.
One of my favourite collaborations from the two of them yet.
How To Design A Nervous System For Your AI by Mia Kiraki 🎭 & Jen Benford
Most AI advice assumes the human should adapt to the tool.
Work faster. Prompt better. Be more consistent.
What Mia and Jen do is the opposite. They start from the body, not the tool.
Jen brings the nervous system side, the way we move through different states across a day, and Mia turns those states into five AI workspaces that meet you where you are instead of fighting whatever mood, energy or capacity you brought to the screen.
As someone with ADHD, this made so much sense to me.
The Dive for when you’re in flow and one unnecessary question can break the whole spell. The Cove for wandering around an idea before it has to become anything. The Harbor for when everything feels urgent and you just need one clear next step.
I loved how practical this was without flattening the human out of the process.
Because that’s what so much AI productivity advice still seems to miss. We are not the same person at every hour of the day. We don’t always need the same kind of support, the same kind of structure, or the same kind of push.
This piece understood that beautifully.
One of the most useful pieces I’ve read in a while.
I Am Not Behind, I Am Rebuilding by Marie-Christine Oliver
This was my first time reading Marie-Christine’s work, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
The piece explores late diagnosis, identity and the complicated process of reinterpreting your own life through a new lens.
The distinction between catching up and rebuilding runs throughout the piece, but it was the idea that ‘the grieving was the rebuilding’ that kept drawing my attention.
There is a particular kind of grief that can come with understanding something important about yourself later in life. Not grief for what happened, necessarily, but grief for how hard things were before you knew why.
As someone who discovered ADHD as an adult, that felt deeply familiar. Not because I thought everyone else was ahead, but because I spent years working so hard to do things that seemed to come more easily to other people. The all-nighters. The overcompensating. The hours spent trying to decode systems, expectations and ways of working that never quite fit.
Marie-Christine writes about that reframe with so much compassion. The idea that the ruler was wrong, not the person, feels like something a lot of people probably need to hear.
Endless Possibilities With AI: Can Africa Survive A Working Africa? by Rebecca Mbaya
Rebecca’s writing consistently expands my perspective, and this piece is no exception.
Much of her work explores the intersection of Africa, technology, development and AI, often asking questions that I haven’t seen many others ask.
At the heart of this piece is what happens when a society that has spent generations adapting to constraint suddenly finds itself facing new possibilities.
What I appreciated most is that Rebecca never treats survival mode as weakness.
She writes about the creativity, ingenuity and resilience that emerge under difficult conditions, while also asking what it costs to remain oriented around broken systems for too long.
The section where she turns the question back on herself was particularly powerful.
Not just whether Africa can move beyond survival mode, but what happens when your own work has been shaped around documenting the gaps, absences and things that have gone unseen.
There’s something very honest about the way she wrestles with that tension throughout the piece.
It’s a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of AI, development, identity and hope.
And that’s it for this week :)
Happy Reading!
Thank you for producing this beautiful curation, Jade. It's extremely useful for people like myself who have billions of stacks to read and are not entirely sure where to start. Also, thank you for featuring the work of Rebecca and myself.
“I stopped worrying about momentum. I stopped worrying about visibility. I logged on when I wanted to and started focusing on what had brought me here in the first place. A place to write. To read. To share. And I started thinking about what Substack could mean for other people, too.”
👏👏👏👏👏