#dump15 I’m looking at an old Polaroid of my parents from the late nineties. They’re sitting on the hood of a beat-up car, laughing at something off-camera. My mom has these wild, unstructured curls and my dad is wearing a t-shirt that is an aggressively bright shade of orange. They look so effortlessly cool. So certain. They look like characters in a movie who already know how the plot ends. But then, because my brain is a toxic wasteland of unnecessary calculations, I did the math. In this photo, my dad was twenty-five. My mom was twenty-three. And I was already alive, probably asleep in a portable crib inside that tiny, rented apartment behind them. I looked at that photo, then I looked at myself in the mirror, and a cold wave of pure existential dread washed over me. Yesterday, I had a genuine, eyes-welling-up meltdown because the grocery store was out of the specific oat milk I like, and I had to sit in my car for five minutes to emotionally recalibrate my ...
dump#14 There is a very specific brand of chaos that happens backstage about two hours before a show. Right now, someone is aggressively steaming a shirt next to me, there’s a half-eaten plate of catering that I’m avoiding because nerves make my stomach do gymnastics, and I’m currently staring at my eyeliner in a poorly lit mirror wondering if one side is higher than the other. (It definitely is) Every time I’m getting ready for a performance, my brain does this weird thing where it detaches from the present and starts scrolling through the archive of my life like a late-night Wikipedia binge. And tonight, I’m thinking about ghosts. Specifically, the ghost versions of ourselves that we leave behind. If you looked at my life right now, you’d see the version that made it. You see me traveling, stepping onto stages, seeing people sing along to lyrics I wrote in the middle of the night on my bedroom floor. It looks organic. It looks like a straight line. But if you zoom out, you reali...