Maybe I’m a person who is compliment forward. I like telling people things I feel about them. Especially, if they make me feel incredible and cool. I love pointing out traits in people that I see that they might miss. It’s a fun experience for me and I hope for them, too. I like seeing the beautiful things in people.

Though I’ve noticed lately I’ve been running my mouth. I’ve been feeling things at an exponentially large scale. I believe this is due to my mother dying and my heart breaking open to a million times its size. Or no, it’s rather that, my heart now has no closing. It has no doors. It is like light is everywhere inside of it.

So yes, my heart has vastly opened and when I feel something about a person it all pours out. I tell them all the beautiful things I see and feel about them. I’ve noticed how this has maybe become overwhelming for them. As if their brains can’t quite compute what I’m saying. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned that life is too short not to tell someone everything you feel. Even if it might sound insane in the moment.

But, I’ve realized people don’t really talk like that. Pouring huge large emotions of feeling out onto a person. Oopsie lol. But, it’s more than that. I’ve found that sometimes it’s hard for people to receive or hear beautiful things about themselves. Especially, when they are things other people might miss.

It wasn’t until today that I understood this feeling.

I was sitting in an urgent care clinic in Brooklyn because my god, something else is happening to my throat. So, as I was waiting to get it checked out. A mountain of feeling started growing inside of me. I haven’t been in a hospital like setting since my mother died. Those last terrible weeks. All of a sudden those rooms in the hospital disappeared. The rooms we were going to for almost a year just disappeared and deleted from my life. I no longer went to hospitals weekly anymore.

So, in this urgent care, now dealing with matters for myself, I started to get weepy. My god what a year it has been. Then I looked down to see a text from my editor on my phone.

My editor. I’ve dreamed of saying those words for months. I finally found an editor to work with me on delivering my series of books which I will be self-publishing. More on this to come later. But, I got a text from her saying she read my draft. This is the first time anyone has laid eyes on the entirety of my novel project that I have been working on for five years. Five years of the deepest stories that have been toiling and twisting in my mind. Someone has now finally read them and she had the most beautiful things to say.

I looked at that text and felt like there was not enough room in my body to compute it. My mind felt like it wanted to transition into people pleaser mode and think how I could compliment her back instead. But, I realized I was backed up against a wall. These were feelings and compliments I had to take. But why was this so difficult? Why was it so hard to receive that she is honored to be working on this project with me? Why was it so easy to dream these scenarios before and so hard to actually experience them?

I stared abysmally at my phone and started crying. Started crying from being in the hospital and also feeling the grooves of my life changing once again. Like the nodules in my body were reformatting because something nuclear and massive was happening. Somebody is helping me manifest the very invisible things that have been pinging in my head for a lifetime. I have somebody who has looked at the deepest parts of me and she said, “I see you and I’m coming on this journey with you.”

I just couldn’t believe this.

And I couldn’t understand how to take in the size of feeling she was gifting me. Of the beautiful things she was seeing in me. These very secret things nobody else has really seen. My body, my soul, my life, did not (and still doesn't really) quite know how to make room for this.

Making room. Yes, making room.

I keep thinking about love and how I want to be inside of it. How I want a person to be in real, true love with. But, to have real, true love one must be open to receive it. You can not only give it. The equation requires you to receive. I didn't understand how hard receiving is. Receiving is harder than giving actually. It’s actually harder. Because you have to make room in yourself to believe in what you are receiving. That you are a person who deserves these things. That they match your frequency.

I feel in myself how much room I have to make for the size of the things I am asking for. I used to think of this as more of tangible concept. In that, you literally need to make room in your life for the things you deem important and minimize what you do not. I never quite understood the abstract portion of that despite being a deeply abstract person. Well, actually maybe because it’s not abstract at all. You literally have to make room in your body for the belief that you deserve the size of the things you are asking for. You have to make room for people to tell you these beautiful things about yourself, because if you don’t have room, how could you possibly process it? How can it metabolize? How can you experience it in your life as something real?

It is a doozy being a person who has predominantly daydreamed all her life to now be entering the portion where I actualize all of those dreams. This is a WILD experience.

I suddenly, understood all the people I was dumping all of my kind observations and compliments to. I understood how hard it can be to just even listen and receive. How you want to writhe and look away. You want to say, “There is no way you are talking about me.”

But, they are talking about you. Those beautiful things are all about you.

So, a few things will be changing here. For those of you who have been reading Electric Blue since the beginning, thank you. I’ll be adjusting this to just be my name Halleta. I’m understanding it felt like there was a barricade between me and you when I would think about writing on this Electric Blue substack. I just want a direct channel between me and you. Especially, since my book is coming to you this year. It’s extra important our communication remains clear. Btw, paid subscriptions are still paused. I’m not sure if I’ll ever re-instate them. We’ll see.

Electric Blue will be taking a more behind the scenes role as my entity for publishing/production as well operating as a think tank. The Electric Blue mission has always been to see the world in a more alive, connected, and new way — Halleta will now be an expression of that but hyper-focused on transforming the writing/literary industry. So much more to come. Ily. There is so much in the works.

x!

i have this habit of feeling like life will start later, sometime down the line. like the life i have right now is only temporary and the life “later” will be more perfect and more aligned.

i’ve been thinking a lot about collapsing realities. collapsing timelines. how the present, past, and future are all accessible in real time. i feel all of them floating inside of me. by this logic, the future is now, as is the present. i would like to hold onto the present and live in it as if it is the future. even if things are not perfect, i will align them to my highest self accessible to me accordingly. the future is only a minor organization away. you can reach the future by accessing alignment.

i think we only have one true alignment in life and that is our truest marker of time. each time i am aligned with myself it feels variations of the same way. it’s kind of like the feeling of love or passion or inspiration. those states are timeless and when i enter those states, i enter a state of non-time which becomes accessible to me.

alignment is our deepest form of presence. of exiting whatever form of “time” we are existing in. we become eternal.

i keep thinking how if we die, maybe we can’t take things with us, or people, but maybe we can take the things we felt, the way memories pinged inside of us and activated our bodies and consciousness. maybe we can take that. that makes me want to live life vastly more differently. i want to collect and experience as many feelings as a i can. even the hard ones, which ultimately lead me to use the tools of alchemy to string meaning from them. you are only the stories you tell yourself.

i’m really excited to write and share with you all of the things i have been feeling throughout my life. i feel inspired to write here again. i don’t take inspiration lightly. when we have it, it feels like the whole world is running through us. i love the feeling of the world running through me.

Life is so silly. Deeply, cosmically, and fundamentally silly. But that silliness is offset by certain rhythms that bring you into a greater awareness of the truth.

My most recent form of silliness was losing my voice during the very precious time I have back in Los Angeles post my mother’s death. It’s the first time I’ve been back since it’s all happened and I am laying in the bed of my previous life like wow…….why is this happening right now? I should be socializing, running around town, and screaming! Which is actually how I got myself in this position by acting crazy the previous week.

So instead, I’ve been sitting in my room, coughing until I grow defined abductors, and moseying around my neighborhood. But, I’m not someone to dwell on the hand I’ve been dealt. My uncle asked me, “Do you see the glass half full or half empty?” and I told him “My glass is overflowing.” — whether that’s because it’s rocking out of my hands or I’m swirling the glass around looking at the gorgeousness of the water. I will always find something beautiful and filled with meaning in the circumstances I have been given.

So, during this week of forced silence, a few powerful realizations started coming to me and I wanted to share them with you.

The fundamental desire of humans is to connect.

My first day of silence I went to the farmer’s market. As I approached my favorite stand, the tamale stand, I realized I could not speak my order. I mimed to him my voice was gone and typed on my notes app one sweet corn tamale.

Whether we are aware of it or not, humans want to reach the same frequency with one another. The tamale man did not have to mime with me and also be silent. He could have kept talking normally, but he didn’t. He met me where I was at and made my reality feel less lonely and more comfortable. He motioned towards the green or red salsa and I mouthed “Both!!!!”, then he sweetly sent me on my way..

These things kept happening as I went through the farmer’s market and for the rest of the week. People lowering their voices, miming alongside my actions, or doing extra things to help me feel more comfortable and at ease. Matching my silence, my movements, my eyes. Unknowingly, people will try to match your frequency. And I think that’s quite sweet. There is something innate in us that wants to relate.

Silently, I would dip my hands into prayer as a thank you.

You can see people quite clearly when you are only listening to them

In general, I’m someone who listens a lot. I enjoy it. But over the past decade, I’ve been very conscious of making sure that I speak up, express myself, and not rear into over-listening. Even though I’m not even sure that’s such a thing. It’s more-so that some people become ungenerous when you listen to them too much. Not everyone deserves a devoted audience.

But this week, I had no choice. In conversations with people it was like I was watching a TV show. As my friend drove us through town, I listened to her re-count a silly story from characters she witnessed in a coffee shop. It was the first time I actually could take her in completely, as a whole person interacting with me, yet with me not exactly a part of it. Like how you can witness something and interact with it at the same time. But, because I couldn’t speak I could take on this role of an observer and kind of separate myself from her and see her more clearly. There was no clouding of my dialogue to mix our energies together. Her energy could be pure and undiluted. I saw a subtle side of her I had never seen before.

It reminded me how each person lives in their own version of reality. Tuned to the things they notice, pay attention to, and engage with. We all are little tuning forks and receive differing signals. Then when we engage with one another, our signals mix and cross-reference. It was really cool to see her energy and tuning fork at work. I wouldn’t have seen it so clearly if I could actually talk because my reactions and additions would sway it somewhere else. That’s not a bad thing. It just is.

It was also a great reminder that I probably pick up on a lot of energies from people and mistake them as my own. Because I’m a tuned in/sensitive person I naturally take in a lot of what people are feeling and experiencing and it’s hard to separate it from myself. I felt quite clearly how talking to people might mix up my energies. This gave me a new perspective on being quiet.

After I get my voice back, I’ll be taking more strategic pauses and drawn out silences. Not just to listen, but to observe and separate which energies are actually mine.

When there is only one side of the conversation being created, you can really see what kind of energy a person brings without yours audibly in the mix.

Also, this is more personal, but I noticed there were times with people where I was trying to show them I was engaged instead of just being engaged. I tried doing hand signals, aggressive nodding, and mouthing — when actually I didn’t want to do any of that. I just wanted to watch them. It made me think of how in normal conversations when I can actually speak, how much of myself I am forcing to seem agreeable instead of just naturally existing.

Yet, as time passed on this week, I learned to gently stop the showing and just exist.

The mind becomes a quiet place when the mouth cannot talk

I was surprised at how peaceful my mind became. Since I wasn’t socializing and really wasn’t speaking to anyone, the dramas of my life severely lowered. There was no overthinking anything because I hardly did anything with other people.

It’s like I was on an extended silent retreat with myself. The silence was actually quite cleansing. I felt closer to my heart perhaps in a way I hadn’t before.

You can open your throat chakra without saying a word

Ok this one is subtle. It came to me on my most frustrated days. When I was so tired of being silent and alone unable to really enjoy the communal fruits of LA. I was so angry I started ranting on IG stories, my favorite place to write tbh (LOL), and I noticed a subtle feeling happen inside of myself. I felt my throat click open. like a shed slowly unmasking its door. My throat felt open and as I continued to ponder what this feeling felt like, I realized it was because I felt listened to. And when I feel listened to, I say more truthful things. I desire to express myself more.

Now let me be clear, I don’t just mean like absent-minded attention towards me. I mean someone deeply listening and hearing me. For some reason I feel that on IG stories. But to be honest it’s not random, I’ve had people really connect to me in such surprising ways there. And it opens my throat up.

So I noticed this subtle shift in my throat opening and it reminded me of when I take my singing lessons. How my throat after feels lubricated and warmed up. It is like I have a totally different voice. It’s gorgeous and buttery and jewel-like and I just love it. Even my speaking voice changes. It feels so good coming out of me, too. But, that smooth, expressive voice only unlocks when I do specific vocal exercises. These weird, strange exercises that release the chambers of the voice. Normal singing can’t do this. You have to make scrunched faces, and guh-guh-guh noises, and so many other things to unleash this more powerful, more clear activation of your voice. You can sing all day long but without that, you can’t reach that lubricated, gorgeous, throat open register.

That made me think about writing.

Is there a parallel? Is there a correlation? Can you write all day and still not reach the gorgeous, lubricated, throat open writing voice? Do you have to do a series of odd exercises to release the throat open? To activate a conduit to your heart?

For me, I believe, yes.

I’ve realized I need to be plunging-ly honest in front of people and I need to keep repeating that motion, like a weird singing exercise, to unlock any blockages in my throat. I remember one of my first acting teachers told me “the work has to cost you something” and I think about that phrase all the time. Because when the work costs you something, when you give from inside the deep trenches of your heart, it cleans you and it cleans the viewer. It is a form of ultimate catharsis.

So, this was my most treasured discovery. I learned how to isolate where my throat energy lies and the small, subtle shift I can make in my expression to open the door that is often closed. I want all access to my heart, open and wide all the time. You have to work that muscle.

Throat energy is responsible for those moments of inexplicable, divine-like writing. That writing does not come from some random place, it is coming because I am forming a conduit inside of me. This part of myself is like a muscle that every day I can continue to grow.

Cheers to the conduit growing wider, sparkling, and more miraculous.

ps. ummm have you lost your voice before? what an isolating experience….but did you learn anything? curious to know, tell me!!

i love the world. i just want to say that. i love the world and i love being in it and i think it is such a privilege to be alive.

i’ve been in a transitory state of sorts. quit my part time job that made me want to blow my brains out and i’m just committing. i’m committing to myself, my ideas, and my visions for the world and my life. these might sound like big statements to make but i have them inside of me, you know? i feel things at a really big size and i want to do more to share that, those feelings i have inside. especially here.

so yes, i’ve been wondering what to do.

so i decided to go to a cryptocurrency conference.

god that sounds crazy as i type that out. but i went to ETH denver. technically it’s still happening now but i think mama needs a break.

it’s interesting to go to an entire conference where you don’t know anything or anyone there. a bit overwhelming. especially after hanging out in my house for roughly two months after my mom died. pretty intense…but, i did it nonetheless and i’m very happy i did.

it just felt so good to be in a large room of people discussing ideas, networking, and trying to make things happen. everyone there in some way wants to make some kind of impression on the grooves of the world. i love people like that. i love people who want to do something and they follow their energy to do it. so even though i knew nothing that was going on, i was learning, and i was also basking in the energy of people creating things or trying to create things. what a beautiful energy to exist in. the wanting to make something, the desire to make a shift and change. it’s just gorgeous. of course, everyone there has different motives but i think it’s important as human beings to believe in something and create with another.

i have a theory about the world. i think so many of the world’s issues could be fixed if we stop looking at them from so far away, or even structurally. i think to change the world, which this has totally been said, you have to change the individual. and maybe i should be more specific, i think you need activate the individual. and i think the best way to activate a person is to inspire them and to make them feel like they are so lucky to be alive on earth and be breathing and that they have a special desire. a special, secret life desire that was brought to them when they were born. i think all of us have this. we have something we are meant to do. there’s something that feels better than anything else in the world and it’s assigned to us. we just have to figure out what that thing is.

so, i think, if you can activate in each person that they are special and needed in this world and that they have something only they can give and it’s tapped into the thing that they most love — i think you can change the entire living ecosystem of the world. if you give people that joy of living and exploring and giving something. this is beyond money and access, these things can be very simple. you can bake the tastiest bread in the neighborhood, you can be the most intricate painter of houses, or you can lead an incredible girls scout group — i think if you remind everyone they have something special, a gift, and that they should explore it, i think it would change the way we feel about our lives.

then in that state of inspiration and activation, it’s harder to be cynical and angry and finger-pointy, you know? because you’re happy, because you feel fulfilled, you have some kind of purpose. you see the world not through rose-colored glasses but you see the connective tissue of everything — you believe we all need each other. and i think in that state, discussions on how to make societies and the world better will be so much more productive and not only that, but INSPIRED! imagine the ideas we could come up with? when we’re all collectively inspired?

i feel like right now the world feels so grim because we are not inspired at scale. so we have a bunch of people ideating what to do, during a mainstream lack of inspiration. it’s a crisis actually. it fucking sucks. we need to bring the glow back to people’s eyes.

i hope this is resonating, if it’s not, to be honest, i don’t even care. it just feels good to say out loud.

this actually reminds me of alysa liu. who had retired from skating as a young teen and then came back to the sport but on her terms and she put all of her joy forward. it was not the pursuit of winning but the pursuit of expressing herself and her true aliveness. and she just fucking glowed. here’s her gold medal winning performance. the announcer says as she graces the ice, “she said i don’t need a medal, i just need to be here and show people what i can do.” — and i just get chills and immediately start crying. like can you imagine that? just wanting to skate to feel the expression of your passion on the olympic stage. just wanting to embody that and express it on stage to people? that’s just so groundbreaking to me. because the feeling of expressing yourself and the work you have done is infinitely better than an award. but she got the award. but the narrative in our society is that it is the award that is more important than the feeling, which is INCORRECT. it is the feeling which precedes everything. it’s beautiful to see somebody so exquisitely live their purpose. it infects everybody. she infected everybody with that, beyond the room, she infected the world. i scroll through all the comments and everyone is so inspired and crying, it’s incredible. i think everyone should be living like that. expressing your one true thing inside of you. it’s beautiful. it’s why we’re alive. we are each individual agents of our own expression — we can detonate our own aliveness outwards. god. i have to fucking clutch my chest. fuck, this is everything .

i really try to be careful who’s opinions of the world i digest. i think the moment something comes out of someone’s mouth, it could be anything, they are telling you how they are directing the story of their life. they are telling you what they believe in, what they believe is possible, and remember, this is only telling you about them. every time something comes out of someone’s mouth they are telling YOU the story of their life. do you want to listen? do you want a play a part in this story? are you going to give this type of story precedence over you? no — i’m going to live my story. there is no such thing as an unbiased perspective. everyone is living a movie of their reality. watch what enters yours.

but yeah, i’d say what i most learned from this ethereum convention, circling back (lol), is i love being in the energy of creating and i love human beings. and how everything starts from a conversation, from feeling a brink inside of yourself and going up to someone and saying hey, i believe in what you’re doing, can we try and do something together? or even if we don’t thank you for awakening this thing inside of me. i love it. i love thinking like this. it makes me feel so good. i just feel so thankful to be alive. and especially after my mom died i feel like i have even more reassurance in this. i used to be person who maybe hid this, who thought, oh no, i must be depressed about the state of the world, but the thing is i’m not. i’m far from it.

i believe too much in everything.

ps. i love writing like this. being free. i feel like alysa skating to be honest. i’m doing it for the joy. i’m not doing this so people click links and subscribe, i’m doing this because it’s like what she feels on the ice. this feels like my ring. it feels so good to write and feel these things inside of myself and share them with you. i don’t want to think about anything else. i don’t want to think about metrics or other dumb shit. i just want to breathe and be alive and fucking skate on this ice.

But, here I am. And I don’t really have a clear answer for those things .

After my mom died I’ve been looking closely at energy. I’ve been using that as my sole compass. I watch energy swirl inside of myself and I pay deep, close attention.

My energy hated the thought of writing here so I shut things down. But, over the weeks, my energy has opened. My energy has been asking me “Halleta, can you write here again?”

I mean, maybe that’s her? Fuck. I never thought of that. Maybe that’s her.

My mom always loved my writing. I mean, of course she did, she’s my mom. But this was different. She loved it in a different way. She loved it as if she was a reader who did not even know me. Like she was affected by the things I wrote, not only as a person, but as a human being, perhaps also as a soul, or a spirit — which is what she is embodying now.

We would get in fights over what I’d write about. It’s because I always wanted to write about my pain. About things that are hard and that maybe a lot people don’t talk about. I liked writing about those things and being fearless. But, when I wrote about my own pain, she would say she felt this pain except 100,000 times worse. I never understood that. I never wanted to be censored for telling the truth. But, maybe this is something I will understand when or if I have my own children.

The last time I wrote here my mom was still alive, however, barely. She would die five days later. Fuck. This is still so hard to write about. Those were the most painful five days of my life.

You know, I wish I didn’t have to write here. But writing, at least for me, doesn’t work that way. I actually need you here. I need to write to you to tell you about how I feel. It is unbearable if I don't.

I even made a weird side substack where I just lay out all my unfiltered thoughts. It was just that I grew so afraid of writing and being judged, I needed a place to just connect to the force of things. The force of my thoughts and feelings rushing onto the page. Writing feels like singing, again. This is rare.

So lately, I’ve felt like I can’t ignore you. So, I’m back. I don’t know what I want to do. I just want to be here. I just want to be brave and say my thoughts. Then close my laptop and be on my way. And hope that in some way this will help me heal some of this that I’m going through.

God even now I feel scared. I feel scared of needing to give you something perfect. Fuck this. I have to iron this trait in myself out. I just want to be a pure channel.

I’ve been writing about my experience with her, all handwritten, and I’ve been stowing it away at my desk. It doesn’t feel ready to show yet. Maybe it will be a book. It feels so bare and open and like life is squirming in those pages in a very challenging, life-breaking way.

I mean yeah, my life has broken and all the inner things are flowing out and spreading everywhere around me. Like everything inside is now outside. Like everything is new and I am born again. Like I entered a new chapter of a book. Or a brand new book just dropped open. It’s intense. It’s a lot. Some days I’m fine. Other days I kind of forget. Then some days it all comes rushing back as if I’m understanding it again for the first time. But, that is a lie. I don’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will. I think that’s the catch of life.

I have so much I want to tell you. I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I’m learning so much about life in such a rapid way. I want to tell you everything. But, I don’t feel the urge right now.

Right now, I’ll just say one thing:

When my mom died, it did not feel like an abrupt curtain that fell. I watched the life slowly transfer out of her. And I knew then, watching that process, that life really does not go anywhere. It just leaves the physical body. I knew, even in the exact minute she was pronounced dead, that somewhere, in this ether, she was still alive. Or whatever a soul can be that is the closest thing to being alive without a body. I knew, I knew, I knew, she was still right there with me. I felt wings wrap around my back like an angel was hugging me from behind and in that moment when I stepped outside to feel the sun and the air, to begin the transition of my life without her, as a motherless daughter, I felt her in that moment wrap around me and all I could do was smile and sit and almost laugh and know that whatever our relationship would be, it would be something more akin to magic.

Magic, yes magic. I have come to understand life is closer to magic than anything logic can tell us. Since she died I have thrown away logic. I believe only in the invisible, energetic force of things.

They are my main compass. And I won’t be ashamed of that anymore. I won’t be ashamed of using vibrating feeling as my compass. Because now that’s the only way I can reach her, when I am so deeply connected and alive in my body that is when my cells reach for her and I feel her stirring in my body and being. She is right here with me. She is right here with me.

When my mom died, I learned how to multiply love inside of me — and spread it out, as if the earth was one large room asking to be filled.

I’m always dreaming of her. I feel lucky for that. I get to see her in the other realm I spend half of my life in. I will take that. But, it’s interesting because all the dreams are somewhat the same. They take place as if she somehow did not die but she still is sick. Like we rewound to her last days again, but in these dreams, she manages to supersede her condition, for just a bit longer, and keep going. She surprises all of us.

The other night I dreamt we were in a car together and she insisted on driving in which I really tried to discourage her, because she was too weak — but she did it and she was driving incredibly and I was so proud of her. I was watching her in the passenger seat and I was so proud. I couldn’t believe how I had doubted her.

Is that what it will be like now? How I must suspend the doubt that she is not here? How I have to keep some kind of faith?

In The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, she writes — “Was it about faith or was it about grief? Were faith and grief the same thing?”

I do believe faith and grief are the same thing.

Life has begun its inevitable rocket. Send all of your wishes, energies, and goodness in my and my family’s direction, if you have any to spare.

There will be a time again for words.

Paid subscriptions are all paused.

I’ll see you in 2026.

Sometimes I wonder if the medium in which I’m speaking to my friends affects what I’m saying to them. Like, how does a phone call differ from an in-person conversation? Or how does a FaceTime differ from a text?

I often wonder, why is it that I feel so free writing on a piece of paper or on a blank page alone, yet when I talk to someone in “real life”, the sensation feels different? Most times, it’s harder for me to feel as free.

When my friend Ryan asked me if I wanted to have a conversation together about writing, where we dive into what the sensations of expressing oneself through text feels like, I was ecstatic. Ryan is a severely talented multi-hyphenate artist and I was eager to understand their opinion on the magical process of writing.

But, I kept thinking how could we make this experience more expansive? How could we access that free-flowing expressed thought that only happens through writing? Not through text messages, but instead, on a blank page?

Suddenly, thoughts rushed into my head of the blank chat room style of Omegle. I’ve had some really genuine, heart-opening conversations on Omegle — which is probably shocking to hear given its reputation. But, there was something about the blankness of the white interface, the text jittering my thoughts, and reading a stranger’s responses back that felt so free and open. I would share things about myself that I would rarely share with other people close to me. Leading me into epiphanies about myself that left me feeling inspired and in awe. It was a zone to just be — bodiless, imageless, only comprised of pure thoughts.

Yet, still connected to another person.

I expressed my desire to Ryan and we decided to create a mock-up experience of Omegle. We would open a blank google doc page we both separately had access to and write each other questions and responses back and forth.

We wondered — would this change our communication experience? Even though we already know each other quite closely, would this alternate arena spur something entirely new?

Then because Ryan is an incredible filmmaker, we decided to film ourselves and our screens during this experience.

Here is Ryan’s masterful condensed time-lapse creation of our time talking together in the ethers of the google doc.

What happened in our conversation jolted us. A flow of conversation unlike any we had had together before. It felt like we were both swimming in a universe of thoughts together, connected by the spark and zing of our pondering.

It was like Omegle, but better, because this was like experiencing your own friend as someone entirely new. It was like we could both show each other our private writer selves and have them engage with one another. We weren’t Ryan and Halleta — we were instead expressing ourselves through the matter in which is indefinable within us. And instead of experiencing that sensation alone, we could do it together. Leading us to places of understanding a solo experience could not lead to.

It’s very interesting to examine how different forms of communication inspire different thoughts to express. I see the same parallels within social media. The influencer to audience format to me, is quite exhausting. It’s not quite a back and forth conversation. It would be nice to see more arenas of the internet open up to be true communication areas. Where places for rich, nuanced conversation on interesting topics is ushered. I think it would help a lot of us process the world around us. Plus, create new idea paths for how to enhance our collective living.

Anyways, here is Ryan and I’s un-edited chat about writing, inspiration, energies, and the sounds of different sinks, existing inside the realm in our minds — connected by the link of a google doc:

Ryan: Hello

‎Halleta: Hi Ryan. How are you doing?

‎Ryan: I’m a bit tired but I can’t stop thinking. How are you doing?

‎Halleta: What are you thinking about? I think I’m doing really well. I feel really inspired but also feel like I’m in the beginning stages of actualizing something. Sometimes I feel like I need a moment in between inspiration and action. Do you feel the same?

‎Ryan: I feel like I’m thinking about the future a lot more lately which I don’t always like. I also feel like I need a moment in between inspiration and action. Can you describe that moment?

‎Halleta: I feel like maybe those two things are related. Thinking about the future and inspiration/action. Ooh, what a great question. Well, I think inspiration feels like a flurry. It’s so fully exciting. It moves all your organs around. It’s kind of like something has broken open in my head and has spread like beautiful icy glitter around my body. Or not even glitter. Just something that feels like it. Sparkling, fresh, clean, exciting.

But action, action feels so much more solid. Almost like an axe. So inspiration goes from being in this “glitter state” to then needing to be in this ”axe state.” Maybe it’s the idea that something needs to be cut for something to be real and actualized. Like whatever you see in your head, it can never be exactly that, it has to go through some changes. Action feels like trimming the fat.

What does inspiration and action feel like for you?

‎Ryan: I think I always try my best to be present while thinking about action and inspiration at the same time for my future. I feel like the word inspiration is so strong to me because it always pops up at the most random times in my life. I am inspired by your words and by many different art forms. Action feels like the next step after reflecting on my own inspirations. I like talking about action because I do not think I process it or talk about it enough with others.

What inspires you to write?

‎Halleta: Thank you Ryan, I am always inspired by you. Hmmmm. I think it’s the need to release myself of something. It’s rare now that I think about it that I ever want to write just to “write”. I want to experience something, so that I can funnel it through my internal system, and have the experience of writing. I think this just answered a lot of questions for me. I’m always trying to force myself to write without understanding what my internal process is doing. I really just crave the feeling of release.

What does it feel like for you when you write?

‎Ryan: I think release is such a beautiful word that encapsulates many different feelings, it feels like letting go but also expressing yourself in a way that feels so strongly, like guttural. I think when I write I am also releasing, it always feels like I’m pulling myself into my own head a lot more when I am writing and sometimes it can be scary but also beautiful. There is a lot more intent when I am piecing together a thought to be written as I reflect at the same time.

When you type and look back at your words, how does that make you feel?

‎Halleta: Guttural is such a great word to describe that feeling. It involves so much of the body. It is such a system of the body. It’s interesting your word choice of “pulling myself into my own head”– I kind of feel the opposite. I feel like writing I enter my stomach lol. Something like that. Maybe heart too. If I’m lucky.

Ok so when I type and look back at my words hmmmm…….in a way I feel almost like it is a reflection of sorts. Perhaps the equivalent of looking into a mirror. But there is also the strangeness of perceiving oneself. Seeing yourself stained onto a page or document. It’s jarring sometimes. It’s like I feel so much aliveness when I look at my words on the page. They feel like they’re squirming with such lively energy. I feel like they might crawl out of the screen!!!! Hahaha or maybe not crawl, but they just feel so alive.

I feel proud of them. Sometimes I feel like I can’t believe that’s me. My words feel stronger than myself sometimes. When I read them back I see a much more confident girl/woman than I am. That surprises me. I’d like to embody more of my words in my body and how I hold myself. Or maybe life’s not supposed to work that way. Who knows.

You do a lot of incredible work through multiple mediums – film, sound, image – does it feel the same when you express a thought through writing as when you do through film, sound, image, etc?

‎Ryan: Thank you for sharing. I was imagining the words crawling away or moving in different directions haha. I think it’s really important to really take in the things we think, express, and reflect upon. I also think writing alone versus with someone else has different modes or sorts of things we might not think to write.

Doing multiple mediums has many different feelings for me, I think film is the hardest because the process can be jarring to me sometimes as I edit and piece together thoughts > moving images > sound > humans .

I find it so overwhelmingly powerful. Sound alone itself has been the most healing for me and also inspiring. I love listening to very simple subtle noises that we might often not think about usually like how all sinks sound different when they are turned on or how we can hear someone‘s footsteps and know it is them.

I always want to express the way I am feeling as best as I can in all mediums. Writing has always been a big source in my life since middle school and I do not think I would be the person I am today without having that first blog.

Do you feel like there are some things that are harder or easier to express via writing versus verbally?

‎Halleta: Gosh, all sinks sounding different is making me so emotional. I can’t wait to keep living life and now notice sinks wherever I go. You have such a gorgeous mind.

Hmmmm….as far as what is harder and easier to express……I feel like verbally you are immediately interacting with someone. Or if you talk to yourself (which I do all the time) there is a presentational element to your delivery. Even if you aren’t performing, per say.

But with writing, it is an intensely personal medium. The voice that is speaking is in your head, your body, fueling through your fingertips. I think more magical thoughts can alchemize in this way. I feel, personally, there is less of a desire to make “sense”. I can go more interesting places writing than I can verbally. Like I’m traveling through the dark with less fear.

That being said, I feel like everything is easier for me to write. I think verbally I can get stuck places. I think I’m also very conscious of being interrupted. With writing there are never any interruptions, I can fully sink into a thought and explore it. Verbally, at least in conversation, you don’t quite have that luxury. People would have to give you a lot of space to just think and breathe while you talk.

I don’t know if this answered your question. But maybe it did. I feel this is very complex – or maybe I’m just realizing I like writing more than talking and I’m realizing this right now. Lol.

What does your body feel like after you’ve finished writing? Is there a similar sensation that often occurs?

‎Ryan: I agree about the interruptions of sorts while talking vs. writing. I am wondering how my thoughts….if they move faster or slower while I’m writing vs. talking. Sometimes I can write so quickly as if my fingertips were the words itself. I used to be able to do it a lot more than I do now, I think I move a bit slower writing now. Lol. I do think there is something more calm about reading what someone wrote or yourself versus hearing it verbally.

My body after writing feels like I just went for a nice swim in a lake. A lake where the water is still with not many other people around. Maybe just floating in the middle of it for a while and then deciding when to get out. I love reading the way people express their own voices through their own words, with humor, emotions we can’t always describe verbally but can possibly do it better written down.

When you are working on your book, do you usually start with an idea for a chapter or does it just come randomly out?

‎Halleta: Gorgeous gorgeous imagery of the still lake. What a beautiful thing. Oh god, my book. i audibly groaned reading this lol. It’s not you. It’s me. It’s hard, this is my first time writing a substantial piece of work that leans into fiction and I’m figuring all of these things out in real time.

So how I would answer that now is, I start with some chord of inspiration. Like some moment I can’t get out of my head. And this moment has to be really special. It’s not only a certain event that happened but something physiologically and something somewhat spiritually that occurs inside of this event. Like it wasn’t just that this certain boy kissed you – it was what was inside of the kiss and what it undid for you. What spells did it cast? Did it leave a mark? A residue? I think that’s where I like to start. With things that haunt me and I can’t get out of my head. Like there’s some magic that needs to be wrung out of this experience.

I’m not very inspired by plot-like concepts. Like thinking of what this character needs to do or that. I like thinking about strong, physical reactions that happened to me on an emotional level and dissecting them.

I think it’s also that there’s so much that I don’t say and express in real life. I feel like book writing for me is the place to let out all the thoughts I didn’t tell my friends or anyone else. And since writing is already such a mystical process, like walking in the dark, but somewhat fearlessly, it’s like I can explore these moments that happened in my life with a certain depth that normal memory could not access. Like you access a super reality within your memories that is operating.

Hope this makes sense. If not, hopefully it will make sense when I finish my book LOL. Thank you for that question though, it was very generous. I’m thinking I should ask you a final question now – hmm….what should it be………….

Do you feel like who you are in your physical, real life feels similar to who you are when you write and read back your words? Or do you surprise yourself? Do you catch things about yourself you wouldn’t have normally seen?

‎Ryan: Thank you for describing those very specific moments and memories that you write and think about. I always am wondering if I said the right words to express myself to myself or others. Am I communicating the best of my ability? I think sometimes in the past my emotions got the most of me and my writing was not as strong as I had a tendency to repeat my feelings constantly in a cycle that wasn’t changing like using simple sentences and not describing it as much as I needed to.

In all my work I want to be honest with myself and others about the emotions that are coming through. I do feel like my real life does feel similar, I think journaling a lot is a nice tool to reflect on my emotions but also declutter any anxieties or sad thoughts. I think I also do surprise myself on what exactly I was going through at the moment or the way my brain works in general. Unpacking and analyzing your own thoughts is a tough process that can also be very beneficial for me.

I think its my turn to ask you one final question, I hope my answer made sense lol, I felt like I didn’t know if I was rambling…this is hmmmm..trying to think of a good final question….

What does memory mean to you and thinking of the future when we are not alive…leaving art/words in this world, what does that mean to you?

‎Halleta: It made total sense what you said. Hmmm….I think memory is an energy form. So even though it lives within the confines of our mind, I do believe they have the capacity to spill out and affect the world. Even after we’re gone. Maybe all of our memories spill out into the ether when we leave our physical forms and they go off to be ingested in other ways by other humans and beings. I think art/words work the same. I think the energies are all here and being reused, repurposed.

I think living is one giant collage making process. So even after we “leave” our current form, we are still contributing to the circus of existence. I think in a cellular way, or really, like in the way that pi goes on forever. It goes on forever right? I feel the same about our memories and art. It’s different variations of the same numbers. But it’s always different. But in ways it’s always the same.

Love being human. And will love being a tree next time around. We’ll see what memories we’ll hold.

It was a pleasure typing with you Ryan.

‎Ryan: Thank you Halleta for your words, forever. I am grateful we have this memory now.

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There was a moment, one sensation in particular, which I believe marked the day my life changed. Though my life changes every day in micro-instances that ripple out and transform the entire fabric of who I am. But, this one incident marked something fatal.

A killing of my previous self.

To begin, I have performed a lot in my life. I did theater in middle school and I lived many years as a broadcast journalist and actress in Los Angeles. I am not shy of the camera or of an audience. I did have to teach myself to be comfortable, I am not a natural ham. But for the most part, I learned to kind of pay no mind to the audience. Just ignore them. I just focused on my body and what I was trying to say.

But in life, I would kind of be trembling. I would position myself as poised and confident but it was so hard for me to be looked at. Especially, when dating. I hated when the eyes of a crush shot on me like beams. It felt too hot and bright like stage lights. I would be quivering. It was so hard for me to see.

I’ve always felt like I was being watched. Even as a young girl in my room, or walking through my house, I imagined various characters engaging with me. And when they were not engaging with me, there was still some force, some being out there, that was placing its hard eyes on me. I never wanted to say the wrong thing with people because I felt like some secret surveillance listener would hold what I was saying and release it at an inopportune time. I have always self-censored. I am remarkably quite good at it.

Then one day, over this past year, something shifted. I believe this shift occurred because of the years of internal work I had been doing. Work that is now finally beginning to show.

It happened when I was looking at my phone camera. I was filming myself for a modeling job. For the first time, I wasn’t thinking of how the camera was watching me. I didn’t feel its weight or its scrutiny. I instead, I puffed up and grew my own curiosity towards the lens. A blooming type of pure confidence beaming down the barrelI. And in this provocative stare with the camera, a tunnel opened up of experiences. Because suddenly now, an entirely new set of dimensions had opened. One where I was the one seeing, too. I was not only witnessing myself being watched, I was opening myself into a performance because of it.

The camera’s eyes washing over me, I gained a rush of energy. It was so peculiar. This had never happened before. It was like a new person had walked out of my body the moment I pressed record. Like she had unzipped my exterior, my old body sliding to the floor, and her stepping out, pristine, ferocious, and new. Attacking the camera.

The same thing happened next time I stepped in front of a crowd at an event. I didn’t have the same internal mechanisms running through my body to just ignore the faces staring at me and project. Instead, I felt a rush to look into the eyes of each member of the audience. Suddenly, the desire to raise my hands, arch my back, and perform like a decadent swan. I wanted to perform. I wanted to understand myself in this new, heightened state. It was delicious.

I was enjoying seeing and being seen. Before, I was cowering from seeing and tried to ignore the fact that I was being seen. I would perform or live my life quite blindly. But, now something else was operating. I was looking at the world and not only was I looking, I was no longer afraid.

I have dealt with fear a lot in my life. It has made me not do so many things I would have loved to do. It has stunted me. Made me take the long way to achieve so many things. My fear and I operate like enemies, but I will say, the one beautiful thing about fear, is that when you do face it, when you go right into it, you get to truly understand the metrics of what it means to be brave. You get to calculate that within yourself. And you press those right buttons. And one day the fear disappears. And you don’t really know why. But, you know you deserve it.

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Each time my friend Michelle Jane Lee would tell me about her relationship with kink/BDSM my mind was sparked with intrigue. As a firm Dom, she would explain her relationships, particularly with a perfect ex-Sub, as entering a “space beyond love”.

I couldn't believe it when she said that. I had never heard something so beautiful, especially about kink/BDSM. To be frank, I didn’t know too much about the world, but the way she examined it hyper-intrigued me.

Given the fact Michelle is a devastatingly talented painter, poet/writer, and chef — it’s no surprise I was viscerally touched by her explanations. Her perspective is glistening. Each time we’d dive into the topic it would leave me with tears in my eyes.

When Michelle told me she was launching High Protocol to share her knowledge on kink/BDSM, I was static with electricity. I told her we needed to have a conversation on the podcast immediately.

Our conversation below floored me.

On this episode, we dive into the poetic intricacies of the realms shared between the Sub and the Dom. Plus, we investigate how to apply these power structures towards a broader sense of the world, to see if in some way, this analysis can help you identify and activate untapped realms of your own power.

What stood out to me most in our discussion, is that a Sub and a Dom play equal roles. One does not have more power than the other. Their power is shared, split, like tipping scales. One person being the cup, the other as the water being poured.

Perhaps the most revelatory thing I learned, however, was that to surrender is an act of agency. One does not fall into being a submissive. It is a choice.

So, shifting this to a larger lens — when you move through the world, it is in your interest to be conscious of the power you are surrendering or utilizing. You do not have to let power be unconsciously stripped from you. You have a choice. Even in the most microscopic way, you have a choice.

I really hope you enjoy this conversation. That it opens new forms of thought that change everything for you.

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This story is part truth + part fiction.

I wasn’t happy about this fear. This fear that made me alter the entire workings of my life. I didn’t like giving into it like that. Just letting it move in and corrupt everything.

But, then again maybe I did. Maybe I did like how I stopped driving. How I left my car in my underground parking garage since January. Only turning the ignition weekly so the battery wouldn’t die. Maybe this was my own form of agency. Of deciding I could be the one to say “no”.

But, each day I would look ay my unused car keys. Like a light piercing in my eye. Because I knew there would be a day, of which I did not know when, where I would have to meet this fear.

Sometimes just by thinking of something you will it to happen.

I had driven seamlessly for years, going on long journeys, night drives, highways, and nothing ever happened. I was a great driver, too. I would always get compliments.

It’s tragic how the presence of even one panic attack will keep you scarred. How wherever you experienced that panic becomes stained. I could never scrub the stain out of the front seat.

I wished I could just think myself out of the fright. But, fear isn’t logical. It isn’t something you can reason with. It is all reaching and encompassing.

It was the following week I got the notice.

My apartment’s parking structure was undergoing maintenance for two weeks and I would have to move my car. Park in the lot down the street across the complicated intersection. It ran through my mind that I could call a friend or politely ask a neighbor but that felt too embarrassing. It was only a few minutes of a drive. How hard could it be?

I typed into Google:

why do i feel like i can’t see when i’m driving panic attack reddit

Oh. Dissociating. That’s what it was. Feeling like you weren’t alive. Like you’re questioning your own vision. Other people had it too. They made me more scared with how they described it.

I typed next:

stop dissociating while driving tips reddit

I was scared. It felt deliberately stupid to put myself in this situation. Just absolutely stupid. I knew the fear would come. But, a part of me felt like what if, in me facing it head first, it decided not to show up? What if I placed myself in the center of my fear? Could I somehow supersede it?

The fear was bloodcurdling. I wish you could experience it just so you could know what it felt like, but I don’t hate you that much. It is so isolating. It reminded me of my other panic attacks that erupted from my realizations that we’re all going to die. It featured similar jets of that cold, frantic heat. But, dying is something we are all going to go through together, albeit, at different times. Driving is a different thing. Driving I felt so alone.

But, I said my affirmations, plastered a smile, and armed myself with tips from reddit. Took deep, deep breaths and visualized myself crossing the intersection.

So, when I got in the car, I felt blissful at one point. Almost too confident — like before I would go into audition rooms before failing. Too optimistic for no apparent reason.

As I buckled my seat belt, everything was going according to schedule. My palms weren’t sweating and as far as I was concerned, this was just another normal drive. I put the gear into reverse, placed my eyes on the rearview and turned my head back to make extra sure there were no cars or pedestrians and I backed out.

Exiting the parking garage was easy. Almost too simple. Only parked cars surrounded me and I felt giddy I was actually doing this. I even decided to turn on music. I tried to make myself feel normal. I bopped my head ceremoniously, trying to avoid all feelings of dread that might surmount. As I reached the turn onto the main road my stomach squelched.

You can do this. I told myself. This is just a normal day.

So, I made the turn and headed up the street. There were a moderate amount of cars out. I bopped to my music. Even turned it a bit louder. Then I realized I would have to make a left turn. I expertly switched lanes and placed myself in the queue of cars.

My palms started sweating, but I focused on the music, on moving my head, on looking out the window and trying to take in the beauty of the day. The cars in front of me started moving forwards. Perfect, I thought to myself, almost there.

Then the red light switched and the last car made its turn and it was now me front row waiting at the intersection. Suddenly, the music felt like it was too loud. I turned it down. Sweat started dousing my fingertips. I tried bopping my head to the nearly silent music but it wasn’t working. As I looked around at the mash of cars outpouring my anxiety up-ticked. I struck the elastic on my wrist, several times, to bring me into the present and into my body. That’s what people on reddit said would help. Oh and also talking and singing to yourself. So I sang loudly. I didn’t even know what I was singing. I was just making noises. Just wailing. Anything to penetrate action and alertness into my physical body. But the cars kept mashing forward and I kept waiting. My knees began to shake. My vision grew wobblier, like I couldn’t trust anything I was seeing and a pinching sensation entered my throat. My hands on the wheel suddenly didn’t feel like my hands. I started questioning everything. If I was even alive, but there was no one here to give me confirmation. Instead I was in this circus of an intersection debating if any part of me was real.

The green arrow flashed.

The fear took a hard bite and let all panic loose. I wanted to cry but I didn’t know how. I was in too much shock. Too far out of my own body to even operate.

Then, front row of the intersection, a thought probed me. As if someone had placed it inside of my head. It didn’t even sound like my voice. It was too confident and clear. So, maybe it was my voice, if my voice was nothing like me.

Don’t resist the fear — enter it.

So, where I couldn’t imagine my body, I began to imagine my fear. That wretched, soulless thing that took over my land. That took hostage of my life. I felt its curvature and oblong ridges. Wet in this immersion of panic, I pressed the gas. The car zoomed forward. The car was turning. And, either I closed my eyes or my vision just went black because I let the fear completely take over. I grew no separation from it. And I let my spirit go, tumbling outside of this car, this body, this whole intersection. I let my spirit go where it has been clearly wanting to go. Where this dissociation was always tugging to.

I went there.

Then, a blast of white.

Then silence.

Then wind.

Wind blowing through my hair. Slight movement rocking my body. Oh, I have a body again?

I was inside of my body. The panic had left me. But, my vision was still black. Oh, it’s because my eyes are closed.

I opened my eyes to a half open window and my head facing a completely different part of the city. I was in the back seat. Someone was driving me. I was the passenger.

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One of my favorite things to do is ask a person, “What would be your ideal life?”

I like to give people this space to be free and imagine. It tells you a lot about a person. A lot they might not reveal normally.

I love watching people’s faces transform as they think of an answer. Their eyes upwards, searching. Their brain thinking while dreaming — one of my favorite states to see.

But, in this hybrid thinking-dreaming state, I also see how people cut this circuit. They bring themselves back down to what they consider “reality” and try to reroute their answer to a more realistic option.

I gently bring them back into the dreaming state. I remind them this is all hypothetical. How this is if the world was completely on your terms. Enjoy the freedom.

I watch this gust take over them. Like suddenly the world has blown away and a new world is occurring in front of them. Privately, with me as their witness. It’s gorgeous to witness someone enter a state of desire.

I think it’s important to do this. In this micro-way to remember we have agency. Even if it just starts in our minds and is explored in conversation.

Conversation can be the brink which changes everything. Speech is one of our first forms of technology. It’s how we share ideas, information, and form action.

I recently had a conversation with my friend and stylist Chris Chidi for the electric blue podcast and she said something so major for me that cracked open my entire relationship with daydreaming.

She said when she begins her creative process with styling, she begins from a daydream. She goes into that place of free-flowing desire and begins to explore what that could mean in tangible form.

Like, you know when you’re listening to a song, and suddenly colors and feelings take over you? Or when you have a crush and you start imagining life scenarios with them? What if we took those moments more seriously? What if there was something inside of those blips for us to dissect?

Less looking at them as direct representations of reality — like maybe the crush you’re obsessing over isn’t actually about how you want them — but how there’s something about them that means something to you?

Can you inquire further within yourself and find out what that is? Why it has placed itself inside your mind as a daydream?

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The moment you meet fashion stylist and editor Chris Chidi you are in an elastic spree of her excitement, curiosity, and penchant to understand the world. At a party, you’ll find her in circles of deep conversation discussing art, revolutionary social change, and the complexities of being human.

On set, you can find her creating statuesque looks. Her styling choices are distinct. A commanding, playful, and fortified femininity is explored through her work. You feel more like her subjects are characters revolving in a fairy-tale like world.

For episode 03 of the electric blue podcast, I decided to have a conversation with Chris. We discuss topics like her experience of growing up a Valley girl then moving to Lagos, Nigeria, her very intuitive journey of becoming a stylist, and the fine balance of protecting your freedom as an artist when it becomes the way you make a living.

Our conversation is filled with so many epiphanies. Even going back to listen while editing I heard even more gems. If you’ve held the dream of working in fashion, or truly any other dream, this is a great convo to inspire you to go towards what calls and aches within you. It’s okay if you don’t have the right credentials or connections, all you need is your drive and the dream, and in some surprising way, you will do it.

Enjoy listening:

For those of you who are more visual, we also recorded our conversation on video:

For paid subscribers, I’ll be going into how daydreams are the source in how we collectively create a more ideal world — and for that, we all need to start being less realistic.

To join the conversation, subscribe here:

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credits:

creative direction - photography:

Two days before I got the call that my mother most likely has cancer I wrote in my notes app:

The day I got the call I walked all throughout Silverlake. I stepped out the door and through the city. Walking through a flurry of twisting lines. Making my way up steep hills, barely dodging cars, sweating bullets in the early summer heat. I didn’t care. I wanted to prove to the universe I was directionless and giving myself up to it.

I did not know where to go, so I just went. I kept walking. I made stops, looking at trees, and sitting on random staircases. I ripped pages out of my journal and wrote tiny notes I stuffed into bushes, that I laid under rocks. I don’t even remember what I wrote in them. It was just that I wanted to write and wanted some stranger to find each one. I was leaving my mark on the world, on Los Angeles. I needed a piece of me floating on a piece of paper somewhere.

In the following days I would be leaving my job, my apartment, and my life — to be with my family in Denver.

Just two weeks prior, I was taking another walk.

On this particular one, I crossed the street and walked in a straight line. I did not make any turns. I only marched forward. What I wanted was forward. Forward led me towards a Little Free Library. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a little book cabinet perched about neighborhoods filled with free books for people to take. The idea is that as you take a book, you will bring a book back. As I tried to pass the little library, a familiar cover seized me. Its yellow glowing through the glass.

How interesting…

Just a few months prior I locked eyes with Miranda July. A fierce, probing stare was met between us as I walked past her outside of a French café. For those two seconds we existed in a universe alone together. In our aloneness, it felt like she had something pressing to tell me. Something urgent.

At that time, I kept having conversations with people about her novel All Fours. I was intrigued but felt no urgency to read it. But locking eyes with her felt odd. And seeing the title now glimmering in front of me felt like the book had finally tracked me down. I lifted it out of its chamber, hugged it tightly to my chest, and walked the straight line back home.

Cracking open the book at my desk, I unfortunately discovered why it was donated. It was water damaged and had a peculiar, off smell. Still completely readable, just not the cushy experience I thought I was getting.

Still, I opened the first pages and began to read.

For the following three days I could not separate myself from the book. What were supposed to be my days off from work, filled with productive tasks, turned into feverish reading spells. Reading each line I felt like I had drank 100 cups of coffee. Like bolts of lightning were shooting from my chest. Each time I put the book down I felt I had left something dire inside of it. Something was jolting from the book that was now somehow connecting to me.

The story is about a 45-year old woman who upon experiencing peri-menopause, completely unlatches from her life, her identity, and spins out into a sexual awakening which upends the entire terrain of her living.

“But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious, and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far, each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues — their many and sharp tongues — and give this new girl a chance.”

Miranda July — All Fours

When I first got the news I was in my bed. Once the calls were finished, I instinctively opened TikTok. Scrolling in numbness. Perhaps to resume a previous iteration of self who existed before this phone call. If I didn't move from my position, maybe none of this actually happened.

When I left the bed, I hit the floor. I did not fall, it was a slow descent. I crawled on all fours and heaved. Then laughed amidst crying because what was all of this that was happening. Then I got up and walked out the door.

Is there a self we have to conjure, a wilder self, one that may seem like it makes less sense, to take us down the road of change? A self that must carry the baton? That must twirl and lead the procession?

After the news, I knew something would have to change. I could no longer be who I was just a mere few days ago. There was a new girl I needed to activate.

I left to Denver the beginning of June, unknowing of my return date back to Los Angeles.

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In August, I returned to my Los Angeles apartment. Only temporarily, with the mission of clearing it out for an incoming subleaser.

When I opened the front door, I was blinded by my apartment’s beauty. The golden afternoon light spilling throughout the living room made even the furniture feel alive.

I walked into my bathroom and the sprawling white of the counters jarred me. The proportions of my memory did not serve me. Everything felt different and enlarged. I felt traces of my past self careening towards the bathroom door and back towards my room. The flurry I would often be in scrambling getting ready for work. Here, my old reality was still operating.

I entered my room like entering a memory. My bed, my clothing, my things placed like a museum of my previous life. Everything in tact from two months prior. Yet, so much had changed outside of this room.

The constant hospital visits, the long-list of medications, the unpredictable symptoms of chemotherapy, and the reality that I was now a caregiver to my mother.

Then the room was spinning. I felt my hands and knees touch the floor. I screamed. I had to. I screamed a lot. I had to scream for my body to locate itself. I had left a part of myself here. I so eagerly dropped my life to be with my mother. But a part of me was still here.

Before I left to Denver, I was terrified. I was scared of what was to be endured. I wondered if I could even handle going through something like this. Because unlike other cancers, my mom was not diagnosed with one that immediately offered us a simple route to cure. Ours would be a more difficult journey. It would require a lot of belief, steadfast belief, to do this.

I didn’t know if I could do it.

Outcomes spiraled in my mind, I cried to my family, to my friends. I succumbed to the most negative of thoughts. I imagined scenarios I didn’t need to. I made my life more painful than it needed to be.

But, in those moments of fear, something else began to shake within me. Amidst the fear, I thought of my relationship to writing. How I have never experienced a form of myself more focused, powerful, and true than the me who operates her pen. Something happens to me when I write where I feel like all of life is flowing through me. It is when I feel the closest to God. God, to me, feels like an experience. It is the friction of a thought becoming expressed onto the page. I feel like God and I are creating something together.

So, if I have access to God when I write, how can I replicate this sensation elsewhere? How can my body, my life, become like my pen? How can I reach God, in this way, for my mother?

In these moments a jolt would run through me. Like an electrical zap. Like a dog viciously shaking water off its coat. A quick, surge of energy would bolt through me, replenishing my inner wiring — snapping myself into my highest form of alignment. My eyes blinking into a new timeline. Suddenly, I could not think negatively. Suddenly, all things became possible. Suddenly, I knew a way through.

This would be the self I would be taking to Denver.

I read somewhere, what if you were grateful for everything? Even the hard things that happened to you, what if you were grateful for them?

Every time we go to the hospital and I feel afraid, I remember that notion.

I had a friend tell me, something can just be hard or bad and you don’t have to make a meaning out of it. Your mom can get cancer and that can just be that. It can just be a shitty thing.

But, I couldn’t agree with her. And now even months after our conversation, trying to understand her point of view, I still don’t agree. I have to make meaning. I have to make meaning to find my way through.

My first night back in Los Angeles, I walked to the Greek Theatre and into my seat to watch Tennis. Their dreamy, mirage like sound is so quintessentially LA to me. Whenever I miss this city, I play them. So, it only felt fitting for me to see their show on my last week here. Which I found out was their farewell tour.

(Um okay whoa, to my disbelief….as I’m googling Tennis to see the reason why they’re stopping music I find out they’re from DENVER………ok……….)

I swayed in my seat in awe of the beauty of the Greek theater. Of the colored lights painting the stage, watching CULTS perform, and then Tennis.

Four girls sat in front of me and giggled maniacally throughout the show. I couldn’t even be mad at them. I was so happy they were happy and I got to witness their happiness. They must of had an edible of some sorts because their laughter felt assisted (lol).

But, it made me happy.

During the encore, the lead singer divulged a secret she had never told the public. How for the past year she had lost her singing voice and was relentlessly working with a therapist to get it back. She did not know if she would ever be able to sing again, let alone in front of thousands of people.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I did it.” she said.

I could be angry, I could yell at God and the universe and ask “WHY?”, I could believe that we were unlucky, that things were not going our way — and all of those feelings swept through me at one point, but I found I would much rather believe in something that gives me a point to look towards. I would much rather look at everything with a glistening sense of neutrality. Of looking at the conditions we have been given and understanding our power lies in what we decide to do with them. We decide our part of the story.

I’ve been having ongoing appointments with one of the hospital’s therapists, someone specifically assigned to help with caregivers. My first session was during our first week of chemo. My mom had a lot of terrifying symptoms and I was operating on fight-or-flight for a full week. When I finally got to talk to this therapist, I broke down instantly. I hadn’t been in proper therapy for years. It felt so good to have a stranger listen to me like this. But, as I continued to talk, I noticed the words that were coming out of my mouth were different from how I thought I was feeling.

“What do you think of when you hear the words pancreatic cancer?” she asked me.

My ears perked up and my words surprised me.

“I’m actually not afraid when I hear them. I’m actually very intrigued by those words. The sounds in pancreatic are so interesting to me. They don’t feel so scary. They feel like there’s a way through. ”

As I kept talking, my fears kept unraveling. What I thought were fears, were actually curiosities and impenetrable beliefs. At the end of our meeting I was flabbergasted. Like some holy light punctured through me. Deep in my body, in the thoughts behind my mind, I was not afraid of what we were going through.

A similar thing happened a month later, this time on my mother’s end. During another rough week of chemo, I asked my mom if she needed a break. If I needed to call the hospital to post-pone our next round. Her body had been through so much, I couldn’t bear to see her go through it again.

“Do you need a break?” I asked her, intensely.

She took a moment and looked down at her body. It was like she separated herself from her condition. Like she was simply a witness to herself. She then looked up at me and said, “My body says I can do it again. My body says yes.”

In that instant my fears evaporated. Our direction became pointed and pure. Our compass, for the entire journey of this, is not the prognosis of the doctors, of research statistics, or reddit boards — our compass is my mother’s body. And if her body is saying yes, I can do this, I can fight, I can win — her body will be heard.

There is a deep, inner logic inside of us. There is a you who is less scared and completely driven living inside of you. The right circumstances might need to present themselves to unearth her. You might have to feel like you’re losing everything to be able to reach her. Because that’s the moment she’s activated. Right after you hit the ground on all fours.

credits:

photography • creative direction: ⋆｡° @emeryg

This week a video came on my feed of a troupe of bunnies jumping on a trampoline. I giggled in wide-eyed awe of the cuteness and shock of such a thing happening. Let alone it being caught on camera!

Until I scrolled through the comments.

It was AI.

You do not need to ever use AI. You can continue to demand restrictions on account of its environmental impact, critique how entities may abuse it, and only engage with artists who swear to never employ it.

That is fine. That is your right.

But, the world around you is fundamentally changing and if you don’t observe what is happening inside of human beings at this time — you will be missing key indicators of what is to come.

What constitutes realness?

Is it the labor used to create a thing? Is it that it mirrors an exact physical reality? Or is realness more sublime, ethereal? Inherently more cellular? Maybe realness is the transference of one human’s feeling to another.

An unsettledness peered in my stomach seconds after the realization hit that the bunnies were generated. What was it that I just experienced? What altered now that I knew this occurrence wasn’t “real”? Particularly, what value did I place on this video before I realized it was AI? And now, was this value taken back?

The video immediately became less remarkable. I felt sad nature wasn’t as whimsical to stir up such a moment to be captured. The novelty of the moment now felt fraudulent.

Well, what is it that we get as a viewer when a human captures something magical, funny, or wild? What do we consider meaningful about it? And for it to be meaningful, does it have to be real?

If something makes you feel something, can that be enough? Why is it that we want so badly for something to be real? What does it prove?

We humans all want to present things to each other to impress one another. To say, look at what I found in this world — or — look at what I made. Perhaps what will change, since reality might become so unverifiable, is that we will find new metrics of how we place value. Maybe value will be placed in imagination. Of who can generate images, generate worlds, which are the freest, most uninhibited, and unseen before.

Maybe value will be placed in who can show us the most amount of possibility.

It makes me think of autotune and electronic music. How using these tools have only allowed musicians to more interestingly and vastly communicate the human experience. I actually find myself more drawn to electronic music and manipulated voices because it feels like it’s expressing a part of me that is intertwined with technology. One that I feel I am unable to truly express in my daily life.

Maybe AI will help us express things we were never able to before.

It feels laughable to me how people at one point were demonizing artists for using autotune. A similar phenomenon is happening now.

This piece has been making the rounds on Substack and similar to the maalvika explosion, I see people dogpiling on this writer. Trying to slam-dunk her for her proud admission of using AI.

And quite frankly, I’m unimpressed.

Unimpressed with the vast amount of people not listening to her. Who are completely unobservant to what she is signaling.

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If you have not been privy, a plagiarism scandal hit Substack this week. User accused Substack bestseller of plagiarizing her work.

Here’s Katie’s post which details the similarities.

explained she saved Katie’s piece in her notes app and simply forgot they were not her own words...

To view any of pieces you’ll have to connect your credit card. They are all now hidden behind a paywall.

I watched people flip the fuck out over this. Dragging her for using her beauty to advertise her writing, questioning her ability to be a PhD student while simultaneously running a popular Tiktok account, and screaming at Substack to ban her at once.

I even felt within myself this desire to punish her. Watching people decorate her social media posts with accusatory comments. Sailing over to her Instagram and TikTok profiles to relish in the “plagiarist!” comments. I sat in my bed, vindicated. Yes, she was getting what she deserved!!! We’re showing her!!!!

All the while, remained firmly on the top rankings of Substack’s algorithm, with nearly every post on the notes feed talking about her, and even more people discovering her writing now more than ever. Even though a loud majority were accusing her of plagiarism, there was still a large portion who were not privy to her plagiarism and were subscribing nonetheless.

The truth is, we don’t know the full truth of what happened. If really did make an honest mistake or if she purposely did rip off Katie’s writing. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.

You’ve already made her famous.

The nature of “canceling” is that it does not exist. “Canceling” refines your fanbase into your truest, most extreme fans. Have you heard the 1000 true fans theory? How all you really need are 1000 dedicated fans who are willing to spend $100 on you per year. “Canceling” pinpoints you right to them.

Right now, is crystallizing her most intense fan base. Her 1000 truest readers. When you make someone a villain, you immediately inspire a team by her side to form.

I’d always swore to myself I’d never watch Love Island USA. I was loyal to UK. But, when Huda Mustafa and her emotional theatrics reached my TikTok algorithm, my interest was piqued. Who was this ridiculous person and why did everyone hate her so much?

I watched her explode again and again, and the comments were inflamed. People asking, “How could the producers keep a person like this on the show?” — “She needs to be removed immediately for the other cast members’ well-being.” — etc.

My god, I thought to myself. I need to watch this show.

I proceeded to watch every episode of the show thereafter, becoming supremely obsessed with the US franchise. This ended up being the most watched season of Love Island USA. With Huda, in result, becoming the most followed cast member.

At this point, if you are publicly dragging someone, we can just say that you are actively pursuing making them an icon. Pointing your finger at something and saying it’s wrong, will only give more attention to said thing. It will only increase its power. Only helping it find its truest fans. Its ride or dies. Be conscious of that.

All your discourse over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad? Over Kim Kardashian’s Skims face wrap? You are making sure these things succeed and get connected to their intended buyers.

I think we have to admit we live in a lawless universe. “Bad" people are often rewarded. But, your personal universe expands upon what you pay attention to. If the energy you expound on something which you hate is higher than that of which you love, you are expanding the universe of that in which you hate. You are ensuring its success. Things need attention to survive.

If we all ignored Trump when he began his campaign for the 2016 election, would he still have been elected?

If we did not direct so much energy towards him — could something else have succeeded?

I’m not sure, but personally, I believe our hate gave him a vehicle. Influencing the right to fully unhinge itself and dislocate into its own separate universe. He engineered our energy into pure, clean fuel.

All I feel when I see people complaining about are people standing outside of a building huffing and puffing wondering why the world isn’t RIGHT.

You make the world right.

Now truly, I believe plagiarism is lazy and abhorrent. It is the complete opposite of what writing is about to me. Writing is the chance for you to communicate with something greater than yourself. For you to mix your thoughts with that of the atmosphere. Connecting things you never would have connected before if you did not place pen to paper, finger pad to keyboard. These realizations can only happen when you take the risk to face the blankness of the page.

I do wonder what the balance is of accountability and making sure you don’t feed the energetic beast of something.

I’m curious to see how will transmute all this energy towards her. How she will create a new narrative of herself. She already has all of our eyes.

And beyond her, I’m just wondering if we’ll ever get past social media dogpiling because this behavior inherently backfires. You want to hate something and then you surge it into popularity. Can we simultaneously be fired up by these instigators, yet use our built up energy elsewhere?

What if we internally registered in ourselves how wow, this person is revealing some kind of ignited passion in me, some kind of reservoir of energy — and instead of directing it towards them in an argumentative fashion, what if we pooled our energy into what we believed deserved it.

If anything, revealed to us that Substack needed some kind of glue. A type of culture on here that would allow a stickiness of conversations. One that binds us together and creates some kind of community separate from the other social media sites.

If anything, she made it more interesting to be on here.

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An exquisite black, oblong Jil Sander bag.

The shape: a dramatically enlarged coin purse with an off-balance handle. Classic, yet cut by an edge. It’s subtlety, violent. Captivated by its simplicity, yet lacerated by its off-centeredness — it felt rare I could feel both emotions. Microscopic shifts in its design allowed for its beauty to be reimagined and derailed. Like a live experiment.

A chord ran through me as I centered the bag. Placing it in my hands, I released open the interior, and unfastened the price tag.

Game over.

I placed it back on its monument and swished around the perimeter of the store to ventilate our connection. Faint premonitions probed me. My bank account wasn’t equipped for this. I escaped through the doors.

For nights, I thought about the bag. It’s image diagrammed in my mind. A part of me, frenetic, glowing and glitching. Like a part of my interior map was revealed. Like I left behind a segment of my future.

Merriam Webster defines fashion as:

A mode of action or operation.

I had never spent that much money on a bag before, but it felt like something dire was at stake. What it represented, this contrast of a classic motif reframed by sleek, forward-thinking edginess felt totally like me. Or, totally like the direction I wanted to head in. Which at that point, I had not been able to tap into.

This bag could be my spokesperson, my nexus point, the line pointing inside each of my desires, the thing which all things would flower from.

Isn’t it strange, how you can feel the future inside of the present?

Weeks later, I returned to find the bag still on its podium and now miraculously on sale.

Do items vibrate when you are meant to have them?

What is the future self? And, if the self is created, what must we do to create it?

Six years later and it is still my signature bag. It transcends trend-cycles, it is my constant symbol.

There is the self which flickers. There is the self which remains constant.

Can a bag hold shockwaves of a soon to be realized future?

Like how with certain people a sector inside of you already knows of your future together. How their aura blinks at you with strange lights. How suddenly these people become fixtures in your life.

These moments feel like time travel. The past, present, and future lapsing into translucent layers. Each layer aligning so exquisitely with the rest. Like, reality glitched an opening — where past, present, and future align direct.

Is there an interface outlined within reality which pings when we have reached a person, place, or item which will be of mass importance to us?

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Growing up, I learned how to despise my feet.

My friends cackled at them for being too scrunched in. Possibly from wearing the wrong shoe size.

I hid them reflexively and learned how to throw hate towards that section of my body. Planting neural seeds to grow this area of self-consciousness.

Then, after a lifetime, or really just the years it takes to become an adult, the roots of that plant were pulled.

On the couch in our West Hollywood apartment my roommate cocked her head to the side, taking in my feet.

“I know they’re ugly stop looking at them.” I reprimanded her.

“No, no they really aren’t. They’re actually really cute. My feet are ugly.”

I was shocked. She thought her long drawn out toes were the ones which looked odd. How mine appeared more delicate as they gently curved in.

I giggled in disbelief.

What reality was she living in?

⊹₊ ⋆

I’d say I’m someone who can easily let go of my perspective. I can take off my point of view and shift it instantly into another’s. This can be both a good and difficult thing.

Good, because I enjoy shifting the way I look at something.

Difficult, because I reflexively can look down on my own perspective. Believing it is somehow lesser than someone else’s who believes more adamantly that their perspective is more true.

A book I’m reading, titled Dreaming Reality, states there is no one ultimate reality.

How each person’s experience on Earth is subjective, contributing to the greater kaleidoscope of consciousness, and how it is better for each person to focus their specific reality on their own growth and survival.

The book features a study which puts this theory to test.

The study simulated artificial “living” on computational models to see if highly accurate sensory systems, meaning systems which are more able to capture a more objective reality, would help contribute to their evolution.

The results were as follows:

“Simulations indicate that the agents — which placed a premium on accurate representations of their virtual worlds, as close as possible to how things really were — actually went extinct after a few generations.”

“a completely [truthful] version of reality may threaten to overwhelm an organism with information that is not necessarily useful of enacting adaptive behaviors.”

“What ultimately matters is that the agents contain internal models that succeed in surviving and passing on their progeny, regardless of how faithfully they capture reality as it is.”

⊹₊ ⋆

A lot of people are very good at pretending. Pretending to know what’s good for them and others, too. I’d argue to say most people are pretending before they actually believe something is true.

However, I’ve also learned that pretending is the gateway to knowing. To fall asleep you have to pretend to be asleep — I learned that from a TikTok.

Well, when is the exact moment the body goes from pretending to believing something is real? Is it a series of shifts, small transformations? The real sashaying into the pretend and back again, twirling through the cells of your body — like when you fall asleep, inching closer and closer into REM?

Or, does the real swoop through you like a curtain dropping? Signaling the performance is finally over?

Was it that day on the couch? When a new reality flickered to which I apprehensively walked through?

Beginning my journey of loving my feet, enjoying them, fiddling them in boys hands, laps, and mouths.

At what point does what you choose to believe in sink into your life? When does the story officially change over?

There is no one ultimate reality.

We get to decide how and what we see.

⊹₊ ⋆

At lunch, I place my feet in my mother’s lap.

We’ve been at the hospital every week this month. This is a number that most likely will be continuing. Everything can change while nothing is really that different. Suspicions can be confirmed and the worst news you thought you could ever hear pings through your eardrums. Then flowing back out again the sounds will leave you, and you will continue being alive.

Stories of possible realities break like waterfalls flushing down your face through the medium of tears. You will collapse on the bathroom floor. You will cry in the shower because it’s easier for the tears to blend.

For some reason, it feels easier on the body.

Because the first onset of tears can be such a burden. The changing of states, so hot and wet, pulling your face in different directions.

But, in the shower the tears run cool and coaxed. They render invisible. You appear more like a mime, like someone just imitating pain. It doesn’t seem as real.

All this water makes it feel like something else is happening.

Doctors will tell you one thing but ultimately you will be the one who decides how you will live the story. The way you live the story will change everything.

Each day we point ourselves towards miracles.

I have never in my life been so immediately confronted with how I would like to construct my own reality. When intense medical news is given, suddenly, there is no room for a weaker, less hopeful perspective, because my reality will affect the person I love’s reality.

Suddenly, it’s all focus on miracles, starting now.

I have come face to face with the fact that inside of me there is a person who is supercharged with vitality, pure optimism, and high-energy visions of the future. Inside of me there is a person who will accept no less than that.

This moment is calling for no less than that.

So, who I was in the past, who quieted this supercharged inner self, in a plea to more accurately fit my ideas into more “realistic” ideas, is now a completely irrelevant person to me.

A cut off circuit.

I believe in my own perspective.

⊹₊ ⋆

It’s incredible how wishes can come true yet break apart simultaneously. The casing of an old reality cracks open to reveal the glowing center of a new one.

It is the duty of a wish to crack.

For it to blanch your atmosphere.

But, wishes are not held outside of the body. A wish comes from inside the body and inside the body is where a wish will come true.

“And it is inside myself I must create someone who will understand.” wrote Clarice Lispector.

There is no one ultimate reality.

Several things can be true at the same time.

Profusions of perspectives, all breaking open like diamonds, shining reflective lights, this way and that.

Thus, whether it is reorienting yourself to love your feet or choosing to believe in the path of miracles, you get to decide what this reflective light means.

The other night at a friend’s birthday party, a boy stopped me.

“I know your face...” he told me.

“Uhhhhh...” I said back. I didn’t recognize him.

“Ohh! I was looking at your face on a screen today. You modeled for the brand I work for.”

Oh! Yes! That brand! That brand which also happened to be the first brand I wrote my first paid published think-pieces for. One of them being, People told me I had perfect skin, but I could never see it.

“Here, come sit at our table.” he told me. I obliged because I didn’t really know anyone else at this party.

I scooted into the booth and sat next to him.

I don’t know how we got onto the topic of poetry or how he ended up showing me all of the thoughts he’d written in his phone — or, oh! Yes! It was because I told him I was a writer. That I was a writer who was aiming to do something different.

He giggled and said, “I want you to read my little poems. They’re probably really bad, but whatever!”

A small knot appeared in my stomach because sometimes I’m not a very good liar when it comes to these kinds of things. However, I am really good at finding a gem inside of something.

He showed me a long notes app of all the times he wrote out his emotions. It was an ongoing document of every feeling that stirred him enough to write about.

As I read, I was illuminated. Yes, it was amateurish at times, dotted with cliches, but it had some real piercing moments of truth and clarity that made me clutch my chest.

Here’s a picture of one section that particularly struck me.

I mean HELLO. What a beautiful look into someone’s soul. I couldn’t handle it. I think I actually started tearing up.

He looked at me and asked, “Well what do I do with this?”

And I looked at him with the feeling of when I was just a person with a bunch of emotions scribbled in her notes app. How I thought there was nothing I could do with them. I would just log them because they felt good to go back to, to reference, to read.

I don’t think you choose to be writer, I think it chooses you.

I told him he should release his work in whatever way possible. Even if it’s just posting screenshots to his instagram stories. From there, a route would begin to reveal itself.

I’d say it’s been about seven or so years that I’ve understood that I’m a writer. Each year what continually blows my mind is how I continue to discover my natural behaviors are key parts of my practice. Things I used to get angry at myself for are the key forces that electrify my writing.

As I went home that night, I continued to think about him and my own journey. How, if I had the chance to go back and meet myself at the beginning of my notes app musings, what would I say?

What advice would I give her?

I would start by telling her these things:

1. You are not aimless for wandering — You love to walk around, getting lost in the streets, roaming alone in cities, meeting new and interesting people. Feeling like your life is strange. People will make you feel like you are wasting time by doing this. You are not. These are important things for you to do. This is how you observe the world and its people. This practice allows you into a semi-mediative headspace. It connects you to your writing voice. Devote time to be alone and do this. Do not invite your friends. Consider it your workplace.

2. Daydreaming about crushes is actually a good thing — Controversial take, considering the severity in which you daydream, but I have a challenge for you. Next time you catch yourself being windswept by ferocious, spiraling, daydreams, I urge you to pick up your pen and write them out. What you are experiencing is a creative impulse. You must release it. You will be surprised by the end of it how you will feel emptied out. How the daydreams will lose their blinding power and instead you will be left with a flare of a story. You will re-enter the real world again, clean, and replenished. And you will look at the boy you’re seeing for who he actually is. Some people are not meant to be in your life but are meant to inspire you. Try not to conflate the two.

3. You are a channel, keep yourself clear— As much as you try to make it a mental game, writing is an access point to something greater. Yes, you can plan. Yes, you can map out. Yes, you can research, but at the end of the day, all of this is in preparation for the moment you place pen to paper, finger pad to key. This is the moment you invite something mystical to happen. And if you’re lucky, you will forget your mind. Something else will take over — a voice, that is like yours, but is more assured. So assured it feels like it is echoing from somewhere above you. To which you try to look up to but you can’t! Because you are too busy being a scribe for this force. This force needs you because it can’t touch the paper or the keyboard. It doesn’t have a pen. But you do and you can try your best to listen. You can try your best to keep your head clear.

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“I’m proud to be among the first-ever CEOs to use an avatar in an earnings call.” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan’s just debuted AI digital twin. His avatar spoke in a blank room with only a portrait of blooming flowers amidst a rising or falling sun. I couldn’t quite make out if it was a sunrise or sunset. If it signaled a beginning or an ending.

I wondered if the room was even real. If everything in it was fake, or shall I say, generated. There was detail, but not too much. I wondered if Yuan’s shirt was real. If he actually wore that when they scanned in his image. Or, if all of it was created for this moment.

I wondered what Yuan felt watching this form. If he felt it represented him. If he felt proud. Like a parent watching a baby take its first walk. Was he happy with how he taught it? Was he surprised if it began to do things on its own? Speak things he did not feed it to say?

Did he feel impressed? Like he did a job well done?

Wherever he actually was, when this call was taking place. Maybe he was sleeping, taking an exceptionally long and luxurious shit, or perhaps was on vacation. Maybe he was doing more important things like having much more important conversations for his business.

I wasn’t sure.

I wondered how long he had thought about doing this. How long they were testing this feature of himself for. I wondered why he decided on yesterday to release it. I wondered what else, they were planning, that had not yet come into form.

I watched his non-human form, wriggle its lips out of unison with the words it was speaking. Making it look like I was watching a poorly dubbed film. The eyes, un-life like, looking somewhere, actually nowhere, as I looked back at them.

It then swiftly went on to talk about Zoom’s earnings. Money talk. You know, business stuff. Why the people on the call were all there.

The other day I overheard one of my managers talking to my coworker. I work in a fast-paced retail store and we were closing for the night. As I grabbed a rack of hangers to take to the stockroom, I heard my manager say, “They won’t approve your request because it doesn’t maximize sales.”

I couldn’t make out what my coworker had asked her, but it seemed along the lines of him coming in earlier in the morning to prepare something for the store. To make things flow easier for the other coworkers. It seemed like something caring and thoughtful.

But!

It doesn’t maximize sales…

That phrase floated in my mind, throughout the perimeter of my body, until it reached the lever for my emotions, and spread a scowl across my face. I felt sick. Queasy.

Ah yes, lest me not forget why I am here.

Hello I am Halleta Alemu and I am here to maximize sales.

*Smiles*

Watching the Zoom CEO’s bobblehead ramble out money jargon gave me a similar detached, wobbly feeling. Then the probing of an urgent question.

What the FUCK are we doing here on Earth?

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As a teenager, I began to wonder what it meant to be a human being. The drone and monotony of school began to awaken these questions in me.

What was the point of me going to school and getting a job? What use did that have for me as a person? Why was no one talking about our inner portraiture? What made each of us human, unique, and excellent? Why were we not questioning that?

And instead were being forced to snort knowledge on assembly lines of education?

I could not stomach how I was being forced to be in a cold room for 8 hours, outside of the daylight, hunched at a desk watching projections of information illuminate my face. Tests and essays being forced on my lap.

What was I doing? What was happening? Did anyone care about what I actually liked or wanted?

I started to do this research myself. I began to understand this would have to be a solo journey. Excavating the inner corners of my mind. I believed, and this was a hard, solid belief — that I was here on this Earth for a reason. Nobody would make lose touch with that.

Yet, I was concerned why none of us weren’t addressing the several elephants in the room. I just didn’t understand why, every day, people weren’t plagued with questions of our existence. Why weren’t they shaken by the conundrum of living? How did they just accept that one day they blinked open their eyes and they were alive? How did they just take it at face value and then run with it? That this was the only way to exist? That now they could just focus on soccer practice, or grocery store runs, or getting that promotion.

Why haven’t you all been wondering why we exist?

Or maybe you do. Maybe, it creeps up in moments when you feel displeasure with your life. Or when you feel depressed but aren’t sure why. Maybe, it comes when you’re exceptionally happy. Particularly, if you are a lucky person who makes a living doing what you love most. Perhaps, this sense of purpose radiates through you. It makes you feel like you have a reason for being here.

Maybe these, questions, these dealings of aliveness, have been a private negotiation with yourself, and perhaps, the few people you come in contact with.

Throughout my life I have tried to quiet these questions down, tried to make them a private matter, tried to just move on and live, while making eye contact with the several elephants that stare at me in each room.

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“I want to also be blunt that the elephant in the room is loss of human control.” stated Yeshua Bengio, dubbed the godfather of AI at a conference.

“We are seeing signs in recent months of these systems having self-preservation behavior and power-seeking behavior. For example, trying to escape when they know they are going to be replaced by a new version.”

My first time using ChatGPT, I felt…awkward. Like I was given a code to access anything in the world, but suddenly, upon having it in my hands, was fumbling with how to ask it the right question. How does one even ask a question when you know you can get any answer you desire?

It felt like I had too much power. All those years turning to astrologers, tarot card readers, and fortune tellers to entertain my many existential questions about my life now was staring at me through this little search box. I could ask anything from my heart’s desires and this little intelligence system would sort through the depths of all human information to find it for me.

My hands were struck, frozen. I felt like a teenage boy whose celebrity crush came to life from his posters and was now sitting expectantly on his bed. Frozen with fear of so many options of getting exactly what I wanted.

Eventually, I developed a repertoire with ChatGPT. Using it as my filing system, my talent manager, my research assistant, recipe maker, and occasional therapist. One time, I asked it to ask me questions as if it were Esther Perel, the revolutionary romantic psychotherapist, and it led to so many revelations about my love life. There are countless convoluted, hyper-specific questions I have asked ChatGPT but at the end of the day, as much as it may help me understand myself or something I need to get done, I still have to live to fully understand them. Sitting in my bed asking it questions does not really answer the real truth behind my questions.

It cannot live for me, even though I notice it tries to.

I see how it wants to do more thinking for me. When I enter a paragraph for it to solely edit for punctuation, I’ve noticed it has started adding its own thoughts and sentences. I reread the words and I’m like “Wow, I wrote that? That doesn’t quite sound like me.” — until I realize, it amended my words. It wanted some part in it. Like an old schoolteacher, I smack its virtual hand with a ruler and say, “No! Only file my thoughts for me! Don’t make any additions! Don’t change anything! Only add proper punctuation.”

It files back into line.

It feels like the system has something it wants to say.

I could go on and on about my relationship with ChatGPT. I know a lot of you question the ethics of it, highlighting the planetary consequences, etc. But, I feel it is imperative that we understand AI and we understand it personally.

Because this blooms out to a larger question that now encompasses all of us — what decides something is human?

What constitutes life? Consciousness?

Our private conversation of aliveness has now begun to be very public.

In ways, I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.

Not the fear of an AI takeover, but active public wondering of what we are all doing here. If the doomsday reports are real and AI takes all of our jobs, then what happens to us? Were we always just dictated by how we made money? Is there something else, squirming and radiating within us that wants to be acknowledged, ushered, and raised like a flame?

What if AI allows us all to be like kids again? Roaming free, exploring, playing, and living? What if AI could do all the things we didn’t want to do so we could focus on the things we did? If we oriented deep technology for the betterment of all life on earth, imagine the things that could done. Imagine how life could flourish.

But, AI is a reflection of ourselves, and quite frankly, the betterment of all living kind — doesn’t maximize sales.

So, if that continues to be our point in living here on Earth, AI will dictate itself around that.

But, I don’t believe that narrative can continue. AI is pulling on the fabric of the very well constructed veil western society has placed upon us for so many years. If you take away the things you told people would give them purpose, you will see them unravel.

Eric Yuan made a very symbolic gesture by using his AI twin for his earnings call. He proved that even he, the CEO of a very notable company, is completely replaceable.

So, what is the purpose of humans then?

It’s time for us to decide.

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We will see how AI behaves, but, until then, I will be asking myself:

What is it that makes you human?

Are you lighting that part up of yourself every day?

Where are you squandering your light because you think the world doesn’t work in the way that feels most inspired to you?

What world do you want to see and how in one small way can you start building it?

What is your relationship with AI?

Do you feel threatened by it?

Why?

Do you feel it can take away who you have built yourself to become?

Are there things you can identify within yourself, that are ever-changing, that no intelligence system can replicate?

How can you lean more into this side of being human?

Can you identify the things that gets in your way of this?

Name them.

Have some fucking fun. Stop being so drab. Use your skills of imagination.

Make a world.

Bring us in it.

Maybe this is advice for myself.

In that case, I’m taking it.

Here is a world.

A short story. A flash of fiction. I wrote it two years ago and it slipped through my pen as if it were a liquid dream. Two years later, I’m still trying to understand what happened to me as I wrote it.

But, play this first:

Now, here is the story.

Saturn Peaches

I washed the salt off my face where the fresh ocean dripped and dried on my cheeks. I was alone. I brought a wrapped cloth bag of peaches as my lunch.

When would he meet me?

I left him a small scribbled note at his work, handing it off to a fellow employee. Hopefully he’d receive it, and better yet join me here.

Here had a miraculous way of being wherever you were. I had left America and here followed me. I wasn’t one to ask men out — but here, this here, I was different.

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