when did you stop being open?

you’re turning 30 this year, don’t you know all the doors in your life are closing? and then i shut down. i sink into bed, annihilated by time.

Jul 24, 2025

i grieve my younger self a lot. i was naive, yes, but i was receptive, i was open to people and situations in a way i’ve never been able to get fully back.

self at 16. i miss her. a wild child, starry eyed.

i’ve wondered if getting older is the process of becoming more solidified in yourself, like when you’re born you’re just a cosm of possibilities, and as you grow the smoke dissipates to reveal a figure, standing still.

but that feels too close to death to me. there’s too many people i want to be. i want to be an herbalist in north carolina. i want to be a sound artist touring around europe. i want to be an avant-garde filmmaker. i want to run sound for experimental plays. i want to be a jungian analyst. i want to get a youth visa and spend a year traveling in new zealand. i want to make a documentary about my local diy music scene. i want to start a podcast to interview artists about their process. i want to learn how to make zines. i could go on and on. possibilities of lives i could live, and want to live, stretch out before me. then i think, you’re turning 30 this year, don’t you know all the doors in your life are closing? and then i shut down. i sink into bed, annihilated by time.

i don’t want to be bitter. i don’t want to be cynical, but my heart has grown more reserved. i think of all the times i’ve put myself out there and it’s backfired, and i think, see? you flew too close to the sun. you can’t have everything.

i guess i am greedy to want it all. i am a hungry ghost, a holy vessel just passing through. i only have this one life, and i feel a desperate hunger to experience as much as i possibly can.

i started rewatching the OA last night. and it’s insane how much of that show went over my head when it first came out, and how eerily similar it feels to my experience over the past few years. i think that the show is ultimately about (and it has so many sweeping, grand themes, GOD) belief. when did you stop believing that our existence is just a thin veil sitting on top of eternity? we just skate the surface on everything that could be, and all we have to do is pierce the veil. this threshold is what interests me, and what i am seeking.

i think of myself as a small girl, in my strange seeking, keeping a box of things i found precious for some reason and putting it somewhere hidden. i created a secret language for myself. i called them “SICNOS” (purposely misspelled spanish (signos) for symbols/ signs) — i made the connection recently that i was creating sigils + accumulating talismans. it was innate to me, this secret world of symbols.

and now i try to recreate that world, i arrange my creative space in a way that feels like an altar. it’s a creative practice, and a sound practice yes, but it’s also a ritual. a portal i create so i can enter it. so i can walk towards the threshold, and maybe, just maybe, i get just a sigh from the other side. a whisper on my shoulder. the feeling of hands wrapped around me, holding me still. i am being carried by something bigger, and much older than me. then, i close my practice, i exit the portal. i’m back in the physical world, where everything feels so heavy and impossible. i long to go back.