…and then I woke up

why I'm starting a substack instead of going back to weekly therapy

(actual photo from my hospital bed, post-op 5/11/24)

Hello, and welcome to my interior psychic landscape.

It’s going to get strange here, but I promise you’ll like it.

I’ve been wanting to become a Substack baddie for two years now, and never really knew when the “right” time would be. I procrastinated (hello, newly diagnosed ADHD), probably due to a deep, lurking fear of what the hell I’d actually say. But the more I put it off, the more I started to feel something—both disturbing and clarifying. A kind of liminal ache.

A collective psychosis simmering just beneath the surface.

This feeling that we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop…

Like there’s a secret we’re all trying to ask each other, but we forgot the question.

And then, exactly one year ago this week, I got appendicitis.

I had my appendix removed in an emergency surgery.

It was the second emergency operation of my life. The first was when I was 3 — I lodged a pen in my eye while my mom wasn’t looking as she shopped at Pay Less Shoes. I guess even then I thought I could see more clearly through the power of the pen.

Anyway.

I woke up from surgery—appendix-less and high on morphine—at 5:55 a.m. on the cusp of my birthday.

And a portal opened.

This Substack is an extension of that portal.

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…and then I woke up

The title is about dreams — but mostly, it’s about waking up from them.

It’s about the clumsy choreography of making sense of destabilizing fragments: dream dreams, waking dreams, the illusions I buy into to survive, and the ways I try (and fail, and try again) to wake up from the stories that no longer fit.

This is a place where I’ll explore all my writing that isn’t screenplays (and baby, there’s a lot).

A place where I’ll let myself be unfinished. Nonlinear.

Where I’ll say the things I probably shouldn’t — but will anyway. (With style.)

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What to expect:

• Poems, musings, short stories, visions, downloads

• Reflections on the little deaths and rebirths that happen every day

• Dispatches from the space between dreaming and waking

• A memoir of the soft apocalypse we are witnessing in real time

• Deep dives into pop culture hauntings
  

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What kind of space is this?

This isn’t a newsletter — it’s a container for softness, instability, obsessions, irreverence, ritual, and love.

There will be a lot in here about gender, film, breakups, transcendence, grief, spiritual delusion, art-making, and many jokes about LA’s “healing” culture.

I like to think of this space as that moment when your best friend is analyzing a dream with you and she says:

“So I eloped with my toxic ex.

The wedding was in our high school auditorium.

Mimi from The Drew Carey Show officiated.

The only guests were my divorced moms — who were arm-wrestling —

and dolphins in individually sized pools that filled the whole theater.

And then I woke up.”

More or less, that’s the vibe in here.

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This is a space for trans and queer kin, artists, weirdos, witches, seekers, David Lynch enthusiasts, anyone trying to make sense of the senseless, anyone who values Snoopy memes.

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The logistics:

• I’ll aim to post 2–3x a month — sometimes more, depending on astrological forecasts and the spirits that move me.

Free Subscribers:

• Access to most essays, mini-rants, poetic nonsense, stories, and experimental thoughts.

Paid Subscribers:

• Bonus content: early creative peeks, voice notes, private Q&As, and rituals I may regret sharing.

• Also, you’ll be supporting my writing practice and my body — both of which are in ongoing transformation.
  

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I’m starting this because I need a space to tell the truth about what it means to build a life — as a trans artist, as a seeker, as someone who’s died a few metaphorical deaths and come back more haunted (and hotter).

If that resonates, stay. Subscribe. Let’s see what opens.

welcome :-)

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