THIS TIME OF THE YEAR

Wow. Here we are. The last single before the album. This is one of my favorite songs I’ve put out in a really long time. Coincidentally, I wrote this song last September, exactly one year before the new album is set to enter the world. Sat in the dark at my studio desk with my 1937 Martin, I wrote the majority of the song in one night. Actually, in one improvised voice note recording on my iPhone. Originally it was called FOR REASONS I DON’T UNDERSTAND and it was five minutes and twenty-four seconds long.

Summer had been exhilarating and incredibly full of life. After spending the better part of 13 months wading through heartbreak and letting myself do mostly whatever I wanted, so much was brewing inside of me. I spent most of September home in New York, recharging and in search of some kind of equilibrium. I was trying to date again, although I was dating without much intention and was operating from a place of feeling rather unavailable. Of course, one of the most productive and healthy steps in finding an equilibrium is to get coffee with an old flame. And then to obviously go to drinks a few days after that, too.

My coffee catch-up stirred up so much within me. I was suddenly overcome with an intense yearning for somebody and for what could have been, had things gone differently. I am such a romanticizer. I’ve always felt things intensely, even when it is not productive or appropriate to do so. It has often been a blessing – for example, it has allowed me to express myself through music, to love those in my life with a wide open heart, to feel appreciation and gratitude for the smallest moments, and to act quickly on my intuition and impulses. Life has rewarded me over and over again for leading predominantly with my emotions. Pursuing music, dropping out of college, traveling on a whim, experiencing great love, and so on. But it has also often gotten me into trouble.

Diary entry from September 2025:

I just don’t understand why I let myself get in these situations. I feel like I am way too emotionally driven and sentimental and I need to seriously tighten up how I act. I should’ve just stuck to my guns about being in a bad headspace and that I don’t want or feel interested in a relationship any time soon. I just try to lean into the feelings and then I hurt people or get in these uncomfortable fucking situations.

Before writing TTOTY, I’d spent much of the previous year allowing myself to follow my intuition freely, even blindly at times. Getting coffee, and writing this song, were pivotal catalysts – moments in time that forced me to really analyze and confront the space between emotion and action. I remember feeling torn by the two scenarios playing out in my head. I could act on the feelings coming up for me, try to see this person again and tell them how I was feeling, everything could go right, we could fall deeply in love, and we’d both be forever grateful. Or I could swallow the feelings, process them on my own, remember why things didn’t work out in the first place, and recognize that our lives had grown in two entirely separate directions. The third scenario, which I struggled to consider at the time, was that I’d act on my feelings without considering the root intention or subsequent impact, and my actions would only cause unnecessary damage to everybody involved.

Diary entry #2 from September 2025

I feel ultimately undateable. I have a limiting belief right now that being in a relationship is incongruent with what I want career-wise. I have such a narrative about myself right now. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m noticing that when I don’t dip into dating, I feel invincible. When I dip my toes back into dating, I feel intense vulnerability, which brings up feelings of insecurity, and that makes me uncomfortable. When I’m vulnerable, I palette cleanse and I pull away.

Am I palette cleansing intentionally because I want to use these years to focus on my career? Or am I palette cleansing out of avoidance? The behavior isn’t the problem, it’s about identifying the intention. I don’t know the intention. I enjoy meeting people and having encounters. And at the same time, I don’t know how much room I have right now for a relationship because I don’t want to compromise anything around my career.

Writing this song was an exploration, or even acknowledgement, of all the infinite possible outcomes, depending on the decisions we make, the action we either do or do not take. It was also an exploration of my understanding of my own intentions. For me, a huge part of “growing up” in my late twenties has been learning how to more maturely and patiently navigate that aforementioned space. How to develop discipline where I previously let myself go mostly unregulated. How to slow myself down and ground myself in reality when I get caught in the romanticization of people and the past and future unrealized scenarios. Understanding when to act on strong emotion and when not to. Understanding how to be at peace with sometimes doing nothing when doing nothing seems logically to be the best choice. Understanding how to let things go and how to let things simply be as they are. Maybe these are lessons I should have already learned far before 28, but they weren’t. They were things I needed to learn right then and there, exactly as I did.

Another reason why I love this song so much is that its September origins reek of the inherent nostalgia of autumn. I imagine this is a widely universal experience, but the fall makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Perhaps all the years of heading up to school early for soccer preseason and fall semester classes have conditioned me to feel this way. Or maybe it’s the heavy undertones of change and transition as the leaves turn orange. It feels like shaking the summer off, becoming another year older, entering another season of life. I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that I love this song and I’m so excited that it’s in the world. And I’m so excited to be showing you all more of this record. So much of the narrative around the last few singles was about existing and trying to find relief while deep inside grief and heartbreak, and as a result, letting myself experience life, pendulate, say yes to as much as possible. I’m grateful to get to give you guys TTOTY because it shows you guys me starting to claw my way back home to myself. Album next. <3

My fourth album IS THIS THE END? is out on September 25th, 2026. 

This album is heavily influenced by New York City, where most of my adult life has existed and will probably always exist. It is influenced by nighttime and sunsets and sunrises, hours of the day when my most prominent experiences and introspections occurred. Lastly, it is heavily influenced by the sonic palettes and visual worlds I loved so much in my late teens and early twenties. Over the last two years, I deeply craved reconnection with myself and with the imagery and sounds from the internet and the music industry that initially elicited such emotion and desire in me to express myself and be an artist in the first place.

To me, this record is truly everything all at once. It is the sunset over the West Side Highway, the diamonds on the East River from a rooftop in Dumbo, the vastness of the Manhattan skyline, the echoes of laughter over beers with friends, the nervous anticipation before a first date, the euphoria of a good high, the thrill of kissing somebody new, the joy of dancing until four in the morning, the brutal dizziness and disorientation of being too fucked up, the stale air in the room after violent sobbing, the stubborn remnants of grief that linger after heartbreak, the pit in your stomach, the stillness of the city at sunrise, the existential questions you ask yourself repeatedly:

Am I becoming who I am supposed to be?

Do I even like myself? 

Am I making the right decisions?

Is this the life I want? 

Am I going to fall in love? 

When will I catch a break?

Will I still feel young and fun when I turn 30?

Am I going to be okay? 

Do you really ever know?

This album is chaos and mess, hurt and healing, motion and stillness, rebellion and acceptance, ignorance and revelation, shame and pride. It is everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve been. I do not like every version of myself that exists on this album, but I love that about it. I want people to find solidarity in it. I want people to know it’s okay to be chaotic and messy sometimes. It’s also okay to pivot, change your mind, recalibrate, and reorient. And lastly, it’s okay to accept and embrace yourself through it all. 

I have so much to say, but this for now, and more later. x

it’s been a long few years since my last full length record. i have felt so high, so low, so invincible, so fucking lost. i have desperately missed touring, i have desperately needed the time away. i was scared i was never going to find real earnest stability, or myself, honestly. i was so scared for you guys to know how lost i felt, although i imagine you guys know me well enough by now to notice these things.

i’ve thought so much about the early days. opening for mike, the swr tours, drinking in the back of sprinter vans, staying after every show to meet every single one of you. i miss it, i miss us. i love it all so much it brings me to tears.

my favorite thing about this next record is that i am not hiding any part of the last couple years, any version of myself, any experience i had or choice i made. i pushed the album back and i thought for months about what songs should even go on it, what versions of myself i should reveal. i was so scared you guys would hate me, or certain parts of me, think ive changed or lost whatever brought us all together here in the first place back when we were screaming 310 bowery and sweating in basement clubs. but i’m not going to hide any of it. i don’t want to, and i also can’t. we’ve never been anything but honest with each other. being 20 something is being all kinds of things, all kinds of versions of ourselves. ones we hate, ones we love, ones we can tolerate at the very least. what a beautiful thing to grow and learn and experience and try again and again. i hope in five or ten years ill look back and reminisce about this next record (and a tour i hope) in the way i so dearly remember all our earliest days together.

this particular song idea got lost in the mix but im so glad i found it again tonight. maybe it’ll have to go on a 2027 record. <3

I love this song. At its core, it just feels like summer to me. Having fun, letting loose, enjoying yourself, not taking things too seriously, following your intuition wherever it leads you, doing something because it feels right in a moment. I wrote so much of the new record from different places of reflection, growth, exploration, change, hurt, and healing. But WHAT ELSE? came from a moment in time where I was fundamentally giving myself permission to just have fun and find pockets of joy through it all.

We wrote it last August in Los Angeles during a chaotic summer that I spent flying back and forth every few weeks between New York and California. Between all of the travel and couch surfing and studio lockouts and summer antics, every week of my life felt like a new adventure.

One of those adventures was that I had started intermittently hanging out with a girl in LA, and one night when we were laying in her bed, she pointed out that I would often ask, “what else?” in moments of silence between us (welcome to dating with ADHD!). The next morning when I arrived at the studio, all I wanted to do was write a song called “What Else?” My only goals that summer, other than continuing to write my record, were to have as much fun as possible and to not take myself so seriously, so I loved the idea of writing a song that loosely poked fun at my desire for constant conversation and affirmation. I also loved the idea of writing a song that felt playful in the midst of writing so many songs that felt incredibly intentional and significant in subject matter.

Surprisingly, as much as we loved writing WHAT ELSE?, it was not a contender for the record until a week before the whole thing was due. It sat untouched in a Dropbox folder for almost a year until we (kind of randomly) decided to take one more look at it. When we opened up the file, we fell back in love with the song - so much so, in fact, that we decided it should not only make it onto the record, but should also be the next single. I love that the song initially came to life in a gust of spontaneity and will now enter the world in another.

I’ve said this before and will continue to say it again and again: I wanted to be vulnerable with this next record in the sense that I wanted to really write about every experience I was having. There are songs about heartbreak, about questioning my future, about changing and growing. There are also songs about having fun, meeting new people, trying new things, letting myself go through every stage in the cycle of healing. I’ve always defined vulnerability in a bit of a one-dimensional way. This record is home to all parts of myself. It is my place to live authentically and unapologetically. There is beauty – and vulnerability – in letting yourself have fun, in letting yourself make decisions on a whim, in letting yourself live with abandon. I’ve found that it actually requires a large degree of self-compassion and understanding to do so. I’ve noticed that whenever I feel the desire within myself to be more calculated in my decision making, it often coincides with when I’m operating more from a place of self-protection, of trying to predetermine outcomes and experiences. Sometimes true vulnerability and authenticity thrive best when the space between intuition and action is actually a smaller (but healthy still, of course) distance. Life mostly happens in the undetermined and in the incalculable: the unforeseen circumstances, the person you didn’t expect to meet, or the spontaneous night you didn’t plan to have.

So this song is me doing my best to live in the fun, in the joy, in the spontaneity. I hope when everybody listens to it, they are able to feel all of our laughter and excitement in the studio that day. Happy summer, go do something fun. xxxx

Little did I know in 2015 that ten years later, Hayley would reach out to me to tell me that she was in New York City working on a film she wrote and directed, and she would invite me to come spend a day with her in the editing room. After a few hours of watching beautiful scenes and talking at length about her ten-year process of making the movie, she would ask me if I’d be interested in writing a song for the film. Feeling inspired and moved, I’d go straight to the studio and send her a demo a couple hours later. We’d finish the song together over the next few months in LA, and I would learn of Hayley’s plan to release a soundtrack that featured solely queer artists. My freshman year self would never have thought any of this to be possible – to be openly living as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, to be a recording and touring artist, to be friends with the person who wrote the song about kissing girls!?

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the premiere, watching the film in its entirety and meeting so many of the brilliant individuals who worked on it. As I watched Maya Da Costa and Myra Molloy on the big screen, I couldn’t help but tear up thinking about how many teenagers and young adults will hopefully get to see their experience reflected in this movie. When I was in high school and college, I was desperate for any kind of queer visibility. Even now, there are so few examples of queer representation in mainstream cinema, and even fewer if we’re just looking at films about high schoolers. The experience of teen yearning accompanied by the unraveling of one’s sexuality is so specific and unique, defined by the careful balance and coexistence of tension, uncertainty, desire, resistance, passion, and fear. I remember reading Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth and feeling as though she so beautifully captured this experience with such care and nuance. I think that if I had seen a movie like Girls Like Girls when I was younger, it truly would have significantly changed the trajectory of my teenage years and early twenties. It would have shown me that I wasn’t really as different as I thought I was, and that there was nothing at all to hate about myself. I am so excited that a movie like this exists now for everyone in the world moving forward.

I’m so proud of Hayley and beyond honored to be included in the soundtrack. The movie is out now so go see it ! <3

And for our second installment: SORRY I’M OBSESSED WITH YOU.

This song is about sex. Let’s get into it.

I heard the other day that one of the instructors at my pilates studio referred to me as hot singer Chelsea. This is both confusing and bewildering to me. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, my friend Emma and I walk through the studio doors at 8:45am sharp for Heated Sculpt – our fifteen minute early arrival time ensures that we’ll be able to snag spots at the back of the class, in case, you know, one of us suddenly starts blacking out and needs to escape. As everyone else quietly stretches and meditates, clad in their sexy little athleisure sets, Emma and I giggle and flirt (badly) with the instructor (heterosexually partnered with two kids) like two preteen boys who just discovered the existence of women. Dressed not dissimilarly to Michael Cera’s character in Juno, we are the only two people wearing stiff, oversized t-shirts. We are also the only two people who keep our socks on for the entirety of the class, no matter how sweat-soaked we become. And while everyone else gracefully moves through the exercises, we spend most of our time looking around, trying to deduce what the fuck we’re supposed to be doing because we were both teetering on the edge of consciousness during the instructor demo. It is astonishing that anyone could see me in this state and subsequently refer to me as hot singer Chelsea. Trust me, I can see myself in the mirror at the front of the room. So, instructor, if you’re reading this: seek mental help!

For most of my adult life, I have perceived myself as an entirely unsexual being. Upon reflection, it’s undeniable that some degree of deeply internalized homophobia played a part in this. Another contributing factor was the prudence around sex that came hand in hand with my partially Irish Catholic upbringing (get familiar). The most likely culprit, however, was that I never considered myself to be pretty or even remotely worthy of attention or objectification.

Growing up, my metric for beauty and worthiness, as it was for many of us, was the amount of male attention that anyone or anything received. Which, for me, was…not that much! I spent many treacherous middle school nights on AIM, typing acronym-filled confessions to my crushes and waiting eagerly for their reply (“no i dont want to go out with u”). In high school and college, I was not one of the girls that guys fawned over, invited to formals, or even cornered creepily at a party. But I persevered and took what I could get! I vividly remember being half-drunk at a sweaty mixer my sophomore year of college and one of the football guys generously (unsolicitedly) telling me that I’m a solid seven. And I was so desperate for male validation that I thought, you know what, that’s actually pretty cool, I think, I’m gonna run with that. I even got a boyfriend, who miraculously stuck around for a couple years! And he was great! Super cute and older than me and the captain of the baseball team! Gone were my lonely nights of being able to sleep comfortably on my dorm room twin mattress. In their place, I eagerly welcomed monthly pregnancy scares, mediocre-college-tier sex, and slow mornings spent entangled in each other’s arms alongside a graveyard of Domino’s Pizza boxes from the night before… It was everything I could have ever dreamed of. The only issue was that even after procuring the most perfect boyfriend, I was more confused by my sexuality than ever.

I spent my early twenties slowly coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t male attention that I wanted. I came out publicly, but privately struggled to embrace my queerness with open, loving arms. I also wrestled with the interwoven relationship between depression and body image. The career path I’ve chosen requires me to be in front of cameras and audiences. It also requires me to think constantly about how to market myself and my art to the rest of the world. So to mostly eliminate any potential for public discussion around my body or sexuality, I opted for baggy clothes and wholesome, family-friendly marketing. In turn, those choices constructed and shaped a brand that felt completely void of sex. As it can for many artists, my public presentation pervaded my private understanding of myself. At its best, it felt safe and protective. At its worst, it felt finite, limiting, uncompromising, and self-perpetuating. On the surface, I insisted that this was what I wanted. But it secretly bothered me that fan interactions were always “your music saved my life” and never “can you sign my tits!?” And yes, at the end of the day, I have virtuous values or whatever, so of course I’m thrilled that my art has positively impacted somebody… But God, is it so wrong that part of me longed for someone to ask me to autograph them inappropriately?

Yeah-yeah, whoa-whoa-whoa

I just can’t help but be sexual (whoa)

Need To Know - Doja Cat

Sex remains a taboo topic in many places and for many people. We all commonly discuss fashion trends, what popular book to read next, and if the housing market is favoring buyers or sellers. Rarely do we see public commentaries or discourses around sex. I’ve seen the NYT post Instagram carousels about the Seven Ways To Tell Your Friend You Hate Their Significant Other, but never about the Seven Most Thrilling Public Places To Fuck – probably because that would be illegal, but my point stands! I remember feeling so awkward and embarrassed the first few times I expressed to my team that I wanted to start talking about sex as a pillar of my identity as a person and artist. How do you talk to your manager, who is a forty-year-old straight businessman, and with whom you’ve never had any sort of similar conversation, about wanting to be naked more on camera? When I first nervously floated the idea of leaning more into my sexuality, I half-expected everybody in the conference room to burst out in laughter. But, as it goes with any topic, the more I talked about this part of myself, the more comfortable I became with having and commanding these conversations.

I also became incrementally more confident using my time in the studio to dissect and metabolize these ideas and feelings with my collaborators. I’d come into the control room every day and sprawl out across the floor and overshare, as artists often do, with them about whatever I was doing and whoever I’d been doing it with. Everybody would gather around me and patiently listen, whether I was excitedly gushing about a new crush (they learned to not take these seriously, since they each lasted approximately 5-7 business days) or anxiously recounting how someone told me to “shut the fuck up” while I was inside of her the night before (and no, not in a hot way. It was more like… my Concerta started to wear off and I just couldn’t stop chatting…). As we talked more frequently about these thoughts and experiences, songwriting started becoming a place where I felt empowered. It became a place where I could take control of the narrative around my sexuality. The trust we built in the studio translated into a wide spectrum of sonic experimentation. I could explore different intersections of sounds and lyrics and decide what “being hot” even actually sounded like to me. We let ourselves go wherever we wanted. We wrote songs that not even The Weeknd should sing (but, if you’re listening, Abel, feel free to try because that would probably make me super rich!). And we also wrote songs, like SORRY I’M OBSESSED WITH YOU, that feel like syntheses of all that I’ve been learning and metabolizing in the last couple years.

Attraction, as a concept, is both extremely confusing and extremely powerful. Its sheer, biological force seems to govern so much of our daily decision making: how we present ourselves, who we spend our time with, what spaces we want to exist in or occupy. For something that dominates so much of society and culture, it’s crazy to me how little we acknowledge the role that it plays in our self-confidence and self-expression as humans. As I approach 30, and continue through my so-called Saturn Return, I crave the most thorough understanding of myself possible. This desire to know myself wholly comes with the innate stipulation that I must confront attraction, desire, sexuality, and sexual expression and acknowledge them as beautiful, necessary pillars of my identity.

To best confront these pillars, I’ve worked to strip them down to their cores and dismantle much of my existing ideology around them. Society imposes a pretty constraining romantic standard on sex (I personally blame Nicholas Sparks, if we’re in the mood to point fingers). For many of us, sex exists as a place that exclusively houses emotional connection and intimacy. But, if we let it, sex can possess a tremendous amount of depth, nuance, and duality. It can be whatever we want it to be. Intense, loving, hot, fun. It can be a function of an intimate connection with another person, or it can be a function of our individual connections with ourselves. As much as it can be a social experience, it can also offer a significant amount of space for isolated introspection and reflection.

In the last couple of years, my sexuality has become a predominant source from which I’ve derived a tremendous amount of confidence. It has largely operated as a mirror to see myself and to discover what I want and what I find attractive, both in other people and in myself. For most of my life, heteronormativity informed so much of how I understood desirability. The idea that beauty or sexiness are measured solely by the cishet male gaze was another construct I aimed to disassemble. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot: which clothes I feel hottest leaving the house in, which sounds I like to hear myself make, what words I feel comfortable saying. And I’ve come to find new parts of myself attractive: how my hair looks tucked behind my ears, the veins that emerge below my skin when my hands are hanging around someone’s waist, the way I can make somebody else feel, how I sometimes hold a quiet, confident masculinity, how I sometimes hold a delicate, powerful femininity. Maybe most importantly, I’ve learned to embrace my own desires and understand the inherent fluidity that exists in how we experience attraction.

When I revisit the concept of myself as an “artist” who the world gets to have an opinion on, all I really want now is for everyone to see me as a comprehensive, complete human being. Moving forward, this completeness includes my sexuality. I don’t have to look good doing it, I don’t have to be great at doing it. I just want people to know that I do it at all. It is a core pillar of my identity and self-expression as an adult queer woman. Because of it, I’ve become obsessed with so much about myself. And I think we all deserve to feel this way. We’re all beautiful and nuanced, and I love that sex allows us to exist as all of our parts in cohesion. Sometimes I feel more assertive and commanding. Sometimes I want to be bent over and told what a good job I’m doing (and this is why I like Heated Sculpt class!). I’m so grateful to my queerness for liberating me and allowing me to occupy spectrums. And I’m so grateful to my music – and to SORRY I’M OBSESSED WITH YOU specifically – for providing me with infinite space to express all of myself. Where I once felt fearful, I now feel emboldened.

I got a bad desire

Oh, I’m on fire

I’m On Fire - Bruce Springsteen

The first proper single I’ve released as a solo artist in over two years, I give you guys: BAD.

I wrote this song over a year ago in December 2024. I don’t remember much from then because I blacked out for a lot of it, literally and figuratively. But my general sense is that it was pretty bad. As one may naturally gather from listening to the song, December 2024 was a categorically chaotic and messy period of my life, both externally and internally. Perhaps what was most confusing and unsettling was how striking the contrast was between this season of my life and the years immediately prior. Who would’ve thought the same person who wrote This Is How You Fall In Love and Your Bones would now be writing lyrics about wanting to be choked out?

Sprawled across my living room floor one morning in late 2024, I arrived at the sobering conclusion that I had lost myself somewhere over the course of my mid-twenties. I had tremendous gratitude for so many things that had happened up until that point, but if I was being honest, I hadn’t felt like myself for a long time.

I didn’t recognize my face or my body when I stood before the mirror or when I saw myself in photographs. Although clothing had been an essential pillar of expression and experimentation in my early twenties, I hated getting dressed because I no longer knew what I looked good in or felt good in. I dreaded being hungry because I didn’t know how to cook anything (and still don’t, sorry, whatever). I didn’t even know what I liked to eat, so I would scroll aimlessly for forty-five minutes through all the restaurants on Uber Eats and Doordash until my patience meter expired, at which point I would usually just lock my phone and give up on eating altogether.

I didn’t know what felt important to me, and I couldn’t define any clear set of values. In fact, I didn’t know what I actually thought about anything or anyone at all. I deeply despised weekends, pockets of free time between meetings, and nights without dinners or drinks. Most Saturday mornings, I’d lie flat on my back in my living room and stare at the ceiling in silence, paralyzed by the fact that I didn’t know how I liked to spend my time or who I liked to spend it with. It was painfully clear that, at the age of 27, I needed to get entirely reacquainted with myself.

My therapist often compares human nature and growth to the swinging of a pendulum. Sometimes we need to experience the most extreme ends of a spectrum in order to determine where we want our equilibrium to land. Having spent much of my mid-twenties wishing to be as inoffensive and palatable as possible, I found myself starting to desperately crave polarity. So, lying on my living room floor that morning, I decided that I was going to let the pendulum swing hard. I started saying yes to everyone and everything, testing my own boundaries, overextending myself, and (metaphorically speaking) overexposing my portfolio. I traveled alone, found a new gym, read every book I could get my hands on, attended breathwork and meditation classes, donated half of my wardrobe, ate at new restaurants by myself, and dyed my hair every shade of red. I also went out every night of the week, kissed anybody with a pulse, said things without thinking, woke up an hour away from my apartment, and swallowed whatever drugs were offered to me.

As the end of year neared, I urgently continued to push and push and push. Jeremy and I spent most of November and December touring brent iii across North America, but upon my return home to New York City, I sought out any and every opportunity for debauchery. As I mentioned, much of that December is lost on me, but I do know that I jolted my pendulum explosively and radically throughout those wintery weeks. New Year’s Eve was a notably abhorrent night for me. While seventy incoherent people partied in every room of my apartment, I hid upstairs in a bathroom, huddled in the empty tub, tripping violently and accidentally on mushrooms. When I did eventually venture back out into the apartment, I made it only as far as the edge of my lofted bedroom, where I repeatedly attempted to climb on top of the balcony railing. Rest assured, my intentions were pure: I simply wanted to sit up there and have an entirely unobstructed view of the rager down below (I love an elevated surface!). But I’m forever indebted to the friends who frantically restrained me and kept me from a twenty foot vertical joyride. Finally, having snorted enough adderall for an entire ninth grade classroom, I spent the early morning hours tiptoeing over sleeping bodies and Swiffering my apartment floor as if I could somehow wash away both my choices and my debilitating comedown. That morning was one of many rock bottoms for me.

“The limit does not exist” - Cady Heron

Everyone has limits to how far their pendulum can go. There have definitely been many pivotal moments, such as that fateful New Year’s Eve party, where mine have started to make their presence known. One showed itself when I noticed a steady uptick in the frequency with which my therapist was asking me, “is now really the time you want to be off medication?” Initially my answer was a resounding umm yes of course!, but I deliberated for a few months and recently decided to start a new medication that keeps me slightly more regulated. Another limit reared its head when my therapist gently suggested that I try implementing a “three drink rule” after a bout of consecutive blackouts. While I haven’t always adhered to this objective super strictly, it has served as a nice bumper on the bowling lane of my life – and has also reminded me that my therapist truly deserves a raise. I became aware of a third and crucial limit this past summer when at a close friend’s wedding, I drank enough and consumed enough drugs to find men attractive. Next thing I knew, I was sneaking out of a dude’s hotel room and Googling how not to get pregnant for the first time since I was twenty-one. Moral of the story: I am not for the boys, even if the boys are for me (I looked soooo pretty in my dress). Hey, at least we got confirmation that your girl likes girls!

Ugh, I’ve been having so much fun! I’ve also kind of wanted to die at times, or at least shrivel away until I disappear entirely. For the first time in years, my life has felt brimming with people and noise and color. It also has felt insufferably isolating and quiet. Sometimes I’ve been extremely proud of my decisions, other times I’ve felt painfully embarrassed by them. Some days I’ve been on top of the world, other days I’ve felt like the worst person alive. And so the pendulum swings, and swings, and swings.

A list from the end of 2024, around the time of writing the song:

Good

Starting to get really good at the Cup Pong iPhone game

Dyed my hair red

Bought a Paint By Numbers kit

The idea of going to a nightclub

Ran 5 miles so I could post it on Strava and get lots of “Kudos”

Bad

Went through breakup and my chest still hurts all the time
Quit my medication cold turkey

Kissed too many people in direct friend group

Substance overuse and repeatedly blacking out

Actually being inside a nightclub

Dating is miserable and I hate everyone

Barely eating

24 hr crush on man (actually nvm sexuality is confusing sometimes sorry)

Both of my dogs bark at me all the time

I’ve become insatiably curious about the concept of things being inherently good or bad, and I’ve felt an intense desire to sort my new feelings and experiences between the two categories. Maybe this is because I’ve been in the process of reconstructing my understanding of values and preferences. Or maybe it is because I am human, and the human brain relies on categorization. But unfortunately for my brain, I’m learning that so many things in life are largely impossible to categorize in any binary way. For as much as I’ve learned about myself, I’ve also become acutely aware of how much I still don’t know, of how much grey area exists, and of how complex and filled with duality the world is. So many things have felt so good, like the instantaneous validation that shamelessly washes over me when a pretty girl kisses me back or the childlike thrill of being crammed in a bathroom stall with my friends, passing around a bottle of molly water. But so many things have felt so bad, like wishing the person inside of me was someone else or begging my best friend to call an ambulance in the midst of a brutal panic attack. Some of my best nights have been painfully bittersweet, and some of my darkest moments have held so much meaning. When I look at the list above from 2024, I now possess the perspective to recognize that everything in the “bad” category has been important in some way to shaping the person I’m becoming. I’ve needed the pendulum to swing, and swing, and swing. I’ve needed every ounce of the messiness and chaos, to feel everything there is to feel. I’ve needed to humble myself when life has felt magnificent and bring compassion to myself when it has felt like it’s all coming down around me.

In my opinion, life operates best in the shape of a rollercoaster. Fast and furious downfall followed by patient and steady recalibration. Rinse and repeat. I want to live as much life as I can tolerate, and then sit back to metabolize and sort my experiences. I definitely had cast myself a pretty wide net last winter. With more time and more data, I’ve been able to start adjusting my parameters and guardrails. I’m still saying yes to as much as possible, but my boundaries have much more defined edges now than they did back in December 2024. It is easier, and certainly more fun, to oscillate into the experimentation phase where we get to pretend we are entirely invincible and unburdened. But eventually, our limits show up at our front door like a debt collector or an Uber Eats alcohol delivery guy who can’t leave until he verifies your photo ID (he’s just doing his job, it’s all good!). As much as we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge them, these boundaries simply exist to inform us of what we like and don’t like, what decisions to make, and how we want to continue moving forward. Every single yes teaches us something. Most importantly: how to start saying no. At the end of the day, it’s a beautiful thing – a privilege, even – to have the power to overextend ourselves and reign ourselves back in as we please. We are exercising our autonomy when we let ourselves try new things, when we go outside of our comfort zones, when we say yes. We are exercising our discipline when we synthesize our experiences, when we index our preferences, when we acknowledge our boundaries, when we say no.

The last year and a half has been an incredible journey in healing, reinvention, and self-actualization - a journey that has slowly materialized in real time into a new album that I am extremely eager to share with all of you. Everyone around me keeps telling me it feels like the “old Chelsea” is back. And maybe that’s true, to the extent that it’s possible. I’m definitely starting to feel like myself again, and I’m leaning back into the influences that inspired me to make music in the first place. I don’t think I’ll ever be the “old Chelsea” and I don’t think anyone should ever want that for themselves. In some ways, BAD feels like the Sleeping With Roses mixtapes from 2018, but it also feels like everything I was experiencing in December 2024. It sounds like the kind of song I would’ve wanted to make in 2018, but it also is the kind of song I want to be releasing in 2026. Either way, I wanted it to be the first single and the first installment in this next story.

I may always relentlessly wonder what it really means for something to be good or bad. Everybody says living alone is one of the most important and beneficial things we can do for ourselves in young adulthood, but for as much as living alone taught me, I largely found that I’m a pack animal, and I feel happiest when I’m in the company of others (just friends or family, don’t get it twisted). Surviving a difficult breakup definitely felt bad, but if somebody asked me about it now, I would say it was the single best thing to happen to me in recent years because it brought me face-to-face with myself and sent me on this extraordinary journey I’ve been on. I do not subscribe to the convenient, narrow-minded trope that everything happens for a reason, and I do not believe that all circumstances and life events exist alongside partnering silver linings. Some things are unequivocally bad (like war and cancer and late-stage capitalism) and some things are unequivocally good (like orgasms and solicited hugs and cookie dough ice cream). But, over the last year and a half, I have come to believe that most ordinary things that happen to us can really go either way, depending on the story we tell ourselves. I don’t regret a single moment and I wouldn’t change a thing.

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up

If the sun comes up and I still don’t wanna stagger home

Then it’s the memory of our betters

That are keeping us on our feet

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan

And the next five years trying to be with your friends again

Oh you’re talking forty-five turns just as fast as you can

Yeah I know it gets tired, but it’s better when we pretend

It comes apart

The way it does in bad films

Except the part

Where the moral kicks in

Though when we’re running out of the drugs

And the conversation’s grinding away

I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision

For another five years of life

All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem

About a year and a half ago, I started journaling and writing as a coping mechanism while experiencing some particularly big life changes. I thought that by collecting diary entries and photo albums and videos, I could prove to myself that my life was worth living.

The more and more I recorded my days and feelings, the more and more I started paying attention to every moment of my life. And by paying closer attention to it all, I started piecing together trends and patterns, I started noticing progress and change. Something that is challenging for me about being alive is that I crave being exactly where I am in every present moment as much as I crave the past and future all at once. And so documentation has become a new sort of obsession of mine because it allows me to exist simultaneously in all three.

Here is a place to share my thoughts, my findings, and my proof of existence. Much of this documentation and synthesis is from the past year and a half, and much of it is also happening in real time, alongside the creation and rollout of my new record. It is for me, but it is also for you guys, as much as you’d like it to be. So if you’re here, thank you and noted. So much more to come. X