There are many things I did as a teenager that I would prefer not to be cross examined about - but unfortunately, one of them is that my best friend and I invented a rumor once that this girl who went to our school ate make up. Not stole make up….not wore too much make up…but Ate it. As far as I know, this girl had never so much as accidentally swallowed a glob of chapstick - but for reasons lost to history and presumably buried somewhere beneath my own insecurities and my side swept bangs, we decided she was consuming cosmetics with the regularity of three balanced meals a day?!

Obviously, this was a fucking awful thing for us to do… inventing a dietary disorder for an innocent classmate is not something I would include on the highlight reel of my adolescence, and I wish I could say that growing up has been a graceful, linear progression from ‘Girl-Who-Starts-Cosmetic-Based-Rumors’ to ‘Woman-of-Impeccable-Moral-Character’, but I feel like personal development seems to consist mostly of periodically realizing you've been a bitch and then having to do something about it? No? Just me?

The thing about change: we like to imagine ourselves choosing it, but so much of growing up happens to us before we've had a chance to agree to the terms. One day you look around and realize something you once believed, wanted, loved, hated or simply were no longer fits. There’s no calendar invitation for becoming a different person, nothing will pop up on your phone saying ‘tomorrow, 11:30 a.m. outgrow several things you were previously prepared to die for’ - you just carry on as normal until one day you realize you haven't thought about him since Tuesday and nothing from Urban Outfitters or Free People fits anymore and YOU are now the demographic that shops at Anthropology!!
I apparently found this interesting enough to write a song about. My new song 'Good Morning Peaches’ is (among other things) about the strange lag between your life changing and you actually realizing it has. In my experience there wasn’t one great cinematic moment where the old me exits stage left and the new one arrives with better boundaries and a flattering trouser - no - I woke up one morning, looked around at the same life I’d been living, and realized I am somehow no longer the same person living it.

The chorus is addressed to my dachshund, Peaches: “Good morning my Peaches, do you think today will be our day?”

….This was perhaps an unreasonable amount of emotional responsibility to place on a small dog (also my most trusted confidant), but I was going through something…

Peaches is Peaches, of course, but she also became shorthand for all the abundance around me - all the little riches, people and ordinary goodness that was already mine while I was busy wondering when my life was going to begin.

The rest of the song is essentially me trying to answer that question (do you think today will be our day?) - I'm healing but don't quite believe it. I want to be more like my friend Michael who is just so confident and hilarious and unabashedly himself. My mum is reminding me I don't have to stay “stuck sixteen” like the girl who was making up absolutely unhinged rumors. I'm trying to “get back in my body” while the ground moves underneath me.

Meanwhile, Peaches has never once wondered whether she is becoming the right version of herself, she wakes up every morning absolutely delighted to still be Peaches.

perhaps I asked the right person.

lyrics below for reference:

I was on the phone with Michael all evening

Saying, “I’m not me, I seem to be healing”

Watching him light up every room

Mikey, I wanna be just like you

Self-made like a butterfly

Careless like a gemini

Cross my heart, don’t wanna die

Can’t take anymore pain behind my eyes

Good Morning My Peaches

Do you think today will be our day?

Summer heat in my Mama’s old kitchen

Radio static, something bout religion

She said “You don’t have to stay stuck 16”

Mama I’m laughing ‘cause I know just what you mean

Stay, exhale

Get back in my body

Hang on for the journey

Caught up by the skin of my teeth

Believe

Woke up to the ground moving beneath me

Good Morning My Peaches

Do you think today will be our day?

listen to ‘good morning peaches’

I have always believed that the notes app reveals who you truly are at your core. Not instagram… where everyone is performing a version of themselves that is a little shinier.. OR even your text messages because those just involve the basic human decency of appearing somewhat sane to whoever is on the receiving end. The notes app however, is where the psyche is truly unsupervised; if I died really suddenly, the most humiliating part would not be a grieving loved one unlocking my phone to find 50 versions of the exact same selfie, but the discovery of THOUSANDS of little deranged entries written by someone who is 10000% sure they are onto something.

Honestly, most of them are harmless or an attempt at organization - a simple grocery list or the odd passive aggressive reminder to myself, maybe the occasional flash of genius at 1am. But then there is a very specific subsection of notes app entries that only emerge during altered states - entries written with the terrifying conviction of a woman who has looked directly into the eye of the universe and discovered that coriander DEFINITELY tastes the way anxiety feels. Which is how, during a mushroom trip last September, I became convinced a tired chef was performing welfare checks on me for God.

I would like to clarify RIGHT NOW that I am not one of those cool psychedelic girls that can eat magic mushrooms in a group full of people in the woods with the purpose of leaning into your own ego death, spiritual consciousness and interconnectedness - I ate them alone in my house with my dogs in a team building exercise t-shirt I’ve had since I was 11, with the far less spiritual goal of trying to become creatively interesting again, as well as making my fave dried mango snack taste that much more delicious.

After about an hour, the mushrooms started to kick in - colors sharpened, music sounded richer, and I had been transformed from a normal woman with mild creative insecurity into someone who believed the universe was communicating everything all at once through a very specific feeling of paranoia that is less like ‘something bad is about to happen’ and more like ‘I can never let this lamp out of my sight because it knows way too much about me’. That’s when the chef appeared.

East Nashville already feels psychedelic enough as it is - everyone looks like they make pottery professionally or like they know how to repair analog synthesizers. Before mushrooms, the chef was just part of the landscape of the neighborhood - I had seen this guy almost every day for the 5 years I’ve lived in this house without ever really registering him properly. Every evening, he’d walk down my street in his checkered chef pants & non slip kitchen shoes, carrying himself with the weary dignity of someone who absolutely SCREAMED ‘corner’ at another human being within the last 24 hours. I know I had recognized the posture of someone who’s circadian rhythm had permanently been destroyed by brunch service and had the very specific haunted and mysterious aura unique to hospitality workers, divorced dads and therapists in the wild. My current state had completely removed my ability to experience this man casually and suddenly he wasn’t just walking to work, he was participating in some sort of ancient protective ritual on my behalf. This time when he passed my house, I felt an overwhelming sense of reassurance, like the universe was quietly letting me know that somebody nearby still knew how to chiffonade basil. I ran to my notes app with the urgency of a war correspondent:

The next day, sober and dehydrated, I reopened my phone to find this profound revelation about this man who was, in reality, just trying to get to work. But the most profound part about all of this is that even now - fully sober, somewhat psychologically stable - I still feel weirdly reassured when I see him walk past the house. This man that has absolutely zero idea that I exist. I think what mushrooms can sometimes do is temporarily remove your ability to pretend life isn’t extremely and bizarrely beautiful or comforting in ways you wouldn’t expect. Sober, this man was just a guy going to work - but high, he became proof that the world was still functioning. That somewhere nearby, people of all walks of life were gathering, tickets were being printed and onions were being chopped under large amounts of pressure.

In the end, I guess the mushrooms technically did work creatively, because I haven’t stopped thinking about that chef and you are currently reading 1,500 words about him on the internet. Some people see God, I saw an exhausted hospitality worker.

The other day I put my boyfriend, Nat, in Facebook jail: basically, I found a really fun & old accumulation of photos of myself in an alternate universe… with friends that are absolutely nowhere to be found today, in clothes that were far too small and smoking cigarettes that I was so desperate to smoke just. one. more. time. in an album on Facebook I titled ‘shenanigans’ …and forced Nat to go through every single one of the photos with me whilst I reacted with horror in real time and told him every detail of each backstory with the lore that went with each lost face. I don’t get on this one much… but every time I do, my god…the absurdity of one’s time frozen actions make it SO entertaining! This particular evening I had found myself right back in the throes of being my 18 year old self in 2014…the clothes I used to wear!! I looked quite good? Wow I did not feel good inside!

Looking back at those photos, I quickly realized those early years were a foreshadowing into the drama/ comedy series that is my life - the first episodes are teenage nostalgia & warm colors & house parties and the later seasons become increasingly stressful with a few too many cry scenes. Drinking that young initially felt like the solution to everything; shyness, boredom, heartbreak & the TERRIFYING silence between conversations… it honestly took me way too long to realize that it was also the common denominator of all my absolute worst evenings. By 24, I had cut booze from my life entirely.

There’s a lot that’s happened in the decade and then some between those Facebook photos and my current almost-6-years-booze-free-self today, but also unfortunately a lot has stayed the same. Yesterday, I walked into an alcohol-free liquor store (yeah you heard me), it had all the ceremony of a proper liquor store: clinking bottles, the promise of a Friday night, and the slightly reckless idea that something interesting might happen… except the only thing you lose is your ability to blame your embarrassing texts the next morning on tequila. Never-the-less, I still managed to walk out of said shop with the one thing most likely to grant me a brief and merciful holiday from myself: a potent THC beverage.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I have an absolutely perfect relationship with marijuana- in fact it’s realistically just as mentally/ emotionally/ physically taxing as alcohol was to me. The same exhausting choreography and the same tiny negotiations with myself that seem really harmless but take up an alarming amount of real estate. There is the noticeable difference of instead of embarrassing myself in public, I’m eating several bags of crisps with the enthusiasm of someone who has just discovered food. Unfortunately my brain has the talent of turning pretty much anything into a complicated relationship - what people politely call an ‘addictive personality’ - where life is presented to you as one massive game of what my therapist calls ‘Whack-a-Mole’, and my Moles’ Name’s are: food, sex, hipster coffee, at-least-one-delicious-sweet-treat-a-day, my phone, attention, the mall, relationships, (I can’t believe I’m saying this next one) Nyquil™ and smoking literally anything. I’ve heard some people get handed the coveted Mole named ‘Exercise’ - I wish. These Moles that I have had to whack the shit out of and manage with such alarming administrative effort throughout my years in the absence of alcohol, dare I say: has, actually, somehow, managed to get a little bit easier. Somewhere along the way between quitting drinking and picking up new vices, dropping them again, and dramatically announcing ‘this is the new me’ to absolutely no one who asked, I realized something awful: Whack-A-Mole isn’t about winning… it’s about learning to live with the stupid fucking arcade machine that won’t stop following you everywhere.

It turns out, when you take away the thing you use to leave yourself, you are left with yourself :) Which, for a while, felt like being on a really long flight with someone you find exhausting. It wasn’t some sweeping realization or a sudden personality overhaul, just a very slow and excruciating awareness that I was gonna have to get to know this person eventually - All her habits, her patterns, the very specific ways she tries to not be alone with her own thoughts for more than two consecutive minutes. Which is, SO inconvenient… I have always wanted to be one of those people that just spends their entire life regulated, is incredibly low maintenance, every relationship is an absolute breeze, runs for fun, someone who can have the occasional vice and it won’t ruin their entire life before lunchtime. Instead, I am me. Not the clean, aspirational version I consistently have in mind - but something more realistic. I’m very tall & awkward, occasionally held together by a snack but mostly, fine. Turns out I am not someone I feel compelled to escape from all the time after some good ole fashioned exposure, just someone I need to keep an eye on and gently redirect from time to time. As it turns out, this is a far more useful skill than being able to hold your tequila.