Ok, I no longer think God is the problem! I think Certainty is. 

Besides the bloody obvious, every war, every terrorist, countless peodophile priests, if you really pull it all apart, the person behind it was always driven by certainty. Certain they were right. Certain they were worthy, righteous, chosen, bla bla bla, bullshit. People believe so hard that they carve their beliefs into their own skin and then pass the knife to their offspring. The same etchings, theories and beliefs get written onto children until they harden into facts, into scars. Scars that become nearly impossible to cut out. 

We grab hold of answers so we can stop asking. We look for conclusions because observations alone don't tell us the full story. We long to connect the raw pieces into meaning. We feel disappointed with answers like, inconclusive, not enough evidence, somewhere in between. So we make up stories. We fill in the gaps. We make deals with our consciousness. We trade search for relief so we don't have to search anymore. So we can sit comfortably in something that feels good. “I’ll need some information first. Just the basic facts. Can you show me where it hurts?” We all become Comfortably Numb.

What's wrong with mystery? What's wrong with comme ci comme ca? What's wrong with I have no fucking clue? What's wrong with not knowing where I'm going after this, tomorrow, next month, in a year? What's wrong with saying out loud, I don't know if I'm going to stay with you till the day I die. I don't yet know where Im going when i die. What's wrong with that?

But I get it. I really do. I get the trade, because we're all searching for what feels good. Once you feel real pleasure, once you feel love, once you feel genuine happiness, you never want it to stop. You want it to last forever and in order to do so you want to define it. You want to belong to it. You want to quantify it, to bottle it up and slap it all over your skin and make it a ritual. The bible is a very old and convincing promise. The belief that someone up there has all the answers. And you too can have all the answers, if you just believe hard enough and follow the rules and stay certain.

I spoke to a dear friend the other day who said she has been “saved.” I always find that expression curious. Saved from what exactly? Our consciousness? Our dark thoughts? A sad world? Or from the great unknown?

People often find God, and suddenly everything makes sense, they have purpose and praise. I respect that inference. I envy the excitement. I really do. But I also question it. I question anything that resolves so quickly and so completely. I think certainty, even the peaceful kind, even the kind that looks like calm and compassion, is still asking you to stop searching. And I don't trust anything that asks me to stop searching, no matter how fucking good it feels.

Because is it ever really enough? Or is it just another illusion wrapped up in stained glass. I want life to have meaning. I want answers to the unknown. I want to be promised euphoria, but I can't help but consider that it's just a feeling, a thought, a theory, a perspective, a man behind a robe telling me the way is HERE. Religions promise relief from pain, they explain the unexplainable, they name the darkness, they promise you that if you believe hard enough, if you grip tight enough you'll be shown the way.   

I understand the appeal. Of course I do. I'm only human.

But I think the grip is the problem. Certainty is the grip.

Thanks for paying attention

Nix.

There’s something kind of twisted about handing someone a substance and calling it “healing”.

Acid was the first drug I ever tried, as a very young teen. Ironic, given my dad was head first down the rabbit hole of investigating the American government’s covert acid experiments on unwitting civilians and here I was secretly volunteering myself for fun. At first it was fucking awesome. Giggles, colorful hallucinations, intensity, and every time without fail, I’d crack open the meaning of life which is rather hilarious , because at that age I couldn’t care less about the meaning of life (I would inevitably forget all the answers the next day). The point is, It’s all fun and games. Until it’s NOT. One impatient evening my best friend and I took too much. Way too much. Minutes felt like hours and my mind went somewhere I can only describe as HELL. I remember seriously considering whether to jump out of my window to make it all stop.

After that there was really no going back to “fucking awesome.” The coin only flipped one way. And I was left living with what I saw, what I felt, and how insanely fragile the human brain is.

Enter Consciousness Culture, Psychedelic Spirituality & Plant Medicine Community where drugs get used as tools for growth, for healing, for connection, for trauma recovery. But rarely does anyone talk about what happens when you have a bad trip! Rarely does anyone talk about the real risks involved when entering the world of hallucinogenics and how to safely close the door behind you after.

This is why I harden every time I see the wellness world treat plant medicine like a shortcut to enlightenment. Handed out like candy at retreats. Ceremonies held by people with sage and Spotify and no actual fucking training in psychiatric crisis, or medical history, or genetic history or addictive tendencies. This is why a name like Katherine McCollough’s (please read the Rolling Stone article) really sticks with me. In brief: she died by suicide in Peru, following a long relationship with Reggie Watts, a relationship her family and friends say was shadowed by his open embrace of drugs. Her story felt familiar. Not because I’ve lived it exactly, but because I know what it feels like to unravel while trying hard to keep up. I know what it feels like when a community you love becomes dangerous.

I once saw her then-boyfriend, Reggie Watts, speak a few years back at a seminar on psychedelics to heal. It was at the health and wellness conference called the Eudemonia Summit in Palm Beach, a collection of the industry’s so-called best sharing insights on longevity and wellbeing. I found him to be very funny and charming, but his talk, his actual knowledge on psychedelia, was generic and somewhat egocentric. To the naked eye, he appeared to be like many friends of mine in the music industry: a reprobate who likes to get high. Not unusual. But his public advocacy of drug-taking was brazen. Then again, I’m from Baltimore, where I was exposed far too young and most of my childhood friends have died by drug overdose and addiction. So I was never going to share the same romanticism of drugs that he did.

The only belief system I can now rely on is that the body is always telling a story. It rarely lies. It aches, hardens, freezes. But every sensation is information. The mind on the other hand is a fucking drama queen. It takes the body’s signals and signs and embellishes the shit out if it, it creates its own wild narrative. Healing, I mean real healing (and honestly I don’t even like saying that word, it’s become so cringe) is learning to listen to the body underneath the mind’s noise. A partnership of the body and the “self”. A conversation in its purest form is my whole personal practice. I call it Sacred Pulse.

But when a person introduces a chemical into that conversation, we’re not deepening the practice. We’re interrupting the shit out of it! Except now the “self” is screaming, it’s distorted, it’s tangled up in the brain’s spider web of memories, expectations, fears, desires. That’s not “healing”. Thats fucking RISKY!

But the reality is that nobody has time to wait. And healing has a wait time. You don’t get over a horrible break up with a pill. You get over it with TIME! You don’t get over a dead relative with a psychedelic trip. You get over it with TIME!

The thing that really “heals” is new habits, new rituals, new thought processing, new friends, new environment, new partner. None of that happens over night. It all takes TIME!! If you’re fast tracking with the red pill or the blue pill , then you haven’t done the work. You haven’t done shit! In fact you might have just delayed the process. Or worse lost your fucking mind!! You should have just watched a movie. Or read a book.

This isn’t an anti-medication rant (sort of is). Psychiatric drugs thrown at people without listening or researching the body first causes exactly the same harm as plant medicine thrown at people without the same preparations and training.

HERES WHERE IT GETS DEEP!

And this is where I get ballsy and controversial. It’s not just the ceremony leaders with a drum and a rattle that can be dangerous. Sometimes it’s the person driving you there, it’s the person sharing your bed.

We all know what constitutes abuse in a relationship. We recognize abuse when it’s a fist, a bruise, a broken glass, a raised voice with nasty words. We know what coercive control looks like, we know what gaslighting looks like, we know the slow erosion of someone’s autonomy by a partner who CLAIMS to love them.

But what we haven’t yet named is this: What happens when one partner’s appetite for altered states outpaces the other’s? What happens when capacity is not equal? What happens when your relationship is driven by trying to keep up becasue you’re in love and trying to stay connected. What happens when one person is having experimental fun while the other is dying slowly?

Not everyone’s chemistry is the same. Two people can take the exact same substance and walk away with two entirely different experiences. One “expanded” or “heart opened” and the other completely splintered, disconnected, fucked! When a partner knows this, or figures it out and doesn’t do anything about it or worse keeps offering the door anyway, keeps normalizing it, then that stops being companionship. I’d go as far to say that it’s its own form of abuse. Not identical but similar: one person’s needs consistently overriding the other persons safety. That becomes a wicked kind of harm with no real legal definition. It doesn’t leave a mark that you can photograph and show to the cops. But it can still kill you.

If we can recognize that a partner has a duty not to physically harm us, we have to also recognize the duty not to chemically endanger us either especially when the danger is visible but ignored.

Just Call It What It Fucking Is

I don’t write this as some sort of moral expert or to condemn the wellness world for trying to help people or to suggest that altered states have absolutely nothing to teach us. Ecstasy once a year might be my secret to long lasting love and my personal alternative to marriage counseling. (But that’s another article.)

If you like the way a substance makes you feel, just fucking say that. Say you like getting high. Say you like the escape. There’s no shame in it, plenty of people do and at least it’s honest. What i find insulting is when we dress our desires up in robes and call it “enlightenment”. Lighting a candle and putting on a ceremonial playlist doesn’t change the fact that you’re still still taking drugs. In a safe environment, yes, with controlled doses, yes, with people on your level, maybe? But calling it “spiritual” doesn’t change the fact that it’s still risky as fuck. You still might have a bad trip, you still might get addicted and once you’ve opened certain doors, they can be very difficult if not impossible to close. And yes, you also might learn a lesson and get 1 step closer to “enlightened”.

BUT “Enlightenment” shouldn’t be something you purchase online. It’s not an add on at a retreat, and it’s not synthesized in a plant. Even if its South American and organic! It comes from your own body and mind, working together as one, held by the earth, and guess what, it takes…. TIME! Slow. Unhurried. Earned. TIME! The moment you need a substance to get there quickly, you haven’t been healed, you’ve been temporarily held. You haven’t found enlightenment. You’ve found a back alley way. Could be a shortcut. Could be a black hole.

Katherine McCollough’s story has reminded me that we are all at risk of burning when playing with fire. But just be extra, extra careful of those lighting the match.

Or just call it what it fucking is.

You like to get high.

Thanks for paying attention.

Nix x

LISTEN TO ME READ HERE

I’m anti-establishment. I hate rules, constructs. I hate limitations. I hate anything too enthusiastic, too self-indulgent, too traditional. So marriage is clearly never for me.

Though there was this one time I almost broke.

Postpartum. I completely lost myself. I evaporated so completely into “motherhood” that I forgot there was a version of me that existed before kids.

That’s when I decided we needed to get married. I told myself it was about love. It wasn’t. I told myself it was about security. It wasn’t. It was me searching for worth because I was struggling to feel it for myself. So I went looking for it in a title, a ring, a party, a contract that would tell the world I still mattered.

It passed. Thank fuck. Because it was never actually about him. It was about me feeling like I needed to fill a hole. And once I got that back, myself that is, the need to validate my relationship to the world disappeared.

Don’t be fooled, I love a good wedding. I’ll cry, dance and smash a toast. I just can’t see myself ever standing in front of a crowd performing my love to prove to everyone and myself that it’s real.

This is what I do instead.

I confess it every night. In bed, next to the person I’m still obsessed with after seventeen years.

I let him know he has me. That I’m standing behind him in everything. Not because a vow is holding me there. Not because anyone’s watching.

Just because I want to, still. After everything. Still after seventeen years. Still.

No contract, No ceremony, No guarantee it lasts forever.

All I know is that it’s worked.

And I guess that’s all I got!

I don’t talk. I leak.

Ask me how I feel in the moment and you’ll get nothing fucking useful. A pause. A half sentence. Static. Not because I don’t feel it, because I’m just slow to get there.

My man doesn’t have this problem. He can build a case mid-sentence, live, no notes, no time to think. I have never won an argument with him. Not once. Not because he’s right. He’s rarely right. But because he’s faster. I watch him do it and it’s honestly kinda hot and also fucking infuriating, because by the time I’ve located where I even stand, he’s already three moves ahead and calling it settled.

I’m not fast. I need every piece on the table before I know what the full picture is. It’s like Tetris. I can’t see the shape of what I think or feel until every piece is on the board. One thought alone means… not much. I need the second one next to it, and the third one under that, before anything clicks into place and I then I go, oh!! That’s it. That’s what I’m fucking feeling.

In the moment, mid-conversation, mid-fight, I only ever have one piece. Maybe two. Not enough to see the picture. So I say something small and true but incomplete, and it sounds like I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, or what I want, or worse, like I agree with whatever was just said to me. I fucking don’t. I just haven’t finished building yet.

Give me the hour. Give me my computer, my notebook, the drive home. The pieces keep landing after the conversation’s already over, and somewhere around piece nine or ten the whole board clears and I finally know exactly what I meant to say. Two hours too late. To bloody no one.

That’s why I write!

Not to express myself. To finish the puzzle. It’s stuck in there like something that needs to pass, and until it does I can’t think straight.

So why share it at all, if I’m only writing for me?

I’m now asking myself this. Do I want someone to agree with me? Disagree with me? I’m not sure it’s either. I think I’m just getting over the fear of being seen, because it does not come naturally for me. I’m a private person by nature. But I’m a writer by design. Maybe the only real gift I got this time around. Genetic, maybe. The one thing I know how to do and actually, confidently, know I’m decent at. So why sit on it?

Here’s the risk. To share is to hand yourself over for judgment. And I am scared shitless of judgment. Genuinely, physically scared of it. Which makes no fucking sense, because what does someone not liking my writing actually do to my life? Nothing. It changes nothing. That’s the thing I’m trying to unlearn as a writer. I’m not writing for them. I’m writing for me. But when I hit share, some part of me is hoping it lands. That someone reads it and thinks, fuck, she just said the thing I’ve been carrying my whole life and couldn’t say. That’s a win. That’s the only win that matters.

And the other side of it? Someone reads it and thinks she’s fucking annoying, I wish she’d shut the fuck up. That’ll sting. That’ll suck.

But, Is it going to stop me??

Six years.

That’s what a judge in Hong Kong gave my friend Isabel this week. Five for blackmail, three for perverting the course of justice (consecutive), one year to be served on top. She tried to make eye contact with her mother in the gallery. She did not get to see the man she says raped her anywhere near the courtroom.

Because the man, the one that Isabel told the hospital and the police raped her, was arrested, questioned, and released within hours. He was never charged. He walked out of a police station while Isabel walked into two years of house arrest disguised as bail, unable to work, unable to leave, and now into a cell.

I keep coming back to this sentence: she reported a rape and was sentenced for it. Not metaphorically. Literally. The report itself, the money that he offered her first in the aftermath became her crime.

I don’t know how to write about this without shaking with emotion, frustration. For her, for every girl that’s experienced violation, for myself.

A few years ago I wrote about consent. It was the same year the agency I worked for won the controversial UK campaign, the one that put celebrities on billboards across London saying I’m Asking For It, three words meant to remind everyone that consent has a clear sound. I wrote it in the tailwind of the Russell Brand accusations and weeks before my childhood friend took the stand after waking in the night to her mate’s boyfriend’s hands inside of her, twice, after she said NO. I wrote it holding my own memory of being 25, one drink in, and then nothing, waking up the next morning to my roommate’s account of a man carrying me off over his shoulder, determined to take me home, then a scuffle, blows thrown, and a rescue I hope to never remember.

I thought, back then, that the hard part was the words the campaign chose. The discomfort of them. Putting I’m Asking For It on a billboard, knowing some people would misread it on purpose just to have something to be offended by.

I was wrong. The hard part is watching, years later, that nothing has actually moved. The scaffolding is the same. Only the names change.

Here’s what I still firmly believe: stripped down to the bone: women are handed two roles when this happens to them.

Broken, or Bitter.

Believe her fully and she’s a victim, forever, defined by the worst night of her life. Doubt her even slightly and she’s a liar, a gold-digger, a woman who got drunk and regretted it and is now ruining a man’s life for sport. There is almost no room in the public imagination for the actual truth, which is almost always far messier and more human than either: that a woman can be flirtatious and drunk and still not consent. That she can be sent money afterward and still have been raped. That both things can be true at once, and a legal system built to want one clean story will always punish the woman for the mess.

Isabel’s case didn’t even have that ambiguity to begin with. There was no relationship. No romantic history, nothing physical between them before that night. She was staying with him as a friend. And still, it got dragged into a courtroom and made to answer for itself as if it had been.

The judge said there were no mitigating factors. Said her foreign status wasn’t grounds for leniency. Said the man had been “nothing but kind” to her and she’d taken advantage of his “kindness, naivety, friendship and romantic interest.” Had to read that back. A woman who says she was raped, accepts compensation he offers, is recast as the predator who exploited a kind man’s naivety. The inversion is so completely fucked up that it reads like a Black Mirror episode. But it isn’t.

And… Here’s the part I HATE admitting. Reading the coverage of Isabel’s case (the transcripts, the way each outlet chose its opening line, its photo, its quote from the judge), I caught even myself doubting her. Me. A woman who has known her since she was a child, who has sat with her mother for years, who heard the tears just after the attack, who believes her completely when we’re on the phone at midnight and there’s no jury, no journalist, no strategy in the room. And still, reading it laid out the way it was laid out, some small treacherous part of my brain went: but what if?????

AND That is NOT an accident. That’s the machine working exactly as it’s been built. Whoever tells the story first gets to set its shape. Whoever can afford the sharper lawyer gets to sound more reasonable, more measured, more like a person simply defending his good name. Whoever the court and the press default to trusting, because of his passport, his job, his race, hers, gets the benefit of every doubt going forward, and she gets to spend the rest of the story clawing it back. I don’t know the full truth of exactly what happened in that room in Hong Kong in 2024. Almost none of us do. But I know that the version being handed to the public was never going to be neutral, because no version ever is. Someone always chooses the frame.

So let me just say this messy truth. Maybe Isabel did something stupid in the aftermath. Maybe she was angry and young and scared, and she said or did something that on paper could be twisted into exactly the shape of the charge against her. People who have just been violated are not always their best, most legally tidy selves. Trauma doesn’t wait for you to respond to it correctly. It slaps you in the fucking face, hard. But doing something stupid after you’ve been raped does not UN-RAPE you.

It doesn’t transfer the crime.

And here’s what keeps me up at night and makes me so fucking angry: every single one of her missteps has been picked apart in a courtroom, syllable by syllable, motive by motive. Her anger. Her grief-money. Her tone in a text message. All of it entered into evidence, cross-examined, weighed.

But what about her account of his hands on her, hard enough to leave a bruise, of being thrown against the wall and taken advantage of? What about the moment she says she said no and he didn’t stop?

What about the messages afterward, where he didn’t deny any of it, where the denial only showed up later, once lawyers got involved? None of that got the same forensic treatment. None of it was dissected line by line in front of a judge. Her behavior after the fact became the whole trial. His behavior in the room that started it was never even brought to trial. That’s not justice weighing two accounts evenly. That’s a system that only knows how to cross-examine the person who was willing to speak.

That’s fucked up.

I know her. I believe her. And I also know that the rest of the world doesn’t know her: they only know the story as it’s been assembled for them, one careful headline and one selectively quoted transcript at a time. That’s the part we all have to sit with: most of what we believe about who’s guilty and who’s lying was never fact. It was framing.

I still think about the woman I met at a retreat, a parenting coach now, who told a circle of women what happened to her in college. Drunk, flirty, blurry, then two athletes had sex with her while she was passed out, until she woke up, crying, then the sentence she reached for automatically, the one so many of us reach for: I got too drunk. I shouldn’t have put myself there.

We are trained so early and so thoroughly to be the gatekeepers of other people’s impulses that even in the telling, we hand ourselves the blame.

That training doesn’t stay in our heads. It becomes case law. It becomes a Hong Kong district court deciding that the question of money matters more than the question of consent. It becomes 1.6% of reported rapes in England and Wales ending in prosecution.

I’m not here to argue the size of the problem. I’m here because someone I love just lost six years of her life to it, and the man she accused is still counting his monthly pay checks from his bank.

I don’t have a tidy answer.

What I have instead is a hard question, one I don’t think we’re supposed to ask out loud in polite feminist company: what happens to a woman’s credibility the moment she wants anything after (money, an apology, acknowledgment, anything) from the person who hurt her? Why does that want, so human, so common in every other kind of harm, become the very thing that destroys her?

We don’t ask burn victims to prove they didn’t want the insurance payout before we believe the fire was real. Isabel’s burns won’t fade either. They’re just invisible, unreadable to minds already molded by a system built to doubt her.

Isabel wanted to be believed. What happened with the money after is contested, and contested in a courtroom that was never built to hear her side of it. She is now in a women’s prison in Hong Kong for it. He is, as of this writing, not on trial for anything.

We keep asking for it: for consent to be simple, for belief to be the default, for a woman’s next move after violation to stop being cross-examined more thoroughly than the violation itself. I’m asking for it again. Isabel asked for it too. It cost her six years.

Yesterday my best friend and I took off our shoes in a forest and let a stranger put blindfolds on us.

Her dad died a few weeks ago. He wasn’t just her remaining parent. He was her best friend. So she booked a sound healing session with a woman who lives alone in the remote Ibiza mountains, the kind of woman you can’t just find, you have to know someone who knows someone. No Instagram. No website. She talks to the forest every day, apparently, and the forest talks back.

The second it went dark, she let out an exhale. Not a sigh. Closer to a moan, like the forest itself was exhaling through her. When the rest of your senses shut off, when all you have is black and the ground under your feet, you go inward fast.

It was as if we were being led into another realm.

And we were.

I’m not going to walk you through the whole thing. Not because it’s private. Though it is. Because if I hand you the play by play, you’ll think that’s the point. It isn’t. You could recreate every detail somewhere else, with someone else, and it would mean nothing.

Here’s the thing about Ibiza.

Most places are too busy being places. The sites are the story. They crowd out whatever wants to come through. This island gets out of your own way. But only if you’re willing to step into it completely blindfolded.

You don’t come here, shake a wand, and expect to leave with all the magic sucked into your crystal ball. That’s not how it works. You come here and you reiterate what you already came here knowing, wanting, feeling. It just gives it back to you louder.

It brings out the best of you. It brings out the worst of you too.

You have to be willing to understand both. It’s like an acid trip. It gives you exactly what you need, not what you asked for.

For me, it unlocks an intoxicating curiosity and creativity. It makes me feel fiercely feminine and full of grace and ease, in a way the rest of the world almost shames me for at my age. Here, there’s an acceptance that feels timeless.

I had the pleasure of speaking at her dad’s funeral. I read a Leonard Cohen line I found the day after he died:” don’t be the magician, be the magic.”

It summed him up completely, he didn’t need to dazzle you, he just needed to be in the room. He just was the thing, and people felt it.

That’s the whole island, too. It’s not a magician waving a wand at you. You have to already be doing the work. You have to be paying attention to all the signs.

Oh and…. She felt his hand on her during our forest session. Not a memory of it. Not a metaphor for it. His hand, on her, in a forest, on an island that doesn’t perform magic.

Thanks for paying attention!

Nix

I don’t raise my kids with religion. I don’t have one to give.

Not out of rebellion. Not as a stance. It’s just that my own relationship to anything sacred is built more from the body, music, breath, nature : not an archetype or doctrine. So when my kids ask me where do we go when we die, or what is God, I don’t have a script.

I don’t have an easy answer.

Here is what I DONT do.

I don’t hand them a book. I don’t tell them what to believe so they stop asking. I don’t just say “well some people think this, some people think that” and leave them standing in the fog . I have to actually answer.

Here’s what I DO tell them:

I don’t know what God is. But I know what it feels like when I’m close to it.

It feels like the ocean. It feels like the mountain rocks that sit so perfectly like art.

It feels like your body when you stop holding it so tight.

It feels like the second before you fall asleep when you’re not performing for anyone.

It’s not religion. It’s just paying attention.

The thing nobody tells you about raising kids without religion is that you don’t get to outsource the hard part. There’s no Sunday school doing the work for you. Every question lands on you, unfiltered, at full weight, usually while you’re caught off guard or too busy to pause.

So you have to actually know what you think. Not what you’re supposed to think. Not the spiritual-Instagram version l “the universe has a plan” type shit. I don’t buy that. It’s too easy. I don’t feed that bullshit to my kids either. Because they’ll keep asking again a month later, differently, testing whether you meant it the first time. They do that. Test it. Kids know when you’re giving them a placeholder instead of a real answer.

I don’t teach my sons what God is.

I teach them how to notice. How to think. Ask. Imagine. Feel.

I teach them that devotion isn’t only for church or people from ancient books we’ll never meet. It’s for the fish tanks, the thunderstorms, the stars, the spiraling shells that speak to your ears, the stones that hold stories, the animals that make eye contact, the music that makes you cry, the moments that feel like magic and you can’t explain it with words.

I teach them that not knowing is not the same as not looking. I teach them that the mystery is the magic!!

That’s all I’ve got.

Thanks for paying attention.

Nix x

Dear Artists,

I don’t know what this letter is. A Rant. A Vent. Fear of failure. Jealous Desperation. Fuck knows. But here’s what I know:

I’ve been writing, creating, making art my whole life. Long before social media handed everyone a mask. Way before AI made everyone a writer and trust funds became a bootstrap . This was never a persona for me. Never just content. It was just the one thing I could never NOT do.

And I suspect perhaps the same for some of you. The ones that have everything to lose but do it anyway.

Not the ones who are artists when it feeds optics , looks cool or gives your privilege purpose. I mean the ones who are artists in the years when absolutely nothing is happening. When no one is paying attention. When the thing you made goes out into the world and lands so quiet you’re not even sure it landed at all!

I’ve never dipped a toe in the nepo pond not because I wouldn’t : Fuck Yes, I would but because there wasn’t one for me flex. I’ve had some luck in my life but mostly I’ve made things in the dark, alone, unpaid, unseen, for years, and I kept making them anyway. Not because I was patient. Not because I had faith it would eventually pay off. But because I don’t actually know how to stop. That’s the whole ugly truth of it. Not a strategy. Just a gnawin compulsion to keep writing, creating, making shit, even if…. and when…. no one is reading, watching, or listening.

Ive certainly watched people with a fraction of that compulsion, that creative impulse get handed deals in one sweet swallow. And I’ve definitely felt that ugly envy in my chest. But under that envy is… There’s no version of me that stops when nobody’s watching, because the creating was never for the masses. It was for me. My therapy. My drug of choice. My stacks of teenage poems. My shitty attempts at art. My hoards of dirty diaries that hopefully my kids never read! Eeek

We all seek validation. But some validation shows up silent. And perhaps there’s more to learn from that?

So what the fuck is this? What’s my point?

I guess this is my love letter to you….. The ones who kept making the thing no matter what. Through the rejections, through the years it went absolutely nowhere, through the never giving up. I’m not writing to tell you it will pay off. I have no fucking clue! What I know is you’re not doing this because it’s smart. You’re doing it because you’re an artist... whether anyone’s clapping or not, and that’s rarer and harder and truer than anything money or a name can buy.

Thanks for paying attention!

Nix x

I’m the daughter of an investigative journalist who spent his life pulling at threads the government didn’t want pulled. Hidden truths run in my blood. I just tell mine through the body instead of the archive.

For two decades, it was London, writing and directing music videos, film, and advertising , chasing truth through story. Then life did what life does: it interrupted. I moved back to a small beach town in Florida to care for my mother. And somewhere between caretaking, mothering, and starting over, I found the next story I was supposed to tell.

My debut novel, TISSY, is a love letter to my childhood best friend and to any woman who’s ever felt like the mess instead of the meaning.

I’m an author, a somatic movement guide, owner of The Emerald Villa , an eco-conscious retreat rental in Indian Rocks Beach , and the founder of Sacred Pulse. All of it built on one belief: your body is always telling a story, whether you’re listening or not.

Thanks for paying attention!

Nix

It all began when my son was 8. He overheard a school teacher call him “the boy with issues”. Naturally he asked me the following day, “Mum, do I have issues?” My answer was immediate. Without hesitation: “Yes. Everyone does.”

Yet as the years pass, I watch my gregarious boy repeatedly slapped back with judgment from institutions that all say they celebrate individuality, but eventually bristle at his nonconformity. And with each incident, his skin thickens and his spirit dulls. The label becomes a reputation, the reputation morphs into a persona, and the persona hardens into a shield against the words that keep on coming. The child who once filled every room with joy is now riddled with self-doubt. All because the very people charged with nurturing his growth have instead become arbiters of “normalcy” - judges of character, deciding which quirks are acceptable and which have to be expunged in order to “fit in”.

He’s now 12 years old and officially diagnosed with ADHD. He is boisterous, creative, forgetful, sensitive, daring, curious, gets bored easily and is occasionally impulsive with words and actions. Selective memory of a brilliant mind. And when he is stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, he tics - physical reactions to his weakness towards talking about things that bother him. Above all though, he is a child. His main purpose in life is to make his friends laugh, be loved by all. He’s most at ease in front of a crowd, surrounded by attention. Yet his character faces daily scrutiny and rigid discipline. Targeted for minor infractions, barred from mistakes and presumed ill-behaved. Learning feels impossible with a target on his back.

But his story is far from unique.

There are countless children with learning differences or needs outside the “norm” who are falling through the cracks of a broken system.

Our education clings to restrictive traditions at the expense of students’ wellbeing, privacy, and personal growth. Studies reveal lectures over 10-20 minutes rapidly decrease student retention, yet passive listening remains the norm. According to The Atlantic, students take a staggering 113 standardized tests from pre-K to 12th grade, though these narrowly focused exams fail to capture diverse skills and learning styles. Tracking systems that reinforce differences are known to harm student self-esteem by categorizing children as “basic,” “standard,” and “advanced”. Excessive homework still piles on despite proof it increases student stress while providing no academic benefit. Students with sensory issues face challenges from noisy, bright classrooms.Yet schools do little to improve these environments.

The stubborn adherence to outdated methods demonstrates a systemic failure to truly meet students’ needs and cultivate their unique talents. What is often pushed instead are medications aimed at quick behavioral fixes versus meaningful accommodations - band aids that theoretically help teachers more than students. In short, the focus remains on changing the child rather than adapting the system, revealing a bias rooted more in convenience. Are we failing our most vibrant young minds? More importantly, are we shaming them into thinking they’re “wrong”, “weird” or “bad”?

Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for teens. 17% have considered it within a year and 8% have attempted. Marginalized teens face up to 5 times the risk. Underscoring the need for proactive emotional support long before crisis stage. The blood of suffering youth stains our hands.

Remaining complicit while the most vulnerable slip through the cracks makes us culpable. Passive parents enable the status quo. And marginalized youth are squeezed into boxes. Parents must partner with schools to pioneer bold reforms. Are we raising soldiers, robots or students of life?

While academic success can provide some advantages, ample evidence suggests it does not directly determine happiness or fulfillment. Our fixation on grades comes at the detriment of nurturing qualities more aligned with mental health and wellbeing.

A 50+ year Stanford study found zero correlation between straight-A students in high school and success later in life, quantified by conventional achievements like salary, community involvement, and satisfactory relationships. According to a comprehensive Gallup study, there is no association between grade point averages and employee engagement at work. And a Harvard study found students with higher GPAs in college were no more satisfied or successful financially and professionally compared to those with lower GPAs.

And so we arrive at the tragic irony - science confirms the very qualities my son naturally possesses - grit, astuteness, curiosity, creativity, emotional intelligence, self-efficacy - are the strongest predictors of professional success and life fulfillment, not the rigid academic metrics by which he is judged. The research is clear, and yet we continue to crush spirited children into conformity. A unified goal must be helping each child shine as their distinctive selves, not dimming their differences. The journey begins in a teacher’s smile, small moments of reassurance that every child has wings beyond measure. Our duty is clearing their path, and then stepping back and watching in awe as they take flight.

Thanks for paying attention.

Nix x

I’m 45 and honestly? Only now am I truly loving the skin I’m in. The body i grow with.

And it’s not because I’m in the best shape of my life. It’s not because I’m the skinniest or the strongest I’ve been. It’s because I finally actually understand my body and am no longer fighting with it. I appreciate and love every inch of it now, even the parts society has spent years telling me weren’t good enough.

I think as women we’re just conditioned to stay the same. Fix the ups and downs, fix the fluctuations, bounce back after winter or after babies to whatever body we had before, like our bodies aren’t allowed to just... be.

But I’m entering a new stage of life and my body IS changing. And not gonna lie, at first it was shocking , I’m 15 pounds heavier than I used to be without making any changes. I judged it hard at first. Flung myself into “fix it” mode. Tried the diets, tried the peptides, checked my hormones. Then I stopped. Felt into it. Asked myself , what am I actually chasing? How do I feel?

And I realized something. I don’t want to go back. I want to move forward, with grace and gratitude.

It’s like I stepped into a whole new body and I’m fucking embracing it. Wrinkles, rolls and all. I’m leaning into the curvature, the womanliness, because I actually feel like I’m embodying that woman more now than I ever have.

This is just where I'm at.

45 and finally living in a body that I LOVE!