Before I Let Go.
I dream big. Like over the rainbow, shooting for the moon, going for broke, delu-lu big. I have these visions of interdisciplinary works that would be undeniable if only I had funds, space, time… you know, the usual things that every broke artist is negotiating in the city.
What I am overflowing with is friends. I think one thing I can say ten toes down about myself is that I have a strong community of badass friends, each one a universe within themselves. I have some that stoke the firess of my fantastical ideas, dreaming ways to make them hotter, and some that cool the embers, reminding me there are steps to take to build an eternal flame. I am full.
But there’s a particular kind of fullness I’ve been carrying lately. The kind that sits in your gut and your hard drive at the same time: files, drafts, stems, ideas that never quite made it out of the body.
Like the start of the universe never birthed. It sits inside me like something I swallowed on a night I thought would pass, now swollen with memory and unfinished language, pressing up like it wants to be called by name. Not hunger and not fullness, just a slow, human kind of ache, like holding onto a song too long and realizing it’s been waiting on you to let it go.
Sometimes the work waits because you’re not resourced. Not just creatively, but materially. Mixing, documentation, even time itself… it all costs. Sometimes the work has been mishandled. By systems, by institutions, by people who didn’t know how to care for it. That kind of delay isn’t creative, it’s recovery. Reclaiming the work as yours again takes time.
And sometimes the delay is relational. Work carries people in it. I am such a libra. I shift my focus the moment the wind moves. I have gotten it to be cyclical, I work like 10 minutes at a time on each thing, do a little dance, then start again. I am so distracted by shiny and pretty.
With my upcoming release, this project has gone through a lot. To be real, this was a project that I originally wanted to do short and dirty. I first came up with the concept as an iphone video project meant for social media, as a fun fast piece for exploration. Of course, I enlisted a friend for help and she said “No. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it big.”
I love working with my friends. They always fill in the holes in my plots. With close ones, words are almost unnecessary. We fall into each other’s language, reading each other’s minds with focused eyes and toothy smiles.
ALIEN has gone through so many hands of care and some hands of fumble. A life cycle three times over. It moved through the “right” channels, the ones that are supposed to hold a project, and still things broke. Allie was the first to believe in it, and it was also her that stopped it in its tracks. Once I finally had a plan to take it back from the label, she passed away and I couldn’t touch it. I’ve had to renegotiate more than the project with her loss.
Releasing something fixes it in time. It says: this is what I meant, this is who I was. If you’re still changing, that can feel like exposure. Like letting something out before your body has finished processing it.
So the files stay. The ideas swell. The gut holds.
And again, I turned to my friends. Laura and Rose, I can’t express how deeply your care for this project has held me through these past few months. Every step of this project, every push forward, every return, every moment it almost disappeared and didn’t, has been because of them.
And it is because of them that I can finally process what I’ve been holding.
And sometimes, that’s the only real deadline there is.
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