I think I want to start writing here more often.
Not really like a blog though.
More like somewhere to leave pieces of myself behind while I’m living through things. Somewhere to put my thoughts when they get too loud in my head. Somewhere to remember versions of myself that I know I’ll eventually outgrow.
A lot of my music already became that without me realizing it.
Most of the songs I’ve written were never really “songs” to me. They were emotional timestamps. Snapshots of who I was at that exact moment. Proof that certain feelings and versions of me existed at all.
I think this is just another version of that.
So I guess the best place to start is with why I came back to Louisiana.
Honestly I don’t think there was one reason.
I think I was tired.
Tired of constantly rebuilding myself in new places.
Tired of pretending movement automatically meant growth.
Tired of running from things I never actually dealt with.
The breakup was part of it too.
What’s strange is it didn’t end badly the way some relationships do. There wasn’t screaming or hatred or trying to destroy each other emotionally. We loved each other. We just weren’t right for each other and I think we both knew it before either of us wanted to say it out loud.
That somehow hurt worse.
I still think it’s ironic that I moved back to Louisiana on Valentine’s Day of all days.
Life really does have a weird sense of humor sometimes.
The whole drive back I kept going back and forth in my head wondering if I was making the worst decision of my life. Everything I owned was shoved into a U Haul truck and I had no plan. No job lined up. Nothing figured out.
Just me driving back toward a place I spent years trying to escape from.
I’ve lived in eight different states at this point and I think somewhere in my head I kept believing if I moved far enough away eventually I’d become someone else.
Someone lighter.
Someone less haunted.
Someone easier to understand.
But I don’t think I was chasing freedom as much as I thought I was.
I think I was running.
Running from grief.
Running from memories.
Running from myself.
And somehow life kept bringing me back here anyway.
I still remember unloading the truck into the Louisiana humidity and immediately feeling overwhelmed. The air here feels heavy in a way I forgot about. Heavy with heat and memory and history. Even the smell of the house felt familiar in this weird emotional way. Dust. Old wood. Humidity. Time.
Then I walked into my childhood room for the first time and just lost it honestly.
The house was in way worse condition than I expected.
Way worse.
I remember my sister coming over to check on me after I got back and I was sitting there crying trying to process everything all at once.
I kept asking her if I made the right decision coming back here because honestly I didn’t know.
I remember looking around my old room thinking about how many versions of me existed there already.
Childhood.
Teenage years.
Heartbreak.
Grief.
Dreams.
All these old versions of myself still somehow living inside those walls while I was standing there feeling like a completely different person.
Everything hit me at once.
The damage.
The abandonment.
The years of neglect.
The realization that all of this was now my responsibility.
Every room felt heavy. Heavy with memories, responsibility, comfort, grief. It felt like life hit me all at once the second I walked through that door.
And I think what made it harder was realizing there wasn’t anybody else coming to fix it.
It was on me now.
The house.
My life.
My future.
All of it.
I think that moment really broke something open in me emotionally.
Not in a bad way necessarily.
Just honest.
Like for the first time in years I stopped distracting myself long enough to actually feel everything I’d been carrying around.
There are still pictures of me and my siblings hanging in the hallway underneath my mom’s picture exactly where they used to be when I was a kid.
Same wall.
Same order.
Same frames.
Seeing them there again kind of fucked me up honestly.
It’s strange seeing parts of your childhood untouched by time while feeling like you became a completely different person somewhere else.
With both of my parents gone, I think I learned adulthood through survival more than guidance. Nobody really walked me through life. Nobody explained things to me. Everything became trial and error and figuring things out the hard way.
I think that made me independent really young.
But I also think it made me tired really young too.
There’s a loneliness that comes with always being the person responsible for solving everything.
And lately I’ve realized I don’t fully know who I am outside of survival mode.
For most of my life I was focused on leaving.
This is the first time I’ve actually tried building something instead.
Some days this house feels symbolic in a way I can’t fully explain. The more I fix it, the more I realize I’m probably trying to rebuild parts of myself too.
Every day there’s something else to do.
Something broken.
Something unfinished.
Something expensive.
Most days feel too short now. Between work, fixing the house, trying to make music, trying to manage life, relationships, bills, responsibilities, everything kind of blends together into this constant feeling of trying to keep up.
By the time I finally get alone time, I’ve become selfish with it. I either want silence or I want to disappear into projects that make me feel like I’m moving forward somehow.
And somehow in the middle of all this chaos I met one of the kindest people I’ve ever known which honestly feels like terrible timing because I still feel unfinished myself.
But maybe nobody really meets people at the “right” time.
Maybe people just find each other in the middle of becoming.
I don’t know.
Coming back here has also been emotionally weird because when I left Louisiana my life changed constantly. I met so many people. Saw so many places. Experienced things I never thought I would.
I think part of me expected to come back and find everyone else changed too.
But in a lot of ways parts of this place felt frozen in time.
A lot of people are still stuck in the same cycles they were trapped in years ago and seeing that honestly scared me more than I expected it to.
There’s a strange guilt that comes with outgrowing versions of your life that other people never escaped.
Louisiana still confuses me emotionally.
I’ve spent years criticizing this place. The corruption. The poverty. The hurricanes. The humidity. The feeling that so many people here get stuck.
But there’s also something deeply human here that I understand more now that I’m older.
People here know how to survive emotionally.
There’s beauty here, but it’s almost never untouched by hardship.
I think that’s why so much art comes from places like this.
New Orleans especially feels built on contradiction. Celebration and grief existing side by side. Music being played at funerals while people dance in the streets.
And honestly I think that duality exists in me too.
Despite everything changing in my life over and over again, creativity stayed.
Even when I disappeared from it for a while.
Even when survival became more important.
It was always there waiting for me.
I think creativity used to feel like escape.
Now it feels more like preservation.
Like I’m trying to document who I was while I’m still figuring out who I’m becoming.
I think healing probably looks a lot uglier in real life than people imagine.
Sometimes it looks like unfinished rooms.
Exhaustion.
Grief.
Uncertainty.
Unpaid bills.
Loneliness.
And still waking up every day trying anyway.
For the first time in a long time though, I don’t feel like I’m running anymore.
And honestly that’s terrifying.
But I think it might also be the first real sign that I’m finally healing.