i loved you, i believed in you, but i am not you anymore

i have outgrown myself i fear

when i was 21, all i wanted was to be a music artist. that was the plan, the dream, the identity i wrapped around myself like a second skin. i spent my late teens and early 20s studying music at nyu tisch, spending countless hours in the studio, writing hundreds of songs, and performing at dive bars around nyc and brooklyn.

(me circa 2018)

back then, i had a cinematic vision of 27-year-old me: two eps out, maybe a full-length album. a niche, devoted fanbase. playing shows in dimly lit venues, my name flickering in neon outside some mid-sized venue, giving interviews about my “creative process” and the “inspirations” behind my work.

i believed in the linearity of life. if i just kept moving forward, i’d land exactly where i was supposed to.

now i’m 27, and i have none of that to my name.

(me a month ago) (even just me from 2018 and me now LOOK so visibly different).

i was releasing music for the first time during my senior year of college. i had a whole rollout planned for an ep before covid came in and stripped the last few months of college from me—erasing any clear next step (as it did for so many). suddenly, for the first time, i had no roadmap. i felt paralyzed for months, unsure of what to do next.

impulsively, i pulled all my music off streaming platforms, telling myself it was because i wanted a fresh start—that i needed to rethink my approach now that covid had upended everyone’s plans. but ultimately, i needed to take time to myself. so i did. i disappeared for a while, even spent a few months in vancouver, pausing, rethinking the plans i had for myself.

somewhere in that first year and a half post-grad…i started thrifting more…at first just for fun, but then it became an obsession. shopping at flea markets became a ritual, which snowballed into discovering and exploring my personal style. as i spent those first few years post-grad building a wardrobe that felt like an extension of me, fashion became more than just clothes: it became a language…a creative outlet…a world i could shape and control. and while i was getting lost in this new passion, music…slowly faded into the background.

it wasn’t that i stopped loving it. it wasn’t even that i consciously stepped away or quit. i always planned to return to music. every time someone asked, “when’s the new music coming?” my answer was always “soon.” but ‘soon’ became a broken record. and slowly but surely…the only remnants of my music career became a handful of miscellaneous tracks on spotify and soundcloud.

no one tells you how heavy it feels to not become the person you thought you’d be. i see so many essays about how proud people are that they’ve “honored their younger selves” in adulthood, but no one really talks about what happens when you fail to…when you wake up one day and realize you’re not even close to the version of yourself you swore you’d become.

i’ve been thinking a lot about 21-year-old me and how sure she was. how she believed in herself with an unshakable certainty. she would look at me now and be so confused, and disappointed. “what happened to the plan?” “what happened to the girl who swore she’d never stop making music?”

and…i don’t know what i’d tell her. because the truth is, i don’t have a concrete answer. i didn’t make some grand decision to walk away from music. i just… drifted. i let life happen to me, and in the process, i changed.

i feel guilty for never making it up to that version of myself…who, more than anything, just wanted to be an artist. i know this is just the nature of getting older and realizing that the version of yourself you once idolized is an artifact from the past—but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it still hurts.

i struggle so much with staying present—no matter how much meditation i do, my brain still finds ways to linger in the past. and i have to keep reminding myself that there’s no way to go back. all i can do is pay attention to who i am now.

i don’t know what happens next. maybe i’ll wake up in a year and feel the pull of music again—a real, undeniable pull. maybe i’ll step into a studio again— not out of obligation to my past self, but out of excitement for the present one. or maybe i won’t. maybe i’ll keep writing, keep thrifting, keep following the creative impulses that feel alive to me now—or take on a completely different form altogether.

and maybe that’s enough. maybe the life i built isn’t a betrayal of my younger self, but proof that i kept going—even when the path looked different from what i had planned. maybe honoring her isn’t about staying the same. maybe it’s about making peace with the fact that i didn’t.

to say: i loved you, i believed in you, but i am not you anymore.

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