Category: Creative Musings
-
When Fantasy Is the Only Safe Place to Tell the Truth Some stories don’t ask permission to haunt you—they simply move in, rearrange the furniture, and leave their muddy boots by the door. Pan’s Labyrinth is one of those stories. Set in post–Civil War Spain, the film follows Ofelia, a girl who retreats into a…
-
Evanescence: The Band That Raised My Inner Emo 🌒 The Beginning: When the EvTrain Rolled Into My Universe My initiation into Evanescence wasn’t graceful or sacred—just my neighbor shoving “Bring Me to Life” at me like it was contraband. (Jamie still swears she was the one who did it, and honestly? They can arm-wrestle about…
-
When Ambition Wears Heels Sharp Enough to Draw Blood There’s a moment in every woman’s life when she realizes she’s been sprinting through someone else’s expectations wearing shoes she never picked out. The Devil Wears Prada opens at precisely that moment—Andy Sachs stumbling into the glacial orbit of Miranda Priestly, a boss so powerful she…
-
Fire pit on Anchor Inn on the Bay’s private beach in Traverse City (2016)—the kind of spot that feels like it’s seen a thousand summer nights and still has room for a thousand more. There’s something about a weathered fire pit on the sand that instantly drops you into nostalgia mode. Late nights, lake breeze,…
-
Some songs are written in the heat of the moment.This one was written after the body was already cold. Before we get into it, here’s how this post works. These lyrics are read without context—no backstory, no personal history, no explanation of who or what inspired them. Just the song as it exists on the…
-
When Forgetting Looks Easier Than Feeling Some films ask you to think. Eternal Sunshine asks you to bleed a little.It opens with Joel—soft, anxious, chronically self-editing—choosing to erase Clementine after she erases him. Not because their love wasn’t real, but because the pain of remembering feels heavier than the risk of losing the story entirely.…
-
This is something I think about more than I probably should. There is not one version of you walking around in the world. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, scattered across conversations you don’t remember, moments you didn’t realize were pivotal, and people who walked away long before you ever felt finished becoming. The You That…
-
“You’re supposed to be the leading lady of your own life, for God’s sake.” 🕯️ Soft Resets and Suitcases There’s no better way to start a new year than with The Holiday—a movie about two women who quite literally swap lives to find themselves again. It’s a rom-com on paper, sure, but underneath all the…
-
Resolutions for 2026 The Year I Actually Have Something to “Resolve” Every year I make the same joke: my resolution is to lose weight, then I shrug dramatically, mutter “ope,” and declare I’ll try again next year once it inevitably fizzles out by the seventh sunrise. But this year?This year I hit the damn goal.The…