Welcome to my new mid-week Wayfinder newsletter, the space where I track the little signals and subtle shifts that don’t quite fit anywhere else. These midweek notes are part compass, part breadcrumb trail — a way of paying attention to the things that are shaping me between the bigger essays.
Echoes from the closet, and the future…
I switched to Apple Music a couple of weeks ago, which felt like a small administrative task (saving money and better playback sound). But then, it started to pack a punch I wasn’t expecting. Somewhere between syncing and sorting, the algorithm cracked open a vault I didn’t know I’d locked. Suddenly, songs I bought years and years ago before streaming services — back when I was still trying to be the kind of person my religion demanded — started shuffling into my day like uninvited ghosts.
Some of them make me laugh now. I can hear the strain in them, the way I tried to curate a personality that wouldn’t offend anyone’s sense of holiness and my own self-righteousness. I settled for a lot of bad music back then, not because I liked it, but because it didn’t threaten the fragile scaffolding of my “values.” It’s wild how a melody can carry the weight of a whole belief system.
But then there are the other songs — the ones that slipped through the cracks. The ones that transcended the rules and spoke to something truer in me, even when I didn’t have language for it yet. Hearing them now feels like time folding in on itself. I can feel who I was then and who I am now occupying the same space for a moment, nodding at each other in recognition.
The Sniffle Shuffle
It’s strange, the emotional range a shuffle button can summon. Grief for the years I spent policing my own joy. Gratitude for the art that found me anyway. A quiet pride in the fact that I can finally listen to whatever I want without checking it against someone else’s, or my own, moral checklist.
Mostly, though, I’m struck by how music remembers us (just welled up with tears typing this first line). Music remembers us even when we’ve forgotten parts of ourselves. These old tracks aren’t just songs. They’re little waypoints. Markers of who I was trying to be, who I actually was, and who I’m still becoming.
And maybe that’s the real gift of this moment: letting the past play through the present long enough to hear what it’s been trying to tell me all along.
If today’s Wayfinder stirred something loose, you might enjoy wandering through the rest of the week with me:
- On Mondays, Mugwump Ramblings digs into the cultural noise and the nuance underneath it.
- On Fridays, Thrive leans into growth, reinvention, and the messy art of becoming.
- On Saturdays, Sexplorer explores intimacy, embodiment, and the parts of ourselves we’re still learning to claim.
Each one holds a different facet of the same journey — reflection, curiosity, growth, and desire — and Wayfinder is the thread that ties them together.
→ Coming Friday in Thrive
A gentle reminder that rebuilding your inner world doesn’t require a TED Talk or a juice cleanse. Just a little honesty and maybe a nap.
→ Coming Saturday in Sexplorer
We’re talking about intimacy, awkward noises, and the kind of listening that happens when you stop pretending you’re a sex wizard and start being a human.
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