Each morning brings a fresh obsession, a new hyper-fixation that my OCD brain clings onto. Yesterday it was a half-blind Black woman riding across Nevada dust with nothing but a six-shooter and the kind of vengeance that burns cool. The other morning my granddaddy’s hands appeared, calloused and slick with Mississippi clay that never quite washes off. And tomorrow might bring vampires whose bite finally feels like truth against my skin.

There are too many stories in me. They arrive on the hour like hunger, like heat flashes, like hauntings. I used to think something was wrong with me. Now I think I might be an oracle.

Yes, I’m spiritual as fuck too–in fact, some of my muse draws from glimpses of my past lives. Yes, you and I may have had a past life as cats. But, of course, this is a discussion for a later time.

God, the ideas never quit. My novels (yes, as in plural) keep me up overnight. Zine ideas materialize while I’m washing dishes. I’m always awaken at 3am to the voices of my ancestors. I have sticky notes to pin to my shower in case an idea for a short story comes up.

It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only person who gets their best ideas while taking showers.

Somehow, I’m still able to imagine these entire worlds with their own physics. Sometimes I wonder if I have more beginnings than most people have thoughts in their entire lives. Holding them all makes me feel fractured and mad, forever unfinished, somehow unworthy of completion.

Sometimes I wonder if I have more beginnings than most people have thoughts in their entire lives.

And funny thing is, even in my writing — the one place I should feel absolutely free — I’ve still been trying to hold it all in.

Brand it and package it.

Make it small enough to double-tap or get between subway stops.

The Box I Built (and Now Must Burn)

When I started my Instagram I leaned hard into gothic/southern gothic aesthetics. It fit. No wait, it almost fit. This was around the time when I started taking my poetry collection Swamp Girl seriously, which by the way is a working title at this point. I truly believed I could publish it within a year. Wrap up an entire childhood of grief and ghosts in 100 pages or less.

How naive we are when we begin things.

Swamp Girl refused to behave. It unraveled into something wilder and deeper than I ever expected. Mississippi isn’t just some state I left behind. It’s an open wound. A psychic realm I tap into from time-to-time. A memory I’ve been half-drowning in while pretending I could breathe underwater. I realized I couldn’t just write one collection and walk away whistling. And what was worse, I had trapped myself in an aesthetic prison before I understood the full weight of what I was carrying.

I had accidentally become everything I swore I’d never be: digestible and marketable.

A writer with a brand that made sense to scrolling thumbs at 2 AM but felt increasingly foreign to my own hands when I tried to type. I’m having trouble staying confined to one genre, one tone, and one story when I contain multitudes of them.

Reality Check: My Real Life as a Creative

BOOM!

Reality hits.

I work a part-time copywriting job that pays minimum wage. I write blogs and email campaigns that hardly anyone looks at. Not much is glamorous about it besides getting to work from home, which can be needed at the best of times. But it buys me time. And honestly, as artists our meals usually look like air and muse anyway.

My apartment could fit inside most people’s living rooms. My notebooks are from Dollar Tree because something about a dollar-priced journal just makes the writing in it more priceless.

I haven’t had health insurance for over a year now. I skip lunch when the month runs longer than my money. These aren’t complaints, but facts that interrupt the chaos. Currently, I find myself wanting nothing more than a space where I can’t be interrupted.

Scrolling through my Instagram feed, I came across this post that had a picture of Indian writer Baby Halder and the headline “This Writer Supported Herself Through Domestic Work And Published Her Own Memoir.” Of course, the spiritual side of me takes this as a “sign.”

However, this quote I read from Baby, stuck with me:

“Still I write. My Taatus (father) would tell me, even if nothing is going well in life, this is one work you can always do. Consider this part of your life — even if there is no work, writing will become your work.” — Baby Halder

Baby didn’t have a work from home job writing boring blogs for marketers, she worked as a cleaner while being a mother raising three children seeking refuge from an abusive household.

And she still wrote.

Writing isn’t something just for expression but a way of breathing. It is our life. This is further proven with Baby being a prominent writer known for her exceptional memoirs.

I took my current job not because I’m giving up on writing but because I’m finally giving in to it. Surrendering to the life I’m actually building instead of the one my college career counselor insisted I should want. I’m here to write until my fingers cramp. To remember everything they told me to forget. To unshrink myself word by terrifying word. Even if I never go viral or never “arrive” at whatever bullshit destination success is supposed to be. This life is still mine.

Who I Really Am: A List of the Loud

I am a writer who needs to channel my sexual energy into vampire novels where consent and blood become the same substance.

I am a writer who can’t stop dreaming about Old Westerns where black women ride across dust that tastes like vengeance and freedom.

I am a writer who wants to make kawaii stationery with tiny ghosts in the margins while simultaneously running a gaming chair business because comfort matters when worlds are being born and when they die.

I am a writer desperate to say what terrifies others to whisper about grief and madness and lust and girlhood and trauma and God and what dwells in the unconscious.

I am not just speaking for myself anymore. I write because for twenty-something years I didn’t know how to speak at all.

My childhood selective mutism never really left. It morphed. I can go weeks without social contact or posting anything online because I’m frantically trying to calculate what version of myself that’s most tolerable virtually and in real-life.

I exhaust myself trying to choose one self from many. But the truth breaks through anyway: I am not one self. I have never been one self. I am not a goddamn brand. I am a chaos-being wearing human skin.

A Soft Rebellion

I’m not rebranding. Instead I’m remembering.

I’m re-learning how to let my writing be a field, not a funnel.

So if you see me write about sirens one day, and vampire lovers the next — don’t ask me to pick one. I already have.

I pick me. All of me. The chaos-being. The oracle. The glitch in the algorithm. The girl with too many poems and stories, and the nerve to try to write them all anyway.

I am giving myself permission to be everything at once. To let my mind wander where it will. To follow each story to its natural end, whether that’s a published book or just a scribbled note that no one but me will ever see.

The world doesn’t need another neatly packaged writer who fits into a clean marketing category. The world needs truth-tellers. Chaos-bringers. Oracles who speak in many tongues.

So I’m gonna keep writing. Keep creating in ways that make sense to no one but me.

Because I’m not here to be understood. I’m here to be true.

There are too many stories in me. And I’m finally brave enough to let them all speak.

Follow the Chaos

If these words resonated with you or if you just want to see how all of this is going to unfold, visit my website or follow me on Instagram @dsmithwrites.