When I got home last night, I was exhausted. Yesterday was a long day. I stepped into my apartment and poured myself a cup of hot Chai tea. I dropped the needle on a crackling old Miles Davis album and stretched out.

My neighborhood gets quiet, late at night, and with only the sound of a few passing cars, I listened to the greatest Jazz ever recorded…and settled into a desperate panic.

Last night, I started freaking the fuck out, imagining the next ten years of my life, and the next twenty, and questioning everything I’ve ever done. I started wondering about what my life meant, and what my choices would lead to, and whether I’ll be happy the day I die.

I started dreaming about what could have been, or would have been, or should have been, if I’d worked harder. If I’d worked at that company instead of this company. If I hadn’t dropped out of law school. If I’d finished writing a...

There’s a question that I have asked myself a few times, since I transitioned.

Should I be doing creative work that references my transition? Or should I treat my transition as something apart from my work?

it’s a question that made me think about my creative impulses, and the reasons for my writing. It’s a question that made me consider a scenario in which I transitioned in silence, writing about a world outside of it, writing as though it wasn’t the most important part of my existence.

I am so much more than a transgender woman, I am a writer and an artist, a creative, a designer, a publicist, and I’m proud to be all those things, and I could have focused on them and doubled down on them, without opening my soul to the world.

I think there are a good deal more stories in me than the transition story I’m currently living. Why not tell them instead?

I know the mainstream public...

I don’t like the notion of social profiles as an on-going record of life lived. To me, that brings up the problems inherent in trying to build a narrative out of a non-linear experience. It makes you think about how to. express who you are, instead of being who you are. It makes your life revolve around a story, instead of drawing a story out of your life.

Instagram for me, is the perfect example of this. Cataloguing snapshots of your existence in a chronological order that people can scroll through endlessly. I can’t do it. I am uncomfortable with it. I’ll not have it.

Instead, I’ve started treating Instagram as basically a pop-up gallery. I pick a theme, an idea, a creative impulse, and I follow it until I’ve reached an end. It’s sometimes comic books, graphic novels, music. It’s sometimes pieces of writing. It’s sometimes fashion, or streetwear to be more specific. Of late, it’s...

You can plan all the right things, go the right way, choose the right theme and story, and still be wrong. There’s such a thing as being directionally sound, strategically wrong and tactically so off base that you might as well have never begun in the first place.

I’ve been directionally sound on many things. My creative impulses can be described in that way, from my blog to my work to my words. But I’ve rarely been strategically and tactically in the right place, at the right time, with the right tools.

Looking at my work from a distance, that’s easier to see now, and it represents a challenge that I relish.

I feel a rising optimism, in fact. I feel more convinced than ever that directionally I have known where to go, and all that’s missing now is the execution. That’s a comfort, when you’ve lived and worked in doubt for as long as I have.

My confidence is improved, and I feel...

I think about my hands, and the marks and blemishes and scratches on them. There’s where glass cut me open in a car crash. There’s where I tore my wrist moving gear, on tour. These are the nails I cracked and scraped on my skateboard this week. Tattoos of punk bands, scars from darker times.

They’re all signs of use. Signs of life. Signs that I’ve been out into the world and I have not emerged unscathed. I appreciate every single mark on my body for what it is, and for what it represents. I think the same is true of my tools and instruments and the gear I throw in my bag each day, the cracked glass of my phone, dropped trying to take photos of a punk show in a friend’s living room. The dents on a laptop that I used as a DJ and that I wrote with in a hotel room in Amsterdam. The blood specks still staining my first guitar, leaned on the wall in my house.

It’s all been used, and it’s...

I woke up this morning in a haze. I’ve been sober for a few days, and my body has started to respond to it.

A certain malaise to my movements, and a throbbing headache that sits above one eye (my right) and a vague, elusive ache.

With an unscheduled day ahead of me, I turned off my phone and decided instead to stare at a much larger glass rectangle, and finish watching the two-hour long Fugazi documentary, Instrument.

It’s a striking film, about a striking band, and about creativity unbound by scale, unspoiled by the more widely accepted rules of commerce, and untouched by the false sincerity that has been plaguing my world of late.

When the documentary finished, on reels of soundless 8mm footage of the musicians flailing on stage, I stared at the ceiling for a good hour.

I was thinking about the rules and boundaries to which Fugazi paid no mind, and where I had let myself...

Yesterday, I talked for an hour with a young hacker/hustler type, who asked me about the career I’ve had. He was full of questions about what I’d done and where I’d been, and what I had achieved, and I knew he was trying to learn from me.

But the only piece of advice that I felt qualified to give him was this.

Look after yourself. Sleep more while you’re young. And try to live in peace.
Peace with the people around you, and peace with yourself.

Beyond that, what would I tell him? I’ve made money, I’ve lost money. I’ve played in bands, and toured. I’ve founded companies and shut them down. I’ve been on top and I’ve been back to the bottom. In one year, I went from running audio engineering sessions to applying for McDonalds. In one year, I went from living in a shared house with a bunch of artists to becoming the CMO of a software company. There’s no story there. There’s no...

When the weather is cold, I don’t want to go home.

I stay out, and I walk down the streets of the city, looking for bright lights and good times.

Last night, I sat at the bar at Frankie’s. It’s a place that feels like home to me. I sit there regularly, and they know the right drink to pour, and they talk and tell stories, and I listen.

A band plays. The suits and ties come and go. The regulars get tanked and get twisted. The pinball machines blare and flash. It’s a routine that I have grown accustomed to, that only makes sense to experience on my own.

xox Joany 🍕

I spend a lot of time on my own.

When I want to surround myself with people, the beautiful folks in my life are there, but I don’t always need them to be.

There is something wonderful about the freedom of being alone, the freedom from thinking inside someone else’s head and feeling inside someone else’s heart.

I’ve never been much of a homebody. When I’m alone, I am observing, experiencing or making. I ride the trains to wherever I wind up, and I write, and I code and I play ambient music and punk rock in my headphones.

I exist in the corner of a cafe, I skate down new alleys every week, and I talk to nobody, until I’m ready.

It’s in moments of profound loneliness that I find myself able to dig into my creativity, and ask myself the more difficult questions about who I am, and where I am.

I am something of a wanderer. I have always been. I like to be out in the fog, and I...

You can’t get a lot of good from an expensive notebook. I usually find they’re too precious to spoil with mistakes - and most of my words are a mistake. They don’t make me write much; their premium weight is something I can’t put out of my mind. They’re not heavy with potential, they’re heavy with obligation.

In the end, if you want to write, the goddamn tatters and smears and bent pages of a cheap notebook won’t stop you. And if you don’t, a leather bound volume with pages spun out of silk won’t save you. The words are going to come, or the words are going to remain out of your grasp, and there ain’t much you can buy from a stationary shop going to fix it.

They’re all just tools.

We put a lot of store by our tools. Notebooks, sure, and laptops and tablets too. Smartphones, pens and cameras. The tools dominate our work. We consume them, and then they consume us.

Some of the...