The Year of the Snake

There’s nothing more satisfying than waking up at 6 a.m. and feeling hot water splash against your skin. The thoughts in my head swarm, and I let them carry a life of their own. Did you know the average human spends 130,000 hours thinking about the past in their lifetime? After my best friend told me this last night, I realized what it means to be a songwriter. To be a songwriter is to capture the important parts of the past that shaped you in traumatizingly beautiful ways. Most, if not all, of my writing tries to remember the details. So does writing about it ever let me feel free within myself? Do I let go of what’s happened if I’m constantly letting my mind work backward?

The year 2025 is the Year of the Snake, and the year I was born—2001—was also the Year of the Snake. The snake sheds its old colors and begins a new journey. The skin I shed carried 24 years of grit and guilt. I have a tendency to feel like I haven’t accomplished enough because of how many times I’ve started over.

In 2019, I put on a pair of wired headphones and heard my voice through a microphone for the first time. That experience led me through some of the shittiest people I’ve encountered in my life so far—people who pretended to want to be part of my team and my growth as an artist. People I thought I needed to guide me toward success in music.

If I don’t want people to control me, what do I do? I was going to studio sessions, spending every cent I made on music, and I still wasn’t the one in charge. I was told to go into the studio and sing what I was told to sing because I wasn’t the “writer.”

In 2022, I bought my first guitar and wrote a song on it.

In 2025, I’ve written so many songs on my guitar that I’ve lost count—and I don’t need to ask anyone whether they’re good or not. I’ll know if it’s good enough. I realized I have good taste on my own.