I’m turning the page

I’m addicted to romanticizing a life with people who never really existed.

It’s the version of them that’s pure — the one I created in my mind. The version that doesn’t hurt me countless times or leave me questioning if I’m good enough.

If someone puts themselves in a position to lose you, they don’t love you the way you deserve.

I fell in love with a gypsy when I was 14. He truly was one — and being with him introduced me to a different kind of life: seven people living in a two-bedroom apartment, myself included. His schizophrenic uncle would wake us up at 8 a.m. yelling “DUH!” and swore he was paparazzi for TMZ. His 36-year-old brother slept on a mattress in the living room until 4 p.m. most days. It felt like a secret world with no rules.

I don’t know why, but none of it bothered me. Looking back now, I think I stayed because I liked how my presence seemed to ease something in him — like me being there made it all feel more manageable. That none of it mattered, because I was there.

And I needed that. I needed to feel like I was the thing holding it all together.

He had dropped out of high school at 15 and was making thousands of dollars a week hustling in the Valley — flipping cars, forging pink slips, drinking Red Bulls at the 76, waiting for the next street race like it was an art. I was hypnotized. Not just by him, but by the freedom, the rebellion, the way he made the world bend to him.

We’d spend nights driving through Mulholland Canyon with no destination — jumping off balconies just to see each other. One night, he took me to my first drag race. “Are you going to race?” he asked. “Obviously,” I said — even though I was terrified. There were hundreds of Fast and Furious wannabes swarming the street, headlights blinking like we were in some underground movie. He put me in a race against another guy — his girlfriend in the passenger seat, ready to watch me lose.

But I didn’t.

I saw their car in my driver-side mirror, flipped on my emergency lights — and in that moment, I knew I was the coolest girlfriend in the world.

I loved the way he made everything feel possible. It was wild. It was cinematic. It was unpredictable.

But even then, there were signs. I saw how he disappeared when things got too real. How he was gentle and cruel in the same breath. I grew tired of trying to pull goodness out of him. I stayed because I believed that love was supposed to be chaotic. That if it wasn’t burning, it wasn’t real.

It’s taken me years to realize that chaos isn’t chemistry. That I confused intensity with intimacy. And that love isn’t supposed to be a fight. Turning the page meant forgiving myself for not knowing better. It meant reclaiming the parts of me I gave away too easily — for the thrill, for the story, for the hope that he’d change.

He didn’t. But I did.

For a long time, I didn’t care. I was in love with being in love. That same hunger followed me into music — especially with the people who claimed they wanted to “help” me.

I remember the first time I ever stood in front of a recording microphone. My best friend’s boyfriend was an aspiring producer. We started making music together. He was a 23-year-old Korean man living in his mom’s backhouse — pillows stuffed into the window sills to block the sun out. The air in there was suffocating. It smelled like sweat, old weed, and days that blurred into each other. Ashtrays overflowing. Laptop always open. Speakers always on. The same song looping for hours until it stopped meaning anything. He bounced between extremes — euphoric one moment, reckless the next — and was addicted to cocaine and our company.

I remember one time he punched the glass bookcase in his room. My best friend called me crying, panicked, so I showed up. The floor was covered in protein powder, shattered glass, and blood. We spent the whole afternoon cleaning up his mess — like it was normal.

It was like two teenagers running a rehab.

Eventually, my best friend moved five hours away for college — partly to escape him — and left me in the thick of it. But I stayed, because I loved making music. I stayed even when he drunkenly set himself on fire at a bar and called me before going to the hospital. He scared me by saying he was burned everywhere. I never hesitated to drop what I was doing to make sure he was okay.

When I got to the hospital, the nurses kicked him outside and told me he was fine — just extremely drunk, with a few scratches.

But my night was burnt.

He was just unaware. And I’ve always felt deeply for people who were all over the place — because so was I.

I filled every moment with someone or something to avoid sitting with the weight of my own poor decisions. I told myself I was being loyal. That I was building something meaningful. But the truth is, I was addicted to chaos in a different costume. I thought pain meant purpose. I thought if I kept proving I was good enough, someone would finally choose me back.

But turning the page doesn’t just mean leaving people behind — it means leaving behind the part of you that needed their approval in the first place.

That’s the hardest part of turning: you have to forget the person you were long enough to become the person you are.

And when I started to do that—really do that—I began to find my voice. And I’ve learned that I am allowed to begin again, as many times as I need.