Orion’s World

I find myself introspectively looking inward and questioning the meaning of absolutely everything. And sitting with Orion and hearing her speak about life from her point of view was an eye-opening conversation nonetheless. We empaths exist and creation is the best form of cathartic release.

Hi! How are you?

I'm excited, I'm fully still in Georgia in my teenage bedroom, so love that.

Oh my God. I feel like that's super nice though. For me, I'm super nostalgic.

Fully, the nostalgia has eaten away at any remaining sensible thing in my brain these days. I've just been crying all week thinking about growing up. Basically. I came home today and my mom got me flowers and it was just so sweet because last night I was a mess. It was horrible.

How often do you visit home?

I think twice, three times a year. I have a niece and nephew who live with my mom, so I'm really realizing now that I think the passing of time just never really occurred to me until recently looking at old videos of them. I'm like, “Oh my God, they're teenagers now. It's so painful to see this passing of time with them.” I get really emotional over it.

I feel like because you're traveling and living away, it's nice when you get to go home and you get to see everybody growing up, especially yourself.

I think it's so easy to be selfish and think about yourself growing up, and I don't think I ever really thought about seeing everyone growing up as a sad thing until recently. It's definitely time to start seeking an existential therapist because it is not fun to have the negative thoughts filter in through good moments that I'm having in current time.

Yeah. Sometimes I just stop and think about how those happy moments are fleeting. They just happen so quickly and I wish I could have lived in them a little bit longer. But yeah, let's just jump into it. What kind of space are you in now?

Right now? It's very melancholic. I think as an individual, a happy person in life, it couldn't be better, and I'm very grateful for the life that I have. But I have been genuinely overtaken by this wave of nostalgia that I think I used to view as a writing tool. Or something that was really beautiful that I could step back and look at and know in the moments that are happening that it will be a special moment. But recently it's felt more like a problem rather than a gift. And I've only come to terms with that in the past two days because as much as I appreciate being a sensitive person in that aspect, I think it sometimes feels like it does more harm than good.

I feel like so much of it takes me away from the great moment that I'm having. And all I could think about is, for example, the other day, me and my whole family drove up to the North Georgia Mountains. My stepdad was driving his pickup truck and my niece, my nephew, and I were all in the back of the truck in the bed, and it was this beautiful moment just seeing them. My niece was eating watermelon, and my nephew ripped his shirt off, and I'm just observing these two gentle children in front of me, and I was so upset that I had left my video camera at home. I really wanted to just capture this moment. And so my brain would go from, "Oh, it's fine next summer, they'll still be kids. We'll do this again next summer." And then I'm overtaken by the thought of, "Well, what if something happens between now and next summer and we can't have this moment again?" So I think I'm robbing myself of having a good time because I'm thinking of the potential of not having a time as great as this again.

Do you find that there's beauty in just living in a moment and not having to capture it? Or do you think that you need to capture a moment so you can look back on it nostalgically?

It's so funny because lately I haven't been capturing things even with having a job that pretty much lives online. I find myself being so poor at it because I'm like, damn, I just lived a whole great day and I didn't document one thing about it. And that thought came from realizing a couple days ago, my niece is now 12, and it never occurred to me that I shared so many moments with her as a child that she wouldn't remember. So there's a part where I was just like, "How dare you? Am I nothing to you?" But of course she's not going to remember anything. So we were going through my phone and I was showing her, do you remember this?

I realized how little I had, I didn't have very much. And so that was then fast forward to a couple days ago where I'm like, “Oh God, I should be capturing this moment because I let myself live too much without having any evidence of it other than stories, which really is all that is important to me.” These past few days I've just realized how much I really do value photographs and in a way that I think I just viewed it as capturing slivers of moments that felt maybe curated, but now I regret not capturing more. I feel like I am very proud that I got to live deeply in whatever moments I'm reminiscing on. So I guess maybe to answer your question, it doesn't feel like a need to, but now especially I think with my existential thoughts it feels like I need to now in retrospect.

No, it's definitely a valid thought. I feel like especially as we're getting older and the babies in our lives are not babies anymore.

Totally.

So you're coming out with a new zine, right?

Yeah, it is aimed to come out in the fall, and it is just a one-off. I think when I say zine, it's very easy. I feel like I'm overexplaining myself because it's not a series of things. It's been a while since I've released a book and it's always so fun to connect with the readers. So last summer I was talking to my best friend Enya, and I was like, I have all of these photographs everywhere I go. I always take photos of the beds that I sleep in, whether it's at a friend's house or really anywhere. I just had a collection of all of these beds and I didn't know what to do with all of these photos, so I threw the idea of maybe I should just post this all on a blog or somewhere. And my best friend was like, "Why don't you compile it into some sort of book? You've been working towards something and here's the one thing that you should do." And so yeah, I'm releasing a zine called Beds I've Slept In. It's about capturing these mundane moments in my life that are special in some way. The bed doesn't seem like much, but I feel like that's where you're the most intimate, and I don't even mean sexually, I truly mean just as an individual.

Just even being vulnerable too.

Pillow talk right then and there. It's all in the word.

So I've read your past work before, and I think that you have such an incredible way of describing the mundane to life with your word choice. And I don't know, you bring life to those things that people might just overlook. Would you say that this new zine is going to have your writing alongside or is it just photos?

I think it will. It would feel cruel to not add any writing in it, mostly because I would never call myself a photographer. So it's almost necessary to have a piece of writing. And I've written a few things and I think it's really about deciding the length of how much time I want to take from people.

How similar or different is it to what you’ve released so far?

Definitely different in terms of the capacity of it. But in terms of sensibility it's very much the same. I think it's similar to Film For Her, it's photos and not so much about the quality of a photo because there are iPhone photos in there, not everything's taken on film. So it's kind of like these snapshots of the years of my life and I got. I think the similarities in Film For Her is I feel like this is unintentionally been something that I've been working on for over a decade. I'm opening the book with these photographs that I found that I've taken throughout the years, and it was a span of every two years of me sitting in my bed at the time. So I have a Polaroid of me sitting in my childhood room at 16, I have one at 18, I have one at 22. And for no reason did I take these photos other than I guess to just document that. But in making this, it was really special to go through the archive and use these photos that I didn't think would amount to any use.

I think it'll be really beautiful. When it comes to your work, especially with Film For Her and Beds I've Slept In coming out, you do a great job at pairing your photos with your words. So which one comes first?

The ethos of Film For Her was always that the photographs came first. It was birthed through the concept of everything that I release just kind of happens to me. And I think that's why there is no third book right now because I'm waiting for something to happen, something to appear. And Film For Her appeared in the sense where I got my hands on my first film camera and was very cautious about taking these 36 photos because it costs money to take a photo and it costs money to see the photo. By the time I got the rollback, everything was so boring and I was so disappointed at myself that every photo I took felt like it amounted to nothing. I guess I quickly realized that, of course they amounted to nothing now, but in those moments, a photo of a sidewalk or a picture of a friend holding a balloon or whatever it may be, was more about the moment that was being had rather than the photo that was being taken.

And so with Film For Her, the photos came first and it was really fun going through these years of photographs. It wasn't about choosing a photo that will look really good in a book, it was really just looking at the screen in front of me and seeing everything and remembering what times or what memory had come up from whatever photo was in front of my face. So definitely photos come first. And I think the same with Beds I've Slept In. Photos just happen to be there and I get to do something with it, which is really exciting.

It'll be exciting to see. I just want to touch further upon where you mentioned that a third book hasn't come out yet because nothing has happened. Do you find that as an artist, a writer, a poet, creative that something has to happen? Or are you somebody that can find creativity in the nothingness?

I think a little bit of both. I've always tried to make sure now that writing has become a job for me, whereas it was once not a job. And I think the only way for me to keep that sacred to myself is to allow it to come to me. Whereas it would be great to be the writer who's releasing a book every year, and I know so many who do and they're great. I think that they could tap into something that I just can't tap into. And so I think really both my enemy and hero here is the passing of time. And I will say I think this summer has felt extremely eye-opening to me and it almost feels like there is something happening, but it doesn't need to be something as big as a breakup or a life change.

It's more so this bewildering mix of discovering who I am because with every month that passes, you're like, "God damn, I didn't know this about myself and I've been living in this body for who knows how long." And it's kind of exciting despite how terrifying it is, learning more about yourself. I am not waiting for a big thing to happen, but I'm waiting for new thoughts to transpire or at least a space to make sense of the thoughts that I have more or less.

Do you find the process of how you write now different from when you first started writing? Now that it has become a job for you whereas before it could simply be a cathartic release of emotions.

I mean more no than yes. I think it's really easy to get in your head and read reviews or get in the brain of the readers. And while that is important to me, and I do actually appreciate a lot of the constructive criticism, I don't think I would be anywhere without it because you could think that you're great, but many of people could be like, this is a little amateur and could be a bit better, which is totally valid. I'm growing and I think that I need to hear those things I guess. But no, that is probably the only sensible thing about myself is that I've managed to continue looking at writing as something that's entirely mine until it's released to everyone else and then it belongs to everyone else. Otherwise, I feel like anytime I've tried to just write and for the sake of having something new for other people to read, I almost always look back and I hate what I've written because it felt like it came from a place of somebody else's desire to see something rather than my desire to show myself for it.

I wish for myself I could be one of those writers that can just sit down and write something. But most of the time it comes from heavy places of emotion and things just really happening to me to get those words to flow out. Yeah, I think I am also extremely guilty of that. I think last year or the year before I went to see Patti Smith, she released A Book of Days and she did a little concert and book reading and she said something that I already knew was important, but I feel like it took really hearing her say out of her mouth for me to understand the importance of it. And that's just to write every day, even if you have nothing to write about. And the past two, three years I went from writing in my journal every single day to being very on and off about it. I could go weeks without writing anything just for the hell of it. And I think that's mostly due to the fact that I've grown such a close relationship with my friends. So everything that's in here will immediately go to them instead of resorting to a journal, which as it always has. But I feel like I'm getting back in touch with my teenage self in terms of making sure that I write every day.

I feel like oftentimes too, a lot of the times with mixed media and photography the visuals are captured, but not so much of what you're actually thinking about in those moments.

One hundred percent. And it's so funny too, I think my mom had found an old middle school journal and I was reading it the other day and it was so funny. Just the jots of us talking about a substitute teacher or some boy in my class, which I would have never thought of today had I not read that piece of writing. So I feel like I owe it to 50 year old me to be as honest at 26.

What were some of your earliest memories when it comes to your writing?

I remember the earliest memory I have of writing ever. I used to keep a diary on me as a child, and I just have this vision of me sitting in my room in a kind of fetal position. I don't remember being sad, but I remember writing in this diary, and I don't know what I was writing about, but my brain wants to go to who I saw myself in the future. And I swear I saw myself marrying a man with blonde hair and blue eyes, and it was this fantasy that I'd always write about. It was ridiculous, but I think you're allowed to be ridiculous as a little kid. I noticed how much I became attentive in class when it was literature class, and I think it was like the fourth or fifth grade is when you start learning about poetry.

And I remember having a really good time with that. And you get to high school and then you start really reading the classics and you have more creative freedom to write about what you're feeling rather than a Cat in the Hat poem. God, I was so in love with my literature teacher in class, and that was really when I felt like that I found something that worked for me. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know anything, but I knew that writing felt good. And of course, this is the age of Tumblr, and I have this space where no one knows who I am online, and I can just throw it all in there. I was probably 16 reading Sylvia Plath for the first time, and I'm like, "oh my God, this is everything."

This is so not like anyone I knew. I grew up in a super hillbilly redneck town where I can't even think of one person on the top of my head that had a love for writing. So it almost felt like I was living a double life where I was trying to keep up with this, whatever the zeitgeist is at the time. I wouldn't say popular in school, but trying to fit in while also writing and posting these things online where people who don't know me see a much more sensitive side of who I am rather than this goofy side that I'm showing to my classmates. And from there on out, I knew immediately, I knew when I was 17 that I wanted to write a book, but I don't even think I actually thought it was possible. I know that I wanted to do it, but I didn't think that I could actually do it.

You assume that you'd have to be really into the world of academia and have a college degree to write a book. I had no idea what the process of all of that was. So I was working towards my first book and I was like, I guess I'll self-publish this. I don't know what else to do. And everything just kind of snowballed from there on out. I'm really lucky that I get to do what I love. But I don't think I knew that it would kind of go this far if I'm being honest. I probably didn't think it would at all.

Is there a place you go to when looking for inspiration?

Away from anyone I know. I mean, actually, no. I don't think I go anywhere looking for inspiration. I think I found what works for me is the mundane, and seeking that in an everyday scenario is really easy. It just feels like I let life happen to me and I figure out what to do with it. But in terms of writing, I say getting away from anyone I know because I'm so easily distracted and I need to be alone in order to write.

Last question I have is: would you rather relive your happiest memory or forever erase your worst one?

Probably relive my happiest memory. There's this movie called Afterlife, and the concept is that you have all these people who've died and they get sent to a waiting room, and in this waiting room there's somebody across from them saying, you have three days to figure out what your best memory while you were alive was. And then we'll record that memory for you and you'll get to watch in front of you and then you'll pass over to the next life. You had some people who were like, "I didn't have a happy life. I have no happy memories." There were other people who were like, "oh God, how could I choose?" I had so many, and I would like to believe that that would be a beautiful way to take one's final breath and leave this earth. And I think it would be unfair to erase your worst one because without knowing, I think there is no good without experiencing bad. You wouldn't know how good something feels if you didn't know how devastating something once felt to you.