charleeremitz

Week 4 of the Making of Unnamed Album - January (Songs finished: 3)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:37:07 GMT

Otherwise known as the week of the Southeastern Freeze.

I think many would agree there’s a certain symbiosis between nature and the general, personified tone of human life. The freeze was jarring. It seemed to come out of nowhere. I was piloting my rental car off the ferry from Ocracoke, moving through a heavy fog along the liminal space

between the dock and Cape Hatteras, when my co-producer, Lawrence, texted:

"I don’t know if you saw but we’ve got perhaps this huge snowstorm this weekend so plan accordingly!"

The weather, these days, was jarring. As was going online at any given moment. And then there was this: I sat on the leather couch in my Airbnb a few days later, discussing my music with a potential collaborator on Google Meets, who said she hoped I would consider integrating Blue Monkey and Charlee Remitz a bit more, as Charlee Remitz’s social media had, since September 2025, generated a large swath of followers.

It occurred to me right then that she was right. My mother had said something similar ahead of this trip, which would kick off six months of nearly non-stop travel while I attempted to finish the album and see another 200 lighthouses. “Is there something we could do to make your life ten percent easier?”

There was. And, like all else these days, it was a jarring realization.

Then again, that’s how most things seem when you’ve failed to pay attention to the less urgent signs that precede desperation. The universe is always having conversations with us; we just haven’t learned to listen. First, I’d had a falling out with my band. Then, my beloved visual collaborator moved out of state. And finally, there was the absolute dread I felt at composing a post for Blue Monkey’s Instagram page.

At a certain point, Charlee Remitz and Blue Monkey felt like they were on a level playing field in that area. Both had something to say.

And then, quite suddenly, one had more to say and more metaphorical mouths to feed.

There is tremendous responsibility in having and maintaining an audience, whether it be in person or online. I kept telling myself as the album neared completion, I’d find a lust for Blue Monkey’s social media once again. I’d find some pocket of energy I wasn’t already using to shape Blue Monkey’s page. The only thing was, Charlee Remitz’s sudden uptick in online popularity felt partially divined. There was no protocol to follow and no miraculous, undiscovered pocket of energy from which I could pull. I was using every ounce of my allotted cup to see lighthouses, maintain Charlee Remitz’s online presence, and record a 14-song, full length album. Whatever was left over I held in reserve for workouts, nourishment and the upkeep

of personal relationships.

In this life, little is worth the compromise of your body, spirit, community or mind.

And so, it was halfway through this fourth week in the studio that I announced to Lawrence, as we sat chatting in his dining room, with the sun pouring in through the windows and a cold brew on the table before me, that I would release this album as Charlee Remitz.

I can’t quite remember his reaction. I think it was a little awed.

And then, the freeze came. First it hit Nashville, where my partner, at our townhouse on the west side, lost heat for two weeks, and power for six days.

Then, it came to Richmond, where I prepared my Airbnb as best as I could without spending money on emergency supplies. I stocked the empty cabinet with boxed mac n cheese, and the empty fridge with vegetables and containers of shredded chicken. I asked Tatiana, the owner, if

she’d stock me up with extra toilet paper and paper towels, in case things got really dire. And then, I drove to the studio like any other day.

Lawrence and I tried to negotiate studio time with the weather, to limit my exposure to a city with a few odd snowplows keeping hundreds of roads passable. In sessions past, we had a system: two days per song, and one wrap day where we ironed out the creases. For a three-song

week, that meant seven days. For a two-song week, five. And so far, we had been deeply prolific.

We had a measure of earned delusion when it came to studio time by January. We really believed in our ability to make art on a timeline. Even with the snow, and the oncoming freezing rain, we refused to deviate from the plan. I found myself on back-to-back days, driving at a snail’s pace from one side of the city to the other, simply so we could stick to the schedule we’d laid out for ourselves. There was a sense of, “I’ll get this album done if it’s the death of me,” pushing me forward as I passed people sliding in the snow, their tires struggling for purchase.

On my one day off, when a sheet of hard-packed snow had laid itself over the city in a way that seemed to wipe every slate clean, I wandered the still, quiet streets as golden hour turned blue. A movie about a married couple separating, finding themselves, and then coming back together again was showing at the Byrd Theater. I purchased a ticket and an IPA, and I settled myself in the middle of the mostly empty theater, laying out my jacket so it could dry from the wintry mix.

Watching that great push and pull was the first time in a long while I’d felt any kind of hope. I thought of this couple as a great reflection of Charlee Remitz and Blue Monkey. There was a crucial separation that needed to occur for me to come back to Charlee Remitz, nearly six years after quitting music in that capacity in the first place. I needed to become someone else, be something else, to give Charlee Remitz a second to breathe. To rest. To dream without the years of music I’d already created dragging along behind her like noisy cans.

I’ve taken to referring to Blue Monkey as my Disney Channel Deviation. Many of us watched as our favorite Disney Channel stars, feeling shackled to a certain image, took a bold right turn and did something so dramatic that it shocked people into submission. This was Miley Cyrus now: on her wrecking ball. This was Charlee Remitz in 2024: Blue Monkey.

I’d had all these rules about Blue Monkey’s album when I wrote and recorded it in 2020. It couldn’t be pop. It couldn’t have too many electronic sounds. It needed to be folk. It needed a banjo and a mandolin. A harmonica. It needed to drive one thing home: I was not Charlee Remitz anymore.

When I think of it now, I recognize part of this need to disappear into Blue Monkey as an aversion to who Charlee Remitz had become. She felt like a dead end. Where I saw happenstance and luck and viability in other music careers, Charlee Remitz felt like she’d come by her very flat and lifeless story by effort and effort alone. It was messy and tiring, and certainly it wasn’t meant to be because nothing was happening.

I remember completing my final album, Heaven’s a Scary Place like I was running the last leg of a cross-country sprint. I was absolutely, certifiably done with Charlee Remitz and everything she’d become by that point. I couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

And so, I got rid of her. Well, that version of her at least.

That was when I found the lighthouses. Or maybe they found me. I’m not really sure who did the finding, but certainly I’ve done the keeping. And, now here we are, five years later, in love as ever before. I moved across the country with my partner. I wrote songs on a guitar that I had no intention of ever actually recording. I went on solo dates. I did things because I wanted to do things. And, eventually, somewhere in that gentleness of pursuit just because, Charlee Remitz became viable again.

Sometimes I think of this as a plant sitting dormant for years starting to sprout new leaves. In fact, in just the last year, my pink Anthurium grew a lily, something I never thought I’d see again, for the first time in years. It was just like that. Charlee Remitz felt possible again. I just needed some space and time away from what wasn’t working so I could find the confidence to not care if it ever did. So, here’s my art. I don’t give a shit if it resonates with you. Because it resonates with me.

Really, what it cracks down to is this: I was not ready then. I was not confident in who I was or what I had to say. I was embarrassed to talk about my music because I couldn’t separate my worth from the concept of streams. I was too attached to the aesthetics of my social media rather than the impact of having a platform to advocate. Now, the music is less definitive and more whimsical. One small part of the mass of projects I’m constantly watering that make me me.

Back then, the music needed to do something for me, which is why I was constantly disappointed. Now, the music just needs to be. And I with it. From a young age, my mother taught me to believe in timing, that when things aren’t working out… it doesn’t mean they never will.

So, here we go again. “Paranoid”, Charlee Remitz’s first single in six years, is out May 29th .

Find out more here.

Week 3 of the Making of Unnamed Album - November (Songs finished: 2)

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 23:39:10 GMT

It was my third trek to Richmond and, by this point, I was a local.

I had all my favorite spots. The health food store where I got a green smoothie every morning. The restaurant, where I found myself sat at the bar catching up with a bartender, who, during my first visit, timidly mentioned his wife was pregnant, during my second visit, was a man in wait, and during my third visit, was a first-time father. The take-out places I trusted for something good and quick, like a poké bowl or a plate of decidedly interesting yet highly addictive Greek nachos.

The only problem was, this time around, Richmond was all but folding in on itself.

It seemed to me every road was under construction. And, certainly, the ones I planned to be on. I’d find my way across town to the studio using one back street or another, just to wake up the following morning to find the maze from the day before was wiped clean. I’d drive to a workout class in a part of town I could only describe as detached and quiet, only to discover it too was plagued by construction, barring cars from every necessary on-ramp. And, to make matters more personal, the poké place, which I relied on for a late-night meal, closed on a random Tuesday for a wedding, leaving me to sit murderously in my car staring at that handwritten sign taped to their door like it was a lecture handed down from the Goddess herself.

It was my quickest planned jaunt in the studio so far, and perhaps that was for the best.

I’d picked songs I thought of as accessible and uncomplicated. They were songs I’d written long, long ago, when Blue Monkey wasn’t even on the list of monikers I was considering for a potential rebrand. I remember playing demos of the songs for my partner in a parking garage across the street from Hollywood Forever. We sat side-by-side in my tiny Mini Cooper, listening, before carrying a vegan cheeseboard from Fromage into the cemetery, eating it in the dark with a narrow view of The Wizard of Oz.

That was a perfect night in a very uncomplicated time of my life. It was that prized moment in every nubile relationship, when you’re just so infatuated, all the things you reckoned with seemed well-placed. Even if they weren’t. I think that’s why the songs met us in the studio with little fanfare. The arguments were less. The ideas were big and naïve. In one track, I endeavored to use my own breath as a texture of sorts. A parcel of tension.

One day, Lawrence stood at the window watching construction workers put out orange cones, grumbling in his way, which is to say, sometimes he was the epitome of youth, and sometimes he was a little old gentleman in loafers, surveilling his house for ruckus. I remember thinking the construction was like a plague. It had started on my side of town, and it was slowly spreading all over the city.

He was deeply unmoved by this encroachment, if it only served to alert him to the fact that the side of his house, which bordered the street and was technically under his jurisdiction, had accumulated more trash, which he was then custodian of.

We watched Good Will Hunting, Bruce Almighty, and A Beautiful Mind on mute with the subtitles while we recorded vocals and built synths as though layering paint on a printing press. The movies overwhelmed with the errant responsibility to purpose, even as they grappled with themes of free will and gratitude. I think, perhaps there is no better metaphor for the urgency we all experience in our current day-to-day, preparing for Neptune to move into Aries for the first time since the Civil War started in 1861.

Conversely, I felt a lack of urgency about the songs. I was totally uncompromised and stimulated by it. And I can only assume it’s because art serves as transportation from one time to another. The only thing I can say for myself is that when I was first falling in love, I did not demand that I do anything of consequence outside of falling in love. That was my only true labor. I carried on with my days. I made plans to see him or to see friends so I could talk about him. And how special it was to revisit these songs when I’d describe our relationship as mature, and far more abiding than the relationship was when we were preparing for a cross-country move and hadn’t really considered the permanence of it.

In a sense, it felt like I’d written a theory back in 2021, and over the course of four years, I’d simultaneously disproved the theory and expanded upon the theory. Which, if we get right down to it, sums up this question of love quite well. After all, it is a question. More so than I would call it an answer. Should I ever lose my curiosity about it, well then, I’ll know it’s no longer love, it’s just an obligation where love once was.

On our final day, I sat in contemplation, making poorly received suggestions to a Lawrence who was appalled at the proposal of more vocals. And then I was packing my bag. And he was powering his computer down.

“It’s like each song is its own little world,” he said at we made leave. I thought nothing truer could be said. We had agreed that this was not an album being made for any particular reason. It was not going to satisfy the whims of the ordinary listener. There was only the responsibility to purpose to account for it being made. Everything else was just instinct.

And so, I took many detours on my way back to my Airbnb, pleased to know that a song becomes a world when you forget about the world, and stop creating art to fit in it.

Week 2 of the Making of Unnamed Album - October (Songs finished: 3)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:51:10 GMT

After lo these many years of being chronically online, I experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic uptick in online popularity, and I was woefully unprepared for the attentiveness this incident would require of me.

In Week 1’s essay, I discussed what recording new music would mean for my ability to positively engage with my first album, Ageless, and how grinding it to a pulp on social media provided a sort of severance, whereas time would need to elapse before I could appreciate the music for what it was. At present, Ageless feels like a box of tattered rags I don’t have the energy to sift through for non-perishables before donating to some sinister non-profit like Goodwill.

The uptick came party to a sense of excruciating seclusion. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I transitioned an Instagram account I normally reserved for sharing dispassionate, 35mm photos of lighthouses, which I’d taken on my mission to see every lighthouse in the U.S., to controversial, politically-charged reels. Initially, I saw my follower count dip. Mostly, the downward trend came from people from my hometown in Montana, and mostly, I felt like, “Good riddance.” But there was an ineptitude that settled in, taking me back to a point in time when I struggled to relate to my high school classmates, and as a result, became, more or less, hostile towards them and towards the concept of high school itself.

As a result, I, perhaps egotistically determined to build up my follower count (I’ll show you!), let out a battle cry I can’t confidently say belonged to anyone other than my younger self, horribly misunderstood as she was by people she didn’t want to be understood by. But I guess that’s the pathology of social media, high school, and the world at large—if we want to be so impudent.

Whether purely altruistic or not, it worked. In a matter of weeks, my audience quadrupled. I had never felt so visible in the online world. It was a terrifying responsibility.

This all happened as I set out, once again, for Richmond, where I had begun recording my second album in August. I started my trip in a bed and breakfast near Point Lookout on the Chesapeake Bay, and in the three days I spent leading up to the studio, I finished seeing every lighthouse in Maryland. All the while, I churned out as much content as possible to keep the online momentum going. It was an exhausting venture.

By the time I got to the studio, the novelty of my social media pluming had worn off. My hands felt poisoned for all the time I’d spent on my phone liking, responding, and sometimes deleting comments. What was once a mostly manageable and customary addiction to social media felt totally out of control. My brain had gotten so used to this new drug, and I began to fear a time when my social media wasn’t growing like an aggressive cancer.

The studio wasn’t the remedy I hoped. In fact, being that my producer and I tended to trade off contributing to the tracks, there were long periods when he sat at the desk, working, and I was totally out of it, furiously arguing with Facebook bigots I couldn’t even be certain were real people.

I can’t say whether the music suffered because of this mania, but I can say that there was not a single morning I showed up well-rested. I managed to work out, I managed to eat well, I even managed a walk or two. But I was easily frustrated. I lacked the capacity for the mundane road bumps any jaunt in the studio would bring, especially with two minds who understand momentum and rhythm in two completely different ways.

For all intents and purposes, it was just as it was before. I overbought produce at the grocery store I pretended I would cook, I watched comfort movies on the living room TV while I did my skincare, I never got to bed earlier than one AM and I complained about it in my journal. But everything was different. I had been imagining a great movement like this for twelve years, and suddenly it was here.

I was grateful and strung out.

The three songs we chose were inherently political. It was purposeful. The energy I’d gained online would’ve been wasted on the more downtempo songs I’d written about happiness and my relationship. I was furious at the state of things, and the timeliness of that was something to call upon.

We took a break over the weekend. I spent one day watching the Twilight series and the other seeing my 400th U.S. lighthouse, and my final lighthouse in Virginia. In the car to Stingray Point I set up my camera to address my new audience. I told them how relieved I was that fall had arrived. True fall. With its crisp, dry air. I hadn’t realized until that first morning, when the ground looked dewy and the sky was white and cold, how fearsome I’d become of a perpetual, humid hellscape. I told the camera, “As I was sitting there this summer, weathering hot day after hotter day after even hotter day, I realized I’m experiencing my future right now.”

This might seem off topic, but I wanted to offer a look into the artist’s brain as the artist ende avors to create. I was sitting with an enormous amount of panic. I was working in the studio wondering about the end of the world, and how everything I had made would go out with it. I showed up optimistically in sweaters and winter coats, only to step out in the midday sun and long for short sleeves. I sat at Stella’s bar in conversation with a man who hated AI but was employed by a construction firm in the business of building data centers. There is so much to account for, and I was exhausted by it all, by the mammoth feelings I had and the implausibility of ever being able to sort through them.

I had started to entertain the idea that I may never accomplish everything I want to. I have myriad dormant ideas and projects, so many millions of ways I could imagine expressing myself, and so, only recently, I started to really appreciate the ideas that made their way through the fold. It was a grand triumph to hear these songs in the studio speakers as we speckled them with arpeggiators, drums, and bells. Sitting there in my overwhelm, I understood these works to be representatives of the collective, of all my ideas and hopes, and that what I could do was honor all the music and words that may never make it into the domain by pouring myself into what had as though this album, alone, could set the rest of them free.

I was relieved to wrap these three songs when we did. Our final day in the studio was spent, in part, making up for our first day, which saw me at my most strained. I had suggested an early night so I could go back to my Airbnb and create more content. I did a lot of self-battering that evening. I was there to work, not argue online and fight for a universal understanding between me and people who were unreachable, and especially in the comment section of some silly post that had “broken through.” Over the next few days, I tried to be gentle, to remind myself that it was okay to be a little caught up in the hysteria. Eventually, this would become a normal part of life, and I would cease to be this impacted.

My final morning, I managed a walk to the coffee shop before driving to the airport in D.C. I was lax as I drove along the highways, through the trees, and eventually the Potomac River. It was a beautiful, wintry day.

Week 1 of the Making of Unnamed Album – August (songs finished: 3)

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:58:25 GMT

When I was considering a second album, I felt totally shackled to my first album, like I owed it to Ageless to pummel it to death on social media until it all but became unrecognizable. The great tragedy of social media is that while your efforts result in listeners, people who are hearing the work for the first time the way it’s meant to be heard—all shiny and new—you’re hearing it for the millionth time. And though some art may resist this pulverization, in general, I think it’s fair to say, even the greatest works are minced by this type of overexposure.

Weeks into the social media push for Ageless, I’d stopped understanding it altogether. These tattered rags couldn’t be the same songs I made on the loom. What was I even singing about? Why did I feel these messages were so urgent? Is it true that I once imagined a great movement around these songs?

This is why artists need distance from their work.

In any case, enough time hadn’t elapsed between releasing my first album and getting started on my second album—that was the consensus. Why was that the consensus? Well, I simply don’t know. It’s interesting how many rules and guidelines we, as creative free spirits, silently abide by. Like there’s this place you’ll be sent if you genre-hop or release an album without at least one conventionally upbeat song. I sometimes think it’s fair to compare building an audience to the snake eating its own tail. The fans I collect with the clever content I make are the same fans I annoy with the clever content I have to keep making. Why any of them stick around is beyond me. This isn’t self-pity. I do know the work is good, but all good things sour in time.

Recording the work, making assets for the work, performing the work—it’s all transactional. And when you don’t make money from it, when it’s just a sunk cost, you feel irresponsible if you don’t then devote yourself to the work like some drafted soldier on the front lines of a war you didn’t start. You’re in it, you decided to put art out in the Age of Aquarius, might as well make it all worth it.

I don’t know how I overcame this compulsion. I guess it could be that I’ve done this before, many years prior. I followed all the rules, and I didn’t “make it” if there was ever such a thing. The textbook didn’t work. Being prim and proper about silly things like timelines, treating artistry like it was mathematical—none of it churned out the abstract results I was looking for.

So, I just decided, to hell with it then.

I know it’s not totally polite to say but, what the fuck? Since when do we feel like we need to be so cheeky about everything? Art is art. Some of it comes pouring out in a wild rush and some of it lingers and annoys and pulls at us while we’re trying to do other things. There is no behemoth as burdensome as the dormant project. I carry many around with me all day long.

What it is is guilt. It’s guilt guilt guilt. I felt guilty going back to the studio so soon. Like I was being selfish. Taking something for my own. Trying to reignite that spark of recognition. Oh, there’s the artist I once knew myself to be. For a while there, I felt like I was nothing more than a fish in a bowl of stale water, swimming in circles, making the rounds. Doing my voyeuristic duty.

The non-artist will never understand the disdain the artist has for their old work when they’re creating new work. When I was really young, and I played my first major show, I remember fans coming up afterwards asking why I hadn’t played some of my biggest songs, which were years old by that point. I feel a bit stupid admitting this, but it hadn’t even occurred to me. I just liked the new music more. I don’t know why I thought my own hits didn’t apply to me. Just a couple weeks ago, when a cousin passed me a potential setlist for Lorde’s Ultrasound World Tour, I was up in arms that “Buzzcut Season”, a song that was, by that point, nearly twelve years old, hadn’t made the cut.

So, there I was, day 1 in the studio in Richmond, creating something new. And, oh, what that meant for Ageless.

I will get over the general repulsion I feel for the old music I’ve ground to dust with my mortar and pestle. Not any time soon. But eventually. And I think that’s why, the night after my first session, I felt a great void opening up in my AirBnB. I sat on the leather couch, looking across the small living room at myself in the mirror, that vacuous tear yawning before me, and all there was was nothing. I was numb. Art does that sometimes. It acts as a severance. I was in the era of Ageless, and then I was not.

I’d written almost all the unnamed second album in my home in Nashville, and a few songs in my old bedroom in Hollywood. The experience of recording away from my little woman duties, my dormant projects, was necessary. As an artist, I’d built up the coveted artist retreat in my mind. A cabin in the Adirondacks, or a chateau in the French countryside. Virginia didn’t quite fit that archetype, but it was other. It was somewhere else. Somewhere new.

I started and ended each day in a little walkup in Carytown. Nobody prepared me for the idleness of my vacant hours, but I will be the first to say how crucial boredom is. Boredom is where the self is confronted in full force. I was unsettled. What better pad to launch from.

My co-producer, Lawrence, and I had worked on Ageless together in an East LA warehouse studio almost exactly five years before. I remember in the days leading up to our reunion that I was nervous it wouldn’t be like it was nearly a half decade ago. And it wasn’t. We still clashed, laughed, and created in the exact same way. But there was a level of polish and abandon to the sound, which we’d timidly poked at in LA. Where Ageless was an experiment, this felt like the result. This felt whole, understood, deliberate.

I don’t know that I’ll find another person I collaborate with in the same way we do. If there was even a hint of reticence on that first day, it was quelled when we wrapped the first song. I sat back on the couch, the space we had to work with nearly tripling from that of the East LA studio, a little mystified by what we had done. That first song was an epic told in four parts. I’d never loved anything I’d made more.

So, of course it should follow that the second song was a test of wills. And the third song was a lesson in scaling back.

Before each session, we sat at his dining room table with his wife. I drank the last of my cold brew, and they made coffee and tea. We talked about whatever—their one glutinous cat, the ridiculous speed limit of the bridges from downtown to the south side, my general disdain of Nashville. And eventually we looked at each other and said, “Well, should we get started?

There was no urgency. And that was the most notable thing during my first week in Richmond.

I can’t say for sure, because I’ll never know for sure, but losing the sense of urgency to get things done as fast as humanly possible felt like the final act of my artistic revolution. I was not interested in pulverizing anything anymore. I could continue to support a culture that rewards quantity over quality, or I could choose to engage with my art in a way that was meaningful to me, that preserved my relationship with the art, so this song that I was so profoundly in love with would never become a song I heard first thing in the morning, when my blood sugar spiked, rousing me from sleep in a fashion that has become typical in modern America.

Artist to Artist: Charlee Remitz Discusses Creative Freedom

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:12:26 GMT

I think artistry, like life, has unique, cyclical timing. We are constantly coming home to ourselves. So, to speak on rebranding as a manifestation of intention rather than instinct feels backwards to me. Dangerous, even. If something of intention can be done, it’s surrender. Surrender to what is. But when we’re told from a young age to do something “meaningful” with our lives, and in a very specific timeframe, going with the flow gets lost in the ideation of sunk cost. Alan Watts calls this a “great panic to […] achieve something,” and in that great panic, there is little space for unparalleled expression.

Life is about gathering information. When we stick with a career or a relationship not because they’re fulfilling but because the idea of starting over sets us back from this imaginary finish line, we miss out on the opportunity to inform our lives with the information our lives give us. It is certainly true that, if you let it, life almost always finds a way. And so, I let life, and Blue Monkey, find a way.

Allow for a Slower Pace

The period of convalescence between releasing my final pop album as Charlee Remitz and my first single as Blue Monkey was the most uncomfortable part of the process for me. I feel I totally misunderstood its purpose, and because of that, I was resistant to it. Knowing what I know now, that that limbo would come to an end, I fear I missed out on the chance to be intentional with rest. To allow for things. For the pace to be slow. For the days to stack up where nothing of consequence was created or destroyed. But I was too panicked. Too pressured to do something swift and seismic. I’d been raised to contribute to society’s machine, and I was relentless in my push towards progress.

You’re Never Late to a Place You Were Meant to Go

The music was fully recorded, mixed, and mastered in 2021, and I spent two years with it in my SoundCloud library in complete denial of the fact that I wasn’t ready to share it. There was a lot of ego in the urgency I felt to disseminate the work. I feared I would lose steam, that I would never put music out again. It wasn’t owed to a primordial need to create, rather, it felt important in my pursuit of prominence. How would I become someone if I resolved to never releasing another song? To me, that seemed like an obvious place to start. First, I set out to understand why I made the art in the first place, then I severed myself from the art’s function. It was only then that I could accept the timing of it all. We talk about late bloomers as though they somehow lost their way, but where I eventually landed is: nobody ever arrives too late to a place they’re meant to go.

So, in 2023, I surrendered. I chose to find purpose in the downtime. Instead of posing a question about where and when, I wondered if perhaps the answer would only find me in the stillness. In the silence. In my peace. There was no Titanic or nuclear event when it finally did, I woke up one day in March of 2024 aware that I had arrived. Looking back on the three years of objective nothingness between 2021 and 2024, I see it for what it was: a gathering of confidence. There was simply no way I could have embodied the moniker Blue Monkey in 2021. I was not ready for the level of self-sacrifice Blue Monkey would demand of me.

Community Over Individualism

There’s an extremely polarizing discussion in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin around creation, and whether a creator would be willing to give up authorship if it was the only way their work, which the world greatly needed, could be published. It’s a troubling thought, but I find more and more that being known is of little significance when the world is drowning.

Blue Monkey believes in community and Charlee Remitz (the musician) believed in individualism. To become Blue Monkey, I had to become extremely angry at the state of things. I had to reject any presence of the self in the work. If it was only to my benefit, there would be no reason for it. This is all to say, Blue Monkey wouldn’t be if I hadn’t given in to the extreme discomfort of idling. If I hadn’t rejected this idea of scarcity, that there isn’t enough for everyone to go around, that time is running out and resources are running thin. I started to believe in a utopia where everyone starves and eats together. It changed my entire mindset around releasing music. I didn’t need this music to do anything for me, rather, I needed to release the music hoping it could do something for all of us. Whatever that means.

So, if there is any advice to reap somewhere in this long, drawn-out explanation of how I got from point A to point B, it is to embrace the times when nothing is obvious, and to allow for things to be confusing. Being in flow means that not everything makes sense all the time. Because we grew up with tangible goals like finals and graduation, we’re always looking for some kind of indicator that we’re on the right path. But there is no right path, there is only movement and stillness.

Visit instagram.com/bluemonkeypresents.

A Different Philosophy: Stress, Progesterone, and the Will to Stay Sex-Positive in a Post-Roe America

charlee779@gmail.com (Charlee Remitz) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 23:35:54 GMT

Every morning, long before I’m ready to greet the day, I wake in a feverish burst due to a quiet strain in my abdomen letting me know I need to pee. At night, that same quiet strain keeps me from falling asleep. Sometimes, I’ll visit the bathroom four or five times in the span of an hour until I’m so delirious, sleep no longer becomes a choice. I was unfamiliar with this symptom of anxiety until I visited an out-of-network doctor at Wellness at Century City, who specializes in hormones.

Prior to the appointment, I found myself in a downpour in St. Tropez. I was wearing a floral dress that flipped up in the ultra-classic, Marilyn Monroe kind of way. My mother and I were drinking red wine beneath an awning on a cobblestone street, and I remember looking at her and saying, “It’s like I don’t know how to enjoy myself.”

Romanticism and privilege aside, this moment is mentionable because of the setting. I’m a writer, and therefore fundamentally lustful towards the act of getting caught in the rain. And even there, in my most ideal setting, I could not figure out how to be happy.

Progesterone, commonly referred to as the “happy hormone,” is vital to maintaining mood.

While my mother indiscreetly secondhand smoked the cigarette at the table adjacent, having divorced cigarettes in the nineties, I listened to the rain beat down and scolded myself for not having a better time. I was a classic subscriber to the kick-yourself-while-you’re-down mentality that fueled America’s GDP, and in times of misery without reason (or so I thought), I gave in to this sinister thought: dying would just be easier.

A year later, when I sat down in Dr. Jessica Cho’s office and she asked me what kind of help I was seeking, I told her I felt “fat and lethargic” despite my regimented diet and guilt-fueled obsession with daily exercise. I wasn’t concerned with happiness at that point. I wasn’t concerned with my period, or fitful sleep, or any of the other unmentionables I had yet to be told were dysfunctional. I was only fixated on the most societally incorrect of my laundry list of issues. Why didn’t I look good? And why didn’t I have enough energy to keep up with modern capitalism?

“Can I feel your wrist?” Dr. Cho asked, almost as if she hadn’t heard me.

Before I could think twice about this response — or lack thereof — I leaned forward, stretching my tattooed arm towards her in a sign of obligation and consent. It was an odd dichotomy: confessing I didn’t identify with mankind’s devotion to medical ignorance by lifting the veil on what I’d been told were normal side effects of womanhood, while also extending my arm in her direction without first asking why. The ferocity of my humanity always dissipated in these types of situations. I didn’t feel at liberty to disagree with a doctor, simply because I didn’t know any better. I needed healthcare, so I willingly entered into a toxic relationship with it at birth.

In 2018, TIME magazine published an article titled “How To Tell If You’re In a Toxic Relationship — And What To Do About It.” Using this article as a barometer, I was able to determine that I was in a toxic relationship with healthcare on the basis that I routinely felt undermined, disrespected, and unsupported, and left most my appointments feeling anxious and unheard. It was no different than the relationship I’d had with my father, where the power was lopsided, and my ignorance was routinely preyed upon. And just as it took resources to escape that relationship, it takes resources to ask for second opinions, educate yourself, or seek out alternative medicines. In all other instances — of which there are far too many — you’re at the mercy of an industry that has more in common with an autobody shop than anything else.

To think any field, however altruistic its roots, wasn’t totally in it for financial gain would be terribly green. In Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short, Dr. Mike Burry discusses the importance of incentives, and how hospitals with higher reimbursement rates for appendectomies removed more appendixes. On the sidewalk outside the Regal Theater in Opry Mills, a friend told me she got her pap smears at the Tennessee Department of Health before she was insured, and her results almost always came back as “abnormal.” This resulted in referrals to specialists she couldn’t afford and bi-annual visits to monitor, despite never receiving any concrete answers as to what exactly was yielding these supposed abnormalities. The health department was playing ping-pong with her pap smear results and inducing health-related panic to — in her opinion — squeeze as much money out of her as they could. When she finally got health insurance and was able to handpick her gynecologist, she never had an alarming pap smear again.

It was a recollection like this, shared without emphasis, popping up mid-conversation like a random restaurant recommendation or stunt abroad, that reminded me that healthcare owned me. Doctors owned me. Even Dr. Cho — in effect, one of the “good guys,” — owned me. She took my arm in her cold, delicate hands, bowed her head, nodded a few times, grunted in surprise at others, and then thanked me. In the thirty seconds we were quietly conjoined, adjusting the masks over our mouths, she was able to divine, from simply feeling the meridians in my body, that I was catastrophically stressed.

“Even sitting here,” she observed, “the image of calm. Your heart is racing.”

We all have events in our lives that sever our ties to Western theories of justice. Events that separate our years into two parts: before the event, and after the event, whereas the event propels you into a reality where your understanding of fairness in the world is completely shattered.

This was one such event for me.

For my entire life, I had been told, or it had been implied, that my fatness was my fault. Identity, for me, was synonymous with weight. I was a girl first, straight second, and big third. Moreover, an unspoken truth I’d been forced to adopt after a particularly demoralizing pity party in my late teens was that I didn’t try hard enough to be skinny. Dr. Cho conjectured that my weight could be traced back to the moment my mother and father came together in a series of heavy breaths and muscles spasms. When one sperm rendezvoused with one egg, and eventually became me.

This is not an outspoken battle cry of predeterminism from a devoted member of the woo-woo sisterhood, this is the lament of a misunderstood woman: you can inherit stress, and stress, in a roundabout way, makes you fat.

Finding out my weight could be explained by something other than my own shortcomings fast-tracked me to a new reality where my upper middle-class parents had had all the resources in the world to investigate my childhood weight gain further, but instead, due to an emerging marketplace that profited off the stigmatization of plus-sized peoples, assumed my inability to lose weight was my fault. Suddenly, the constant cries of “nobody understands me!” after fitful middle school sleepovers, during which I relentlessly interrogated my cohorts for some kind of indication that my anxious preoccupation with dying was normal, became less unreasonable and just sad.

In times of high stress, during long stretches of chronic stress, when your identity seems to be the ironic side plot and your anxiety the uncompromising main character, or even when anxiety is just an undercurrent to daily life, your adrenal glands produce cortisol, the main stress hormone. In moderation, cortisol helps regulate your blood pressure and increases inflammation to protect you from infection. When you’re in danger, it causes a spike in blood sugar, which gives you a quick boost of energy should you need to physically escape and restores balance thereafter. “Danger” used in this instance is more of an abstract term. Many situations your body registers as dangerous may appear characteristically undangerous to you. To the Sympathetic Nervous System, famous for triggering “fight or flight” mode, all stresses, both evident and obscure, are treated as equal, and experienced chronically, these stresses can lead to an excess in cortisol.

Aside from the obvious — unrelenting work-related pressure, a recent life event like a move or the loss of a loved one, anxiety disorders, or any stressful experience that is less episodic and more continual — silent killers like poor self-esteem and excessive screentime are also prima benefactors for the overabundance of cortisol. “Doomscrolling” and “trauma porn,” cutesy terms coined in recent years to describe the widespread obsession with, and exposure to, negative, hysterical media, incite feelings of dysphoria and are often seen as unavoidable. It’s a privilege to feel left out, and that privilege is capitalized on by social media platforms with algorithms that award the young and restless and promote the go-go-go attitude and compulsion to earn sleep that leaves us feeling overworked, drained and — ultimately — stressed.

I was newly eager to unload onto Dr. Cho, hoping every other hard truth I’d come by in my life could likewise be explained. I told her I was an anxious child. I became fixated on the afterlife in third grade, and often cried myself to sleep over the vagueness of death. I told her I gained sympathy weight with my mother in middle school when she was diagnosed with carbon monoxide poisoning. I told her I first became aware of my fatness when I heard my father whispering to my mother through a closed door that “something needs to be done about her weight.”

She nodded as I spoke. In truth, she reminded me of a mad scientist — mad because she was giving women, and people with female reproductive organs, answers. And after I’d finished my long-winded monologue about how bad I’d had it in a totally non-unique way, she said of two things she was fairly certain: I’d inherited stress from one, or both, of my parents, and I had a progesterone deficiency dating back to puberty.

But she wasn’t done yet. There were gaps in my soliloquy she wanted to fill. Gaps I hadn’t thought to mention due to societal influence, where the standard is overworking and women’s issues are taboo.

She asked me if I gained copious amounts of weight before my period. I remember feeling almost taken aback by that question. Violated. How could she know this intimate detail about me I’d barely acknowledged myself?

I nodded.

“So, in essence,” she said, “you look ugly for half the month.”

I wanted to scream, yes, yes, that’s absolutely correct! You see!

She asked me how many times I woke up in the night.

“Nine or ten,” I responded. “To pee.”

Thinking back, it seems absurd I thought waking up almost a dozen times in the night was normal. But the world had begun mirroring a sort of absurd theater by that time and I genuinely didn’t know any better. I was aware that a persistent need to pee could be related to stress, but I didn’t know it could extend into the night. I was asleep — in essence, hitting pause on my stress and resuming it again the next day. I blamed the innumerable nightly interruptions on late-night consumption, or too much sugar intake throughout the day. In actuality, the involuntary act of tensing up and squeezing my bladder was a by-product of anxiety, and at 25, Dr. Cho said I should be able to drink a whole bottle of wine right before bed, eat like a growing boy, and still sleep through the night.

I was dumbfounded.

She asked me if I had ever been successful losing weight. I told her between the ages of 20 and 22 I’d managed to lose 40 pounds before hitting a plateau. A year later, I went through a breakup and learned the secret to getting to the other side of that plateau was to stop eating. It was the one time I’d been able to hit the ideal weight for a 5’8” female, according to the CDC and, to this day, the plainness of that injustice has never stopped bothering me.

This all gave Dr. Cho pause. She looked at me, really looked at me, like I was a bit of an oversharer, but an oversharer who’d accomplished the impossible. Assumedly, I had an overabundance of cortisol in my body, given that I’d been in fight or flight mode since I was a kid. Assumedly, that had led to estrogen dominance in my hormones. Assumedly, that was why I complained of cravings, water retention, and a slower metabolic rate. And assumedly, all that came together to make losing weight hopeless for me.

There is a long explanation for the synergistic relationship between cortisol and progesterone, but to be brief, when the body is stressed, it uses progesterone to create cortisol. This meant that “the happy hormone” I needed to maintain my mood and regulate my period was being whacked out by the stress I had possibly inherited from my parents and the anxiety I felt about things I couldn’t control. Like my weight, like my career, like the world at large making choices for me I challenge.

She sent me down the hall to a room with all the traditional doctor’s office things: a bed lined with paper that tore if you breathed too close to it, jars filled with popsicle sticks that had me salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs, and art that was dull and unmemorable. A few minutes passed. I looked out the window at Los Angeles in the bored way of Angelenos who’d tired of perfect weather. A nurse, juggling three or four small glass tubes, entered the exam room. After a brief questionnaire, she began filling the vials with my blood. She was fervent that we weren’t running tests because we were looking for something. Dr. Cho had seen this a million times before. Misunderstood women and people with female reproductive systems were her niche, and I was another of the collective whose denial Judith Grisel would say is strange. We were running tests for proof, so she could confirm that what she already knew was wrong was, indeed, wrong.

On the drive home, I was enraged.

I had been told my entire life that I was fat. That despite fad diets like Ideal Protein, South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers; despite the small case of workout bulimia I’d developed my junior year of high school; despite the doctors who’d tinkered with my thyroid and naturopaths who’d given me strange supplements that looked like powdered eggs and never dissolved in water like they said they would; despite every futile and grand effort I had made, it was my fault that I was fat.

And that was the moment I realized the world was hellbent on keeping women in chains.

Suddenly, I was the one family member at Christmas dinner who had been to therapy. The ignorant girlfriend who was now in possession of some damning text messages. I was wide awake, and our grand suffering was inescapable. At dinners, at concerts, in Ubers, at bars, on the beach, on my couch, god damn everywhere, I listened to what had become so systematically and usually discussed in my friend group, but for which I could no longer write off as normal: late periods, missed periods, lethargy, fitful sleep, mood swings, back pain, irritability, PMS, weight gain, yeast infections and on, and on, and on. It only served to infuriate me further that each time I asked if they’d had their hormones checked, not a single one of them could even say they had thought to.

Unless you’re going through menopause, struggling to conceive, or specifically ask, your hormones will not be prioritized during your routine physical. Common check-ups will be a vague overview of general health and delving deeper without cause will only be covered by your insurance as a preventative visit… if you’re lucky.

Following a brief discussion about the general negligence of Western medicine as it relates to premature birth rates, saving technologies, and racial disparity, a doctor of homeopathy named Marnie Reasor told me she’d experienced suicidal thoughts in her twenties she believed were linked to her hormones. While the intuitive powers of women have long been overlooked, her doctors agreed to test her blood for any discrepancies. Her results came back normal, not because her hormones were balanced, but because they’d failed to carry out the test during the mid-luteal phase of her period, which is five to seven days after ovulation occurs when our sex hormones are at their peak. Testing during the luteal phase is crucial to uncovering any abnormalities, as the luteal phase in and of itself can tell us important things about our hormones. For instance, if your luteal phase ends prematurely, it can be a sign that your body isn’t producing enough progesterone, and progesterone is considered key for healthy conception.

Understanding menstrual cycles seems like a very basic prerequisite to working in health care. In principle, half the people receiving health care have female reproductive organs and tend to weather repeated hearsay objections when asserting their intuition about their bodies. It’s next-level brainwashing disguised as healthcare, where the emphasis is on health and not on care — a notion that is heavily asserted in Dána-Ain Davis’s book, Reproductive Injustice. Thus, these women and people with female reproductive organs will continue to buy the lie that they’re sleeping well, their irregular, painful periods are a simple side effect of having a female reproductive system, their back pain is a symptom of getting older, and their dryness during sex means they’re not turned on enough.

As a collective we have been wholly unprepared by middle school and high school educators who taught us the bare bones of what the government considers to be essential sexual education. According to “Sex: The Taboo Education,” a TEDx Talk given in Bozeman, Montana, where I was raised, sex educators were told to push abstinence first, preventing HIV second. Anything extra fell on the teacher’s own political self-identification and was not a required part of the curriculum.

To Judith Grisel’s point about our collective ignorance, I couldn’t take it any longer. I approached the women and people with female reproductive organs in my life and handed them keys, keys to their personal freedoms, keys that were our birthright, but that had become one more privilege in a world that values saving over prevention. In Billings, expecting pushback from a friend studying to earn her DNP, who works in healthcare and has long touted Western medicine, I was pleasantly surprised to lock eyes with an ally. She smiled at me, piloting our golf cart around a tree in sought of her wayward ball, and said, “If they gave us progesterone and rights, we would take over the world.”

My labs came back in late November of 2020 and served as the evidentiary support for Dr. Cho’s testimony: I was progesterone deficient and genetically predisposed to higher stress levels. My stress hormone state-adrenal fatigue the day of testing was so high, it was almost as if I was in a perpetual state of panic. And I was insulin resistant, a common pathological condition that often goes undiagnosed in women and causes obesity. She packaged these findings up into a petite binder, pushed them across her desk towards me, and ironically called them the “Weight Loss Trifecta,” whereas, the combination of stress, insulin resistance, and estrogen dominance makes it nearly impossible to lose weight, even if I did everything right.

To treat, I was given topical progesterone, a bottle of little chartreuse-colored pills called Synjardy, Ashwagandha in both pill and powder form, and a new mountain to climb: the medical patriarchy.

And climb I did.

I became relentlessly devoted to debunking every lie I had ever been told. I read books like Quit Like a Woman, where Holly Whitaker theorizes that alcohol companies specifically target women; Come as You Are, a revolutionary look into the sex lives of women — what turns us on, what turns us off, and how it’s all normal and okay — and The Will to Change, the first bit of literature I’d held in my hands that truly challenged the definition of the modern-day feminist, a.k.a. man hater.

It was almost a form of self-flagellation — scouring the Internet, looking for ways I had been ill-prepared as a woman to thrive in this world. There were small furies and there were large furies, and perhaps the largest of them all was the link I finally drew between alcohol, caffeine, and the main female sex hormones.

Perhaps I hadn’t paid enough attention in Science class, or perhaps there was a more sinister reason the relationship between hormone regulation and the liver went unmentioned — or without emphasis — while Mesopotamia’s rivers and climate are ingrained in memory like my first hangover. In meme culture, it’s common to criticize high school education for failing to prime teenagers for adult life. But rather than questioning where general health falls in the hierarchy of important subjects, we laugh about “adulting,” doing taxes, and planning for retirement, completely overlooking the liver’s tendency to become overworked, and the chaos that ensues therein.

The term “loaded liver,” refers to a liver so inundated with toxins, it’s no longer able to do its regular job efficiently. It becomes overwhelmed and backloaded with a constant influx of pollutants hiding in plain sight, like air pollution, microplastics, and synthetic additives in our skincare, resulting in an inability to attend to its core duties, like hormone regulation. Getting real about the legitimate consequences of ingesting substances that induce liver toxicity, many of which have been widely exonerated for their profitability, means going up against industries responsible for creating millions of jobs and pulling in trillions of dollars in revenue each year. Industries that thrive on Schadenfreude.

Two liver loaders in our daily lives, alcohol and caffeine, are so commonplace, we often relax into them for their ability to loosen us up and provide us with the energy to “do life.” If your consumption is high and regular, your liver function becomes sluggish, physically manifesting in fatigue, weight gain, cravings, headaches, etc. Even hormonal birth control and popular behind-the-counter medications like Fluconazole, or “Diflucan,” prescribed for yeast infections, are considered liver loaders.

Returning to the conversation I had about the general negligence of Western medicine, I was not told until my third or fourth visit to the Hollywood Walk-in Clinic in Los Angeles specifically seeking Diflucan, to refrain from consuming alcohol while taking the antifungal because it’s notoriously hard on the liver. By that point, they were generously prescribing them to me in multiples of ten, which I was instructed to take once a day until the infection subsided.

As someone suffering from a chronic yeast infection, Diflucan had become something I couldn’t live without, and on no occasions had I been offered an alternative treatment. I felt betrayed and defeated, and it wasn’t until I conducted my own research that I discovered that boric acid suppositories, such as the ones sold by Love Wellness, are a more effective and far less harmful solution to the pH balance in your vagina.

Friends who’ve poked fun at the handfuls of vitamins I take morning and night like to joke that even my vagina takes vitamins.

There wasn’t a single person in my life with female reproductive organs, myself included, who hadn’t been offered birth control by one doctor or another as a cure-all to symptoms like depression, acne, and painful periods, or as a simple introduction into womanhood. In my teens, I remember girlfriends of mine flaunting their birth control around like it was something to be proud of. My uber granola mother, whose spirituality went so far back, she remembers having to find books on meditation in occult bookstores in Minneapolis in the 80s, forbade me from taking this normalized step into female maturity. She had her own reasons, but a friend of hers who’d never been able to conceive strongly believed birth control was to blame. Now, imagining the level of manipulation and brainwashing that goes into pill-pushing, this pride in being on birth control is as absurd to me as the idea I once had that I slept well, despite waking up every hour to use the bathroom in the night.

Fortunately, detoxing from birth control has found support on TikTok and other social media apps. Despite being led to believe in a fall-out of crazy symptoms, many reported their acne getting no worse. Some stopped spotting, some felt more energized and content, and some were relieved from constant bloating.

“Now my suspicions that [birth control] was actually the problem for the last 10 years are pretty much confirmed,” one friend said.

In the two years following my diagnosis, I lost ten pounds, often slept through the night thanks to stress supplements like Ashwagandha and Theanine Serene, and no longer gained an unreasonable amount of weight leading up to my cycle. It was a success story, but one I couldn’t see through to its end owing to the pricey out-of-network visits. At the end of 2021, I relocated to Nashville, and visited an OBGYN named Dr. Anne Rossell for a routine pap smear and breast exam. I told her my story, how I had relocated to Nashville, how the move had been hard on me and my relationship, how a small depression and listlessness had resulted, and how my anxiety had ramped up over the summer. I expected a back-and-forth of sorts, or an acknowledgement of my pain, but Dr. Rossell only wanted to talk about remedies. And remedies, in her experience, were birth control, antidepressants and other mood-stabilizing meds. It was debilitating how wide she cast this net, as though these three things were the only things we, as women and people with female reproductive organs, needed to be caught. And while you’ll never hear me knock meds, because who am I to question what works for one person — what, perhaps, saved another from detriment — you’ll never see me make that leap without exploring less invasive alternatives first.

I made it clear I was disinterested in medication, that I’d found success in talk therapy and leaned on vitamins, minerals, and herbs for anxiety relief. She nodded, and that was that. I was disappointed, having hoped for more insight, and finding instead that she didn’t expand on my research at all. She came to my bedside and began the two-fingered pat-down of my breasts, talking — about what I can’t remember — but in such a way that elucidated how little chemistry we possessed as patient and doctor. I felt newly vulnerable and scared when she’d finished, pulling my gown around me, and spreading my legs so she could examine my pelvis. She continued to talk, and I continued to listen, and near the end, after several pinches, pokes and prods, I expressed my desire to have my hormones tested.

Whatever spell she had been under, whatever notion she had that we were somehow on the same team, seemed to wear off. She told me she didn’t believe in testing my hormones without cause, and that it would be “difficult finding an OBGYN that will test for hormones or supplement progesterone.”

I sat up and asked her why.

As she discarded her gloves, she explained that “progesterone can increase risk of breast cancer,” while progesterone deficiency/estrogen dominance is also known to cause cancer.

“It’s a different philosophy,” she continued, to which I almost responded, “what? Health?”

“Progesterone is a depressant,” she offered by way of explanation. “I tell my patients who take it to be wary of feeling depressed.”

I caught myself before I did something inappropriate, like scream or roll my eyes, her words transporting me back to St. Tropez, to that Marilyn Monroe dress, to perfect circumstances, to a time without progesterone when I couldn’t stabilize my mood, when happiness was ephemeral, and when dying felt easier.

I posed this hypothetical: “Say we do my bloodwork, and you find out that I have no progesterone — you wouldn’t do anything about that?”

“No, because everything else is working just fine. Your period is normal.”

Yet, I had opened my brief life story with an admission of depression and exposed her to my history with progesterone.

I muttered a rather icy goodbye and left her office disillusioned and confused. I questioned the article I was working on day-in and day-out. I questioned Dr. Cho. I questioned everything. And I wondered if she did it all on purpose.

Later on in the day, as I was mopping my sweat after a brief session at a sauna studio near me, I received a phone call from her office, a woman, whose name I didn’t get, but who I assume works at the front desk, notifying me that, “Dr. Rossell had continued to think about your story and would actually like to test on day 3 and day 21 of your cycle.”

I thought about the fight I put up in that room, and how uneducated I was in comparison to her, but how educated I was in comparison to most everyone else. I thought about how many women and people with female reproductive organs had walked through her doors and believed in her different philosophy. And it all filled me wrath. Would it always be this hard? Would only the ones starved for information they sequentially felt responsible for distributing to the masses be able to save us? It was no longer about women and those of us with female reproductive systems. It was about the world at large. It was about Maya Angelou’s assertion that “when you learn, teach.”

On the day the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, I woke in the usual way: I had to pee. I grabbed my phone, sat down on the toilet, and reached between my legs for my Diva Cup, a small bell-shaped, silicone basin that captures menstrual fluid instead of absorbing it, as a tampon would (since writing this article, we now know, on top of all else, tampons are toxic). I’ve found that women are more likely to be repulsed by the concept of a menstrual cup than men are. It’s not so strange. I used to be one of them. I had an intrinsic fear of my vulva. I didn’t want to touch it. I ignored the smells associated with it. I never peered below my navel when considering myself in the mirror. I whispered the word “vagina” in conversation. And I certainly never masturbated with my fingers. One very grave day in 2019, I realized, to my utter horror, that all my ex-boyfriends were on better terms with my vulva than I had ever been and, due to a deep-seeded shame of my own sexuality, would probably ever be.

It seemed a fatal flaw that any woman could be repulsed by the Diva Cup — more accurately, by handling the fluids associated with our menstrual cycles. But after careful consideration, I realized it wasn’t odd at all. It just made sense. We had been told our periods were disgusting by at least one person in our lives at one time, and it is universally acknowledged that you shouldn’t hold something disgusting in your hands.

I know women and people with menstrual cycles who despise their periods for every valid reason under the sun. Because it’s irregular. Because they identify as a man. Because they’re trying to conceive. Because they associate it with pain, etc. I was grateful to love mine. Despite some body aches and back pain, it was regular, and I took each period as an indication that my body was functioning the way it was meant to. When abortion bans in the past weren’t absolute, but stricter, I was privileged to have a period I could depend on for its predictability. Being that pregnancy is estimated from the first day of your last cycle — something the masses don’t realize — six-week bans would require diligence on my part. But I could be diligent. I could make it work. The question of whether I should have to make it work was never one I thought I’d be asking again when, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, almost a quarter of women and people with menstrual cycles have irregular periods. And, for them, six-week bans would feel absolute, like a total attack on their autonomy.

After rinsing out the cup, folding it in half widthwise to minimize surface area, and reinserting it into my vagina, I checked my phone. And there it was. SCOTUS had overturned Roe v. Wade.

I remember my initial reaction was to read the fine print. What was I missing? I had to be missing something, some tiny detail that made it make sense. But there were no special clauses. Roe v. Wade was simply no longer the law of the land, and the rage I felt was akin to the rage of finding out I was progesterone deficient. I started to cry, as I once had on the drive home from Dr. Cho’s. I cried and cried and cried, and I watched myself in my mirror thinking this is what heartbreak looks like. I left the bathroom and sidled up against my bedroom window, where the train was going by, and overgrown vines were encroaching on my back patio. In a month’s time, I would have them removed, and the hillside would look like it’d been wiped away by a SoCal mudflow.

I was furious. I was furious at those vines. I was furious at America. I was furious that millions of women and people with female reproductive organs were wandering around thinking their irregular or painful or short or long periods were normal. I was furious that a country without universal healthcare, without the erudition to identify racial disparity as a race issue and not a class issue, and with so little insight into female body parts that they often unknowingly referred to the vulva as a vagina, could force women and people who can get pregnant into carrying a child against their will. I was furious to be so misunderstood, to call my mom and have her soothe me with promises that “this just means they’re losing. This is just an act of desperation — one final grasp for control.”

My boyfriend entered the room. Beyond a groggy acknowledgement at dawn that he was off to the gym, and I was sleeping in — as was the case most weekday mornings — we hadn’t yet greeted each other. It felt like a small fury in the grand scheme of things, but a fury no less, that we hadn’t touched or kissed or shared a private moment in our private lives before the news cycle tore through yet one more gentle morning with an unwelcome announcement, the same way it broadcasted school shootings and police brutality. As he walked over, I performed a spiritual pat-down of sorts, checking myself for sincerity. I think many women would echo the sentiment that they feel responsible for justifying their emotions. He said his usual, “Hey,” rested a hand on my shoulder, and peered around at me.

“Oh no, are you okay?” he asked.

“They overturned Roe v. Wade, Eric,” I said.

This was only the third or fourth time he had seen me cry in the span of the year and a half we had been dating.

He laid his head on my shoulder and held me.

My grief, spilled all over our bedroom, seemed to wake Eric up to what this landmark decision meant for him. One of the first divisive conversations we’d had was about children: he didn’t want them, and I did. He didn’t believe people took child rearing seriously.

Furthermore, he thought most people lacked the ability to look at the bigger picture and were clouded by idealistic views of suburbia. When I’d told him I believed I’d be a good mother, he was firm that he believed that too, but that simply believing you could do something doesn’t mean you should. He would be right, and I would never look at the young parents around me with the same wistfulness I once had again.

He was always looking at the bigger picture, and that morning was no exception. He feared for what this decision would mean for privacy. He didn’t believe in the government interfering with our personhood. He believed what goes on in our home should be our business, and our business alone. I stared out the window, anxiety building, cortisol releasing, progesterone deteriorating, and Eric trauma-scrolled through news articles, through facts and exaggerations, through the inner-workings of the trigger bans, and the inevitabilities that 13 more states would follow suit with their own laws, some inflexible and totally absolute.

Throughout the day he checked on me. He packed a soft cooler with snacks and filled my water bottle in the event I decided to protest downtown that evening. He tiptoed around me, gauging my upset, and dealt with the lawn guy when he came over to assess our weeds. I was upset. I was mad at him. We lived in the same house, we both worked from home, we both laughed and had a biological process, we both cared for our families and sent birthday presents to our friends, we both believed the earth was round. So, why was I the only one who lost her rights that day?

It wasn’t his fault the ban didn’t hold men responsible for partial childcare — which includes financial and otherwise. It wasn’t his fault everyone was pretending like child support is the most uncomplicated, implied, and non-negotiable thing in the world. It wasn’t his fault that I woke up that day with less rights than my mother had at my age. None of it was his fault. But I was mad at him anyway. Because he had no responsibility to the unborn. And I could die during a forced birth. I was mad at him for the contingencies.

But more than that, I was mad that my sex life would continue to suffer beneath this patriarchal regime. Taking ownership of my healthcare, looking for answers, becoming the sole proprietor of my body, refusing to buy the lie that my weight was my fault — it all served as a radical self-awakening to my own intrinsic sexuality. I was now a woman who looked at her vulva in the mirror, who was not ashamed of her fantasies, who watched herself masturbate, and lovingly reminded herself not to spectate — a term picked up in Emily Nagoski’s book, Come As You Are, meaning the act of observing physical intimacy rather than being fully present for it. I had been handed a new freedom when I realized I was allowed to explore, and just as quickly I had seen it torn away.

Before labels, when Eric and I were just an idea in my head, I became determined not to make the same mistake I had in the codependent partnership we succeeded. I needed to get familiar with my female parts, more familiar than any man would be. That was my duty, as integral and evident as the liver’s devotion to detoxification. I was supposed to love every slick, soft, dry, and hairy part of it. If not me, if not the government, who else?

I had to undo every unfriendly thought I had about my vulva and every bad habit I had picked up trying to be sex-positive in a society that seeks to punish women and people with female reproductive systems for wanting to have sex. In a journal entry I wrote about masturbating with my fingers for the first time, I described the immediate aftereffect of my orgasm as a feeling of plenty. I was cashing in on all the hard work I had done unravelling every archaic train of thought I’d once blindly followed about female sexuality so I could do this one divinely feminine thing for myself. It wasn’t about coming. It was about stepping fully into my power.

I rigorously stroked two fingers over the most intimate, and politicized part of my body, and propelled myself into a new reality where gate-keeping my sexuality wasn’t out of respect for my parents or my purity or my desirability, but a deliberate and effective tactic to keep me from discovering how truly powerful I am.

After I left the window and Eric went to work, which is to say, after we set this new American trauma aside and resumed our lives, I pulled my Beats over my head and listened to “Nothing Left to Lose” by Kari Kimmell. She sang of an emptiness that lasted forever, and I pictured it in 4D. In that continuum, I deliriously painted by number on an old stylist gaming device in my childhood bedroom until I was worn out enough to sleep. Next to her, the woman I am now painted at the kitchen counter with a watercolor kit I’d just picked up from Michael’s, hoping to quiet my mind enough to eat.

Would being alive always be so painful? Would progress always feel so eerily similar to hitting a wall? And if it was this agonizing for me, what did it feel like to be erased from the conversation about reproductive rights as somebody who’s non-binary-defined? What did it feel like to live below the poverty line without access to sexual education and, causally, preventative measures? What did it feel like to be a Black woman living in Jackson, Mississippi, a trigger ban state assigned an F by the March of Dimes in 2021, where the rate of preterm births for Black women is 17.4 percent, 5.2 percent higher than white women and 7.3 percent higher than the national average?

What did it feel like to be non-white, non-affluent, uneducated, unsupported and without a regular period?

I would never know. And neither would most of the people responsible for overturning Roe.

Discomfort is the New Normal

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 20:23:25 GMT

In the 48 hours it took me to get to Paris, I was confronted over and over again with the privileges of minor inconvenience.

I was an hour and a half into my flight to Paris when the pilot announced over the loudspeaker that there was an oxygen leak in the cockpit and, as a result, we’d be diverting back to JFK. I had just taken melatonin and was brushing my teeth. When I slipped back into my seat, the man in front of me explained to his wife that it wasn’t to be dwelt on. It was like a light coming on in her car, only this was a plane, and for all manner of liability issues, it couldn’t go ignored as hers often did. Assuming he wasn’t a complete layperson, I was pacified for the hour and a half it took to get back to Jamaica Bay. Just a light on the dash. Sure, okay.

We made it back to JFK, stranded on the tarmac at one in the morning looking for crew to man the jet bridge and the helpdesk, to be bodies for angry, overtired passengers flooding into the terminal with their small and large furies to bully. At this time, there were a series of contradicting announcements. For my part, I was up and down, up and down, collecting my belongings, preparing to deplane, then seated again with my things stowed. Standing again, my bags at the ready, then sitting back down in a huff because the gate agents said to.

What I couldn’t see past was how cushy this dance was in Delta One. While there were passengers in middle seats in coach going through this ordeal with children, with varying levels of financial comfortability, having been to Europe before, or having saved up for a trip for however many months or years, I had an entire cubby of space, water, and peace of mind. It was, as always, an unavoidable class issue—I knew I would be among the first to reach the help desk, that my status meant I could call Delta right then and there and get straight through to a representative, that mine was the business Delta couldn’t afford to lose.

When we were escorted off the plane, we were told to sit in the terminal with our belongings and await news. Initially, I sat near the podium, next to the man and wife and their two kids, one of which looked eerily like Anne Frank and brushed her hair out for twenty minutes, a clump of it sitting in her lap, and of little import to her. In fact, she fell asleep with it there. And that, combined with the masses and hordes of individualists prepared to take their singular tragedy out on a gate agent who was there, working overtime to supply us with answers they were getting in the same timeline we were receiving them, pushed me to a small, empty corridor where I could find some semblance of quiet.

It was always alarming to see humanity up close like this. To realize how many of us were hell-bent on our victimization, on resorting to anger and exasperation, as though shit doesn’t happen all the time, to every type of person, with or without cause. There were so many levels of circumstance in that terminal, and I felt hopeless sitting in the middle of it all, knowing how many of their problems, their hurts, their fears, could be resolved if wealth was more evenly distributed, and if scarcity wasn’t the single-most acknowledged universal truth.

I had been on the search for lighthouses in the U.S. for four years by that point, having seen 359 of the 790 still mostly standing, and was headed to France to see all the lighthouses along the coast from Saint-Malo to Amsterdam, Netherlands. In my search, I was routinely confronted by a rampant individualism. I’d spent most of my summer in 2024 in the mid-west, speaking with locals and small business owners who were so brazen and open with their COVID-era racism against Asian people, it made me realize how bad things had gotten way out there in the rural, mostly forgotten areas of our country. Out where they trusted the promise of a “businessman” and believed he alone could lead them to Jerusalem. There was little pushback in these parts of the world, where the community had been born, raised, and settled in the same place, had little aspirations to leave, and had never been exposed to anything but an echo of their same beliefs. And it had mostly happened in our periphery, meaning, we were all partially responsible for this cancer that was spreading.

I had experienced more travel debacles than not when I set out to see all of America’s lighthouses in 2024, but each time I was met with one enduring thought: it was important to go out and meet with the world in this way. To see all its working and broken parts up close. To see the messiness, how we were split into hordes of people who felt unseen, and all in a different way. How each time something happened, like a flight cancellation, pain came pouring out of them, and it was never in proportion to the offending event.

In summary, people everywhere were not okay.

After two long hours of intermittent updates that “there are no updates,” the flight was cancelled. The crowd was united in its disapproval, groaning to mobile positions, listening closely to their options: visit the help desk, get rebooked or be refunded. If we wanted our luggage, there would be a two- to three-hour wait, as there was no crew to operate the baggage claim. By this time, I had already spoken to a Delta representative who’d assured me that if the worst happened, which it did, I’d be immediately booked onto a flight leaving at six-thirty that evening.

“Just like that?” I asked her. She assured me, yes, “just like that.”

Well, it wasn’t “just like that.” I reloaded my app, hoping to see a new ticket issued, and was met with the same message about my now obsolete flight—that it was delayed. Check back later. I called Delta and was put through to someone else. Unfortunately, I wasn’t rebooked. They could rebook me, but all she had on offer was a new itinerary that went through Cincinnati. Seeing the line of exhausted passengers with their monstrous, sleep-deprived children and piles of unchecked goods breathing in and out in a way that made me think all of society was on the verge of collapse, I told her to book it and approached a separate help desk to ask if I could get my bags. He said I couldn’t, but he assured me my bags would follow me to Paris the next day. He was wired. He apologized for a mess that wasn’t his own, told me he had been working for over eighteen hours at that point, and held his hands up. I nodded, acknowledging his limit, and that was that.

I took small defeat after small defeat, pocketed my phone, and headed for the exit, passing that horde of people with only enough patience left in the tank to form a zig-zagged, mostly civilized line. I couldn’t help wondering what they were being told. And, if it was this bad for me, what would it be like for the rest of them?

It occurred to me that most people didn’t think like this. For a long time, I thought they did. But in the past however many years, I had come to realize that, in general, people think of their lives in a singular way, with very little in their periphery. And what was there was mostly threatening. The world was scary when you paid attention. Most of them didn’t have the capacity for unique thought. Most of them were worried about scarcity and annihilation, the news pumping them full of hatred towards minorities. It was as roundabout and backwards as diverting me through Cincinnati. I wandered through the halls of an eerily empty JFK, and I thought about the fact that tomorrow afternoon, after over twenty-four hours of travel, I’d be almost exactly as far from Paris as I once was in Nashville. I’d made no progress, and it was all out of my control. It felt deeply, uncomfortably familiar.

I needed a hotel. I took a train from terminal 4 to terminal 5 and thought about the TikTok I could make if I went to the TWA hotel. A way to explain the night from hell in a humorous fashion whilst also grasping for visibility. If nothing else, it would give the whole debacle purpose. As an artist and writer, it seemed my brain was always on the lookout, even when I was at the edge of consciousness, for an opportunity like this.

It was a long walk from the train. Rather, it felt long at four AM. Jamaica Bay was foggy and humid, not quite cold, but not quite warm. The parking garages were empty, and the path to TWA felt like a tromp through the set of Bladerunner. It was ominous, and the hotel itself was a behemoth—the way its architecture defied the harsh angles and squareness of modern buildings. I felt alien approaching it, my bags wearing on my shoulder, my spirit, and my patience. The lobby was huge and white, polka-dotted, like a scene straight out of The Jetsons, and when the late-night staff told me there was no vacancy, I left embarrassed, in a daze, wondering what I was to do. Actually, the most pressing of all my emotions was fear.

I felt inconvenienced and displaced in a mostly manageable way, even if I wanted to tell myself that nothing was okay. That I couldn’t be expected to hold it all together. That I should just give up, sit on a curb crying, waiting for more tragedy to strike or savior to come. I read once about the inexhaustible determination of those who weren’t white, because they’d never had the option of simply giving up. I couldn’t help thinking of the people in Iran. It was a time of horrific uncertainty in our world, and I had long learned how eager my brain was to perpetuate a cycle of despair in my life. To feel some sense of hopelessness at all hours of the day so I wouldn’t have to live in the discomfort of content. I told a friend how important it was to allow ourselves small personal wins, to live a life adjacent to tragedy. But to still live. Right then, my aim was to remind myself of how good life was if I was wandering around with the means to find a hotel, no matter the distance, and that it would be hard and I would be tired and all would feel really personal at this hour—after this day—but that I was safe.

I walked back to the train, miserable, calling hotels in the area hoping for vacancy where there was none. After many rounds of refresh, something in Rockaway opened up on Delta’s site. I called them in a panic and reserved a room. The relief was palpable. I finally had a place to go. I hadn’t realized how much of my anxiety was owed to aimlessness.

I took the train to Howard Beach, feeling every bump and twist and turn along the way, climbed into a Lyft and stared off into space for the entire twenty-five quiet, foggy, vacuous minutes to my hotel. In my room, I made urgent calls about my rental car to Avis, who directed me to a different Avis, who told me to call booking.com. I learned bits and pieces of information through various thick, European accents. I wouldn’t be there within 24 hours of the start of my rental, so I’d have to book a new one. Thankfully, only insane people would devise to drive a car in Paris, and there was plenty of availability.

Dealing with robot-menus in French at five in the morning was what finally put me over the edge. My endurance, however notable, had finally petered out. I dissolved into frustrated tears, wondering how everyone else was fairing. I was having a hard enough time as one person with disposable income. I was not a family searching for five seats on the same flight. I did not have a connection in Paris. All was, for the most part, well. I just needed to go to sleep.

I made one last call to my hotel in Paris, who said not to worry, my room would be ready for me at whatever hour I arrived. I filled out a reimbursement ticket on Delta’s website. Then I shut my laptop, showered, did what I could to wash my clothes in the sink, and went to slept without my pillow, sound machine, or sleep supplements. I woke in a sweat. I turned on the AC. I woke in a panic. And then finally, I woke to the alarm.

The hotel arranged for me to be driven to the airport by the general manager. A Black man in his thirties who apologized for poking and prodding at my “lighthouse thing” as we sat in traffic. We had a conversation that felt so modern, so healing, like an understanding among two people who couldn’t understand each other even if they tried. We spoke of reparations for Black people, of a two-party system enslaved by the same oligarch, of Rockaway’s strange isolation, of mass consumerism, of his Caribbean grandmother who was spartan in her living, who wanted for nothing, not even a patch in her leaky roof, because she wasn’t around anyone who had anything to speak of. I had never thought of it like that. How proximity inspires desire. How I grew up with entrepreneurs and people who had seen the world, and how that had built in my subconscious like a disease. And when he dropped me off, he shook my hand, and met my eyes, and I remember thinking this was what it was all about. This moment of human connection, when one person in distress about the world felt an interruption. I complimented the brown crystal hanging around his neck, wrapped in wire.

“It’s good to protect yourself,” I said.

“That’s what I’m all about,” he said back to me, clutching at his necklace. “Protection.”

We should all shield ourselves in this way. Be so informed, but also, find respite. Find a way to be in a world that is uncertain and overwrought and ripe with dissatisfaction, war, and greed. I thought at once how I was deep in a new normal. That what I was experiencing wouldn’t be so outlier in the future. This was the way of things. Chaos was taking over, systems were breaking down, flights were less and less dependable, especially with less ground control. I could no longer travel without a cushion period. I would have to make room for this. There were billions of us here, going about their lives business as usual, flying during the worst of times, and all I could do was accept this and move on.

It turned out, my baggage didn’t go to the claim, as I was promised. They would not be following me to Paris if I didn’t go retrieve them. The things stacked up, but I would persevere.

I went downstairs and sat in line waiting, making small talk with a couple who were very good at taking things personal. When I got to the desk, the agent couldn’t say for sure where my luggage was. Luckily, I could. After a gut-wrenching theft in the Geneva airport in 2024, all my luggage had Airtags, and I could tell from my app they were in the storage room I’d watched him go in and out of no less than a dozen times. Together, we raked through the aisles of bags, and when I found mine, I rolled them into the bathroom to change my clothes. I was relieved to have access to my anxiety supplements and contact solution, a few necessary dribbles into my cup. I zipped my bags back up, walked from whence I came, and checked myself in.

At security, a line for Delta One customers only, I asked for a hand check for my film. With the way things were going, it shouldn’t have surprised me when they got a somewhat iffy response from whatever residue they’d picked up on the case, which resulted in my getting a very intense and in-depth pat down. I stood there as a woman dragged her hands all over my body and I was reminded of a quote by Olga Ravn:

“I just want to be a body […] with no one able to make contact with that body anymore.”

All my things were touched. My computers. My jewelry. My journal. The junction between my legs, “where my hands meet resistance,” the TSA agent had explained. I was so humiliated.

It was this humanity, this moment of grief, that brought me back to those in the middle east. Sheltering if shelter was available, carrying their children to safety over and over again, carrying an entire civilization on their backs as people summered in Tel Aviv. How could you not be filled with despair for them every time you were inconvenienced in some small or big way? How could you not immediately relate these grievances back to the biggest inconveniences of all: a loss of a home, a community, and a right to exist?

I sat in the Delta One lounge, watching Krysten Ritter walk by, picking at a plate of food, talking to my boyfriend on the phone about our new compost bin, which had newly exposed me to the sheer amount of food waste I, as a singular person, was responsible for.

“I’m in such a mess,” I told him then. And I didn’t mean the flight to Cincinnati. The nearly 48 hours of travel it would take to get to Paris. The obscene pat down. I meant the world.

We were in such a mess. And as I sat on that flight, and I listened to Brad Mehldau playing the Beatles, I wrote this out in the most urgent of pleas. Today I was driven to discomfort, as we all would be in the end, if we didn’t wake up.

And soon.

On “The Great Undoing” Song and Video

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:02:34 GMT

As regards the era of Ageless, I feel "The Great Undoing" is less the ending of a chapter and more a dogear on one of its pages—something to circle back to. As needed.

It already felt ridiculous to me to still be stuck on that relationship when I wrote “The Great Undoing”, but to be putting the song out now—seven years after the fact—well a lot of self-validation had to happen.

The way life manifests in a series of movements that aren’t always strictly forward, healing is so open-ended and non-linear. Shit is always coming back up. I prefer the gentle approach of allowing for things to, sort of, stick around. If they need to. Overstay their welcome. I think there’s a tremendous amount of guilt that accompanies grief, in that we feel it’s necessary to get over something as quickly as possible. It’s counterintuitive, if you ask me. To feel obligated to move past something. I remember being angry at myself because the amount of time I spent grieving that relationship far outweighed the length of the relationship itself. Who cares? It’s not science. It’s relative.

In a way, sharing this song so many years later feels like an affirmation. I was so concerned back then with what people thought of me. Whether they were whispering behind my back, calling me dramatic and obsessive. I was convinced my hurt was annoying, that I just needed to “get over it already.” But more likely, nobody was thinking about me at all.

The thing was, I wasn’t just tasked with getting over the breakup, I was tasked with getting over myself. Getting over the insatiable urge to center myself in the lives of others. If, by putting out this song, I’m dragging something out, or unearthing something that’s long since been buried, that’s news to me. I’m not so self-obsessed that I think it’s going to make waves in the lives of anyone. If it does, bully for me.

I used to be first in line to pick apart any one thing I did. Now, I dare say, I’m last. With the video, my aim was to play out the very big and fanciful ideas I once had about the relationship, and to memorialize the future I’d imagined for us, almost in apology. I can’t travel back and tell my younger self it doesn’t matter, there’s no such thing as being unnecessarily affected, what you feel is what you feel. But I can acknowledge that this was no ordinary ache. This was a great undoing.

So, I built this dream world for her, as if to say, “You got to the other side. Does it matter how?”

Ageless Extended: Thoughts on the Bonus Tracks

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:09:07 GMT

I was 25 when I wrote the entirety of Ageless. It's an extremely complex and enigmatical concept, but I sometimes feel like I didn't write it at all—that it's separate from me—and that calling it mine would be, in part, like stealing it. Though, I think that's part of the mystery of art. There is an element of detachment that occurs, in that, when the artist endeavors to create something, they do so transactionally, out of responsibility.

I'm sure there is a universe where I never released this album, and I'm so sure it's directly adjacent to this one. The decision was that small. It was the difference between taking a left or a right out of my driveway to dinner. I would have been happy either way, and I likely would have gotten to where I wanted to go, simply because that's how it all works—everything you do is meant for you and all that jazz. But the one thing that swayed me to the other side was the possibility of an amended album. An album without two songs that felt totally outdated, unaligned, and gratuitous—where the other ones felt... well, ageless.

However, as custodian of this music—music from a different time—I still, ultimately, bear a responsibility to these two extra songs—bonus tracks, if you will. Not because I think anyone needs to hear them, but because my younger self—a girl who was not quite done hashing out a long, drawn-out breakup, and a friend who was sick with grief over mean girls who liked to play the victim—needed to say them.

An Additional Sentiment: Charlee Remitz on Ageless

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:23:00 GMT

After I wrote this album and I was trying to design the track list, I broke it up into three categories: friends/growth, self-love, and time. I’ve always been very literal and chronological, and while I admire the artists who lean into the abstract, I prefer to tell my stories exactly as they happened. And what happened is my grandfather died and I grew up. It’s an interesting phenomenon, but the first place we tend to experience growing pains in our lives is in our interpersonal relationships. I lost a handful of friends. I sometimes miss them, but mostly I feel grateful for their absence. They left space, and I moved into it. Without that vacancy, there would be no Blue Monkey. See, we need meaning in our lives, but we often look for it in the wrong places. My life didn’t need more people, things, etc. It needed stillness. Idle hours. Boredom. I don’t think there will ever be a moment when I can plainly say, “I found myself.” I think the self is a concept that evolves over time, and that what we’re really meant to find is fluidity. I’ve struggled my entire life to accept that someday I will die, and in every project I release, I imagine that tug-of-war between wanting control and surrendering to what is, will be the most enduring theme. I wish I could say I wrote Ageless from a mountaintop, but I didn’t. I wrote Ageless as a lament. I don’t want to grow old, but I’m going to. It seems to me that the world’s most major issues could be resolved if only we found a way to live in this truth. We will never be ageless. But, we can be conscious.

Jazz as a Working Metaphor for Life

Sat, 10 May 2025 23:30:14 GMT

Like most endings, my grandfather’s death ushered in a new dawn—the era of jazz. It was April of 2020 when his Alzheimer’s became too unmanageable for my small grandmother and their Florida house to contain. He forgot how to catch himself when he fell, and his body became black and blue. I’ve decided, in all my amateur field work, Alzheimer’s is many things, but the very worst of them is the complete departure of one’s motor function. It was not the instability—we can all withstand a fall—it was knowing to throw your arms out before the whole hulking mass of you hit the floor. To tuck your head and do it with a shred of grace.

The family, like a small tribe on a wintry planet bracing itself for a time without sun, descended into chaos when our patriarch forgot how to golf—the most observed of his hobbies. We picked over his diet, sharing Internet search inquiries and intuition, like some of us had more insight into the dilemma simply because we felt something to be true. There was so much sensation. So much open grief. We wished it could be so simple as to take away sugars, to serve him meals slightly resemblant of bird food. But there was no keeping him alive, no anchoring him to the present. There was no willing his disease away. It was a realization humans would suffer again and again: that life ends, and at no point does it become as putative as one’s need to sleep.

We couldn’t keep involving ourselves in a fight that wasn’t ours. And no matter what can be said about the final stages of Alzheimer’s, I still feel there’s a certain spiritual presence lording over the host, and perhaps that’s who we bowed to in the end. He was done—we were no longer in denial of that fact—and so were we.

We moved him into a memory care unit in Montana, outfitting his small apartment there with furniture that came as a part of a set. It was strange, not unlike a parent furnishing their child’s dorm. We shifted uncomfortably in our new roles around this alien dependent, and when we left, he didn’t leave with us, which was the strangest sensation of all.

When we visited, we had confused, and often distressing, conversations with him through a screened window. At times, he grew so upset that the visits were cut short, the nurses assuring him he knew the masked strangers peering in at him like he was a bird at the zoo. In fact, they were family! The whole enterprise felt like a hell specific to him. He, who had the faces of his grandchildren printed on his skis so he could point to them with his poles when talking about us to random skiers on the chairlift. He, who lived to the tell the tale of the ten thousand misadventures he dragged us on. He was no match for a life of anonymity, for a world without his legacy. And in two months’ time, he took one final, epic and injurious plunge.

In hospice, like a little boat in the eye of the hurricane, he sipped chocolate milkshakes through a straw while my grandmother wet his lips with a sponge at the end of a stick. He had meaningful, soundless conversations with a bright spot in the corner of his room, at times pointing at it with the last of his conviction, his mouth agape or tipped slightly in the direction of a smile. We couldn’t be certain, but in our different estimations of What Comes Next, the family became convinced he could see it. Whatever it was. Wherever it would take him.

He left behind all the usual things: photobooks with the original negatives, clothing, a staggering wealth of Scotty Cameron putters. And for me, a large box of vinyl in different stages of wear and tear. There was no Sinatra or Tony Bennett. No Dean Martin or Bobby Darin. As I fingered through those albums, I felt uniquely rich. Loss was as significant as it was final, and there I was on the floor meeting my grandfather through this corpus of jazz again.

His was no collection to imply a purely selfish interest. There were vocalists—sure—the occasional live album—Etta James in Montreux, numerous recordings from the Blue Note—Bing Crosby’s extensive Christmas catalogue, and compilations done by Playboy. But mostly, there were instrumentalists. Art Blakey, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Art Tatum, J.J. Johnson. Records meant to be supplementary, when the lights were low, and bottles of Ruinart were free-flowing, every conceivable surface covered in cheeses and food, candles lit on the built-ins as if for a midnight vigil. Here was the legacy of a life spent in service of bringing people together in all the plain and blockbuster ways. Here was my grandfather, as vivid as ever.

My mother and I spent many weeks in Montana standing watch over my grandmother as she received various cakes and flowers and covered platters of foods and visits from her neighbors. We drank wine and played cards on the patio, and I followed the trails through the neighborhood, listening to essays from the New York Times about Val Kilmer and “The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth”. And then, when my grandfather’s remains were emptied into a sable urn and we’d flipped through a catalogue, picking out jewelry and crystal balls we could have made with his ashes, my mother and I packed up our car, with our geriatric dog, Aspen, and the box of vinyl in tow, and we drove back to our second-floor Hollywood condo, where we continued to wait out the pandemic.

Only this time, we had jazz.

We had Getz/Gilberto with “The Girl from Ipanema”, and when we played it, life felt like a movie. It teemed with possibility. We became mixologists. We learned how to make cilantro margaritas from a Facebook video uploaded by our old country club, watching as they smashed gobs of cilantro into the fresh juices of limes and oranges. We celebrated the tiny yields from my quarantine garden with farm-to-table bruschetta and lined the staircase leading up to our front door with blue bottles and fairy lights. For the first time in a long while, I picked up the guitar, and, with it, I wrote an entire album.

There was absolutely no reason losing the most significant man in my life should set off a time of deeply felt romance, but this was an era of whimsy. Of fresh air pouring into the house at all hours of the day. We were forced to slow down by the pandemic, to find ostensible meaning in doing less, and the jazz only helped to ease the compulsion to speed back up and go as fast as we can.

Losing him felt impossible, but jazz made it possible. Jazz made my grief sparkle, gleam. I may not have sat in his office with him while he pulled out the tumbler of scotch and taught me to savor its sweetness, but I was touched by his elegance. I would always endeavor to be as elegant as he was, and I realized part of this elegance was just an extraordinary and uncanny ability to be spiritually present in the world. He was always there when I spoke to him. And I wanted to be here too.

When Vinicíus de Moraes spoke about the girl from Ipanema, a real Carioca living on Montenegro Street in Rio de Janeiro in the 60s, he called her “golden.” He said she was “full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone—it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow.”

And that was just it.

I’ve recognized jazz as a working metaphor for life itself. There is an ebb and flow to the musicians on stage. A certain rhythm that takes some time to settle into. Part of me thinks jazz finds you when you’re ready, that it’s meant for the meditative, for those who’ve found the courage to let their hearts do the leading. It doesn’t seem possible to play something so intuitive otherwise, to compose with your mind busy managing.

By leaving me to sit in thoughtful contemplation with a bunch of dusty records in a box, my grandfather managed, in death, to teach me how to surrender, to let things happen, rather than forcing things to be. It was Thelonious Monk who said, “Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

A Musician’s Thoughts on Surrender

charlee779@gmail.com (Charlee Remitz) — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 23:35:54 GMT

These days, it would almost always be that sharing your art was a form of self-flagellation. I talk emphatically about creating for the sake of creating, but I’m human, and it was always right there in front of my face — a kind of truth. The calculated success of art didn’t used to be so accessible and immediate. Now I had special apps to track my streams and followers and engagements, apps that updated in real-time so I could watch as a song I published started its slow crawl to whatever abstract milestone was mentionable enough for a post on social media. The whole affair was underwhelming at best, painful and defeating at worst. When considering the smallness of it stacked against news of plane crashes and executive orders that felt strangely and irritatingly personal, it was killing. And I was meant to keep contributing to this machine? To find myself some stable ground where I could emerge from another boring release day unscathed? Hopeful even. Prepared for whatever would be asked of me when, inevitably, the world rose up and said, “enough.” One resounding moment amidst the chaos signaling the start of something new or the end of it all.

When I thought about it — putting my music out — it really didn’t seem that consequential. Couldn’t I just put it out and allow for it to mean nothing or everything? When I got right down to it, it felt quite immature to make such intense “I” statements about something I couldn’t really control. Things like: “I’m never going to make it.” “I’m just one more singer in a long line of many.” “I don’t know why I think I’m so special.” Of course, I knew the importance of creating to create, rather than creating for praise. But it was hard to stay latched onto the original intent when the song in question wasn’t picked up by a curated Spotify playlist in a matter of hours after its release. To many an artist, that placement made a world of difference, even as we released a collective sigh about the powerlessness of the artist’s relationship with streaming giants that were eager to raise prices incrementally with no meaningful impact on the artist’s salary.

Without that initial pickup, I all but threw my song a funeral. I went into overdrive doing chaos management, like a publicist trying to control the narrative for some A-lister hell-bent on spinning out. I would check and re-check my social media, making sure the lack of traction wasn’t the doing of some 10,000-year flood, whereas the systems were overwhelmed with notifications, the song making a miraculous splash and clogging all roads leading to me. I was in the dark waiting to be saved. And then, when I really thought about that — about my salvation being inexplicably tied to whether or not my work was being heard — I felt alienated by the absurdity. How funny to welcome the dark if it was a side effect of being so loved, so celebrated things had to be recalibrated to handle the magnitude of attention I was getting, but to fear it if it meant nobody was hearing me at all. To then run to Instagram to see it really was true: I had one notification. One. Notification. The song was dead on arrival. At which point I’d devolve into hours of mindless scrolling, eventually finding myself on somebody’s page — anybody’s page slightly more popular than mine — wondering whether they had great marketing, or the algorithm favored their aesthetic, or they were, simply put, chosen.

“Golden Rule” single cover shot by Hollon Beasley at Skyline Lanes in Clarksville, TN.

My newest song is called “Golden Rule,” and it is, at its very core, a song about presence. I wrote about times of inadvertent pause, when I found myself in a strip mall parking lot, watching the sunset, the clouds, which meant rain all day, now adding texture and substance to the sky, so the sun wasn’t just setting in a diaphanous blue, but backlighting a stage of hills and mountains and tributaries. It was a song about great American traditions and community, about singing “Sweet Caroline” at the ballgame and learning to populate our lives with the same intentions we used to decorate our homes. William Morris said, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And I lived in service of this truth.

But then, I shared something of myself with the world, and even though I found nothing useful or beautiful in notifications or stats or streams — or jumping to conclusions, for that matter — I still let them lord over me like I was Elton John’s tiny dancer watching headlights approaching on the highway. It all felt so bleak. Doomed, even. I believed in rest, in the reset that happened when you took time away and allowed for space to bring you the next great idea that might turn you into a giant among men. It was only too bad I had to be pushed to rest, frustrated to a point of Shakespearian downfall, whereupon I left my phone in some undisclosed location and forced myself to be present with all that was in the material world.

And so, when I decided the release wasn’t going my way, I poured myself a glass of wine, and I brought it out to my front stoop where I sat, hot from a bath, trying to cool down, and watched as my neighbor’s motion detecting garage light flickered on. In time, a small gray cat named Fitz trotted up, dragging his face along my jeans and pushing himself into me with so much force, I thought it ridiculous I was mourning a song that had barely been out for twenty-four hours. We created this reality with its likes and filters and award shows, and now we had to find a way to live in it. Sometimes these moments of surrender, while more reactive than intentional, were the only ways we could fight back. And perhaps, that was the great why of it all. We create because we have to, and we disseminate our work because we have to, and we learn to find purpose and merit in it because we have to. There was no other way.

Later, as I sat at my computer and typed in the same password I’d had since I got my very first laptop, a pink MacBook in 2009, I thought of the girl who authored the password, so feverish and ready to be the exact age I am now. Through the ages, we shared this one innocuous keyword and a devout wish for things to be different, which is to say, there was a certain level of denial there. I was always her and she would always become me, and there was something pacifying in that. In timing and predeterminism. Possibly, it was all greater than I would ever be, and trying to exercise some level of control was futile. I refilled my glass, and I considered this essay, and I recalled a moment when my friend and I sat around a bonfire two nights prior. She talked about the January wind, how she opened all the doors of her new home — a home she’d prayed for — so it could rush in. “Now, this is living,” she said, finding ostensible meaning in an otherwise throwaway transaction with the world; a tiny rebellion in its own right.

This is all to say, it is never that easy to surrender to what is. I’ve tried, and I only find that I disappoint myself in that way too. Perhaps, the great mystery is letting life be disappointing when it’s disappointing and letting it be exciting when it’s exciting. In either state, there is flow and stillness, especially when you consider the fact that none of it means anything about the bigger picture, which is, of course, your Life. Who you are. The messages you carry and propagate with what you create. It’s by no means new, but I’ve found that artists need to be reminded of this time and again. That art isn’t dead on arrival. Art is, by its own right, alive, and giving into the doom of scarcity rather than reveling in the sweetness of maintaining a certain belief that art can change the world simply by creating and publishing what we create is one of the ways we contribute to the collective’s despair.

But it doesn’t hurt to laugh at yourself. This is a tough business, and, by nature, we’re dramatic, artistic, and defeatist. As I sulked around my bedroom the night of the release, ready to prematurely mourn “Golden Rule,” my partner said, “Give it a chance.” It still had plenty of time to do something great — forever, if you really think about it.

There’s this feeling that only the new can make a splash, so we drive up our output to stay relevant. But what if we fought back merely by reminding ourselves that old art is constantly being discovered, and that all good things do, in fact, take time? As I sat there in the throes of my newest tragedy, my partner laughed at me, and in time I laughed too. I guess it is kind of funny when I remember there was a time before cavemen discovered fire, when the dark was just an established and abided part of life.

Extending and Enduring Beyond Every Circumstance

charlee779@gmail.com (Charlee Remitz) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 23:35:54 GMT

It was nine o’clock on a Thursday night, and my boyfriend and I had just had a fight — one of those fights. The type of fight that feels like a blow to a windshield that’s already been chipped.

Years before, when fear made my choices for me, I would’ve dissolved into a fit of panic after we agreed — or he insisted, assuring me that my laundry list of issues wouldn’t find one singular cure-all in one night— the argument was done. Now, I remind myself a crack in our windshield is not a crack in my windshield and press on.

I did the codependent thing when I was twenty-three. That boyfriend held a hand palm up between us and told me he was like “sand in my hand.” Every time I said my piece, held my ground, stood up for myself, etc. — it all served as a tightening of my grip on him, whereas the more I squeezed, the more sand I lost.

Lying next to him in bed, I watched him enfold his fist around this invisible mound of sand, and I wondered if this was romance. He was basically telling me he’d tallied my complaints, and I was only allotted so many. No matter how he behaved. No matter that he wasn’t a good boyfriend at all. I, for the two years it took to truly be over it and him, thought that love was something you disappeared inside of. That love took the rebel out of you, or rather, that love was the hill you died on.

My current boyfriend is good — what my mother calls a “keeper.” The perfect person to change the narrative. I speak my truth to him. And it’s never my fault for speaking up, the way it always seemed to be with my ex. The thing is this crack in the windshield is totally circumstantial. Neither of us had lived with a significant other before we packed a U-Haul up and moved across the country together. It was naïve. A true expression of our youth. But all the most rewarding and damning things tend to come from poor planning and optimism.

I’m a happy person. I like to say happiness is an undertone to almost everything I do. Even when I’m bawling in the car while my mother reminds me that I moved here for a reason and it not working out for him doesn’t mean it’s not working out for me. I am happy then. Happy and oh so very sad. This self-containment allows for each of our experiences to coexist guilt-free. I can revel in my newfound freedom without fearing my sensation will make him feel resentful, and he can be critical of our new town without worrying I’ll superimpose myself onto that critique.

Being happy is an ever-evolving concept that changes with age, and one of its greatest nuances is that it can accompany feelings of lack, anxiety, fear, anger, and sadness. Growing up means allowing yourself to feel the full spectrum of human emotion, sometimes all at once. Where one sour moment in your teens was enough to convince you life was no longer worth living, as an adult, the idea is to learn the ins and outs of duality. How you can be doing really well personally, and struggle within your relationship. How we can thrive as individuals, and drown in our professional lives. There is much power in the simple act of acknowledging that you don’t start and end with any one circumstance, that you extend and endure beyond them.

That your life isn’t happening to you, but rather you are happening, and life is everything going on around you that isn’t inherently you.

In our teens, our worlds are breathtakingly small. We are told where to go, who to aspire to be, and we’re given tangible markers with which to monitor the passing of time. Our vacations are carefully mapped out by our parents, and our relationships exist within the hours they designate. Somewhere in our early psychology, when we formed a habit of securing permission to go out and experience things, we limited our relationship with possibility. Instead, we’re pushed to become something, and we often settle into an idea of ourselves that feels permanent. As time goes on, this idea becomes less and less malleable, change becomes less and less tangible, and wasted time grows in severity. Suddenly, we aren’t twenty-one wavering between majors, we’re twenty-nine questioning our career path, and instead of looking at the past eight years as a collection of moments that narrowed down our search for purpose, we look back on them with disappointment, wishing we’d taken a different route, and feeling like it’s “too late” to try something new.

Because everything has to have meaning, because every step must be a step forward, and because every relationship needs to have potential, we miss out on the opportunity to shape our lives with the information our lives provide us. Flings, career stints, and moves offer crucial insight into the self. But instead of basking in our lessons learned, we sink into a feeling of existential dread and misused potential. Alan Watts describes this as a “great panic […] to achieve something,” and in that great panic, we place the emphasis on making things work simply because trying something new might delay or sacrifice our ability to make an impact in our lifetime.

It took much longer than I thought it would to recover from my codependent relationship. It was the great Before and After in my life — a hurricane of strange events as compelling as Maura Murray — that shone a light on the small hill of healing I had done, and the mountain of healing I had yet to do.

Healing is one of those things that never happens by accident. It requires intention and endurance. And so, I was dutiful in my solitude. I gave myself time to be a rage-filled victim, and when the era of over-sharing and revenge-posting online came to a close, I made myself take responsibility for the role I played in it. I leaned into spirituality, practiced patience — especially with myself — and forgave the way I expressed my pain after we broke up.

I bought plants, using them as a tangible representation for my own growth, redecorated with bright pinks and oranges, visited nearby parks, and took up the harmonica. I tried things, and in trying things, I didn’t just start feeling free of him, I started feeling free in my life. In the ultimate expression of this newfound freedom, I drove the PCH from San Francisco to Carmel by the Sea, where I stayed in a small guesthouse in the mountains with massive windows and low bookshelves covered in crystals and affirmation cards. By day, I tasted wines at a local vineyard and watched the sunset with my current read and a small massif of sea glass piled on the towel at my feet. By night, I cooked pasta from a small Italian café and dragged a blanket onto the deck so I could look up at the stars. And when it was too early to sleep, but too late to do much else, I sat in the silence, the idle hours triggering the restless creator within.

It was my first solo vacation, it was my first time really playing with the world, and it further woke me up to the fact that I am . I am not my career. I am not my schedule. I am not the style of my room. I extend far beyond these things, and I will endure as these things shift and morph through the years. I had become shackled to my choices, to this universal notion that once you pick something, you have to stick with it. But making choices is merely a by-product of existence. They don’t come together to make you who you are. You are.

I only belong to other people as an idea, and I am not responsible for upholding that idea, even if, for most of my life, I have. I’ve operated under the weight that is, “what would people think if I (fill in the blank)?” But I didn’t sign a contract that said I’d always have expensive taste and the money to fund it. I wasn’t onboarded at Mom Friends for Life. I could stop being the spokesperson for veganism whenever I wanted to. And I could soften and be the exact opposite of what I had always been.

With one solo trip, with one or two meals on my own making conversation with a waiter who felt no guilt hanging around my table simply because I was unaccompanied, I had been set completely free.

I found in that freedom that things started to flow. Relationships that no longer served me — and perhaps never had — saw themselves out. The pop career I’d spent eight years nurturing came to a humbled, and triumphant finale. Knowing the world was big and as filled to the rim with possibility made excusing the things in my life that didn’t align with my truth impossible. If I had all the time in the world, if I didn’t need to worry about my lasting impact, why was I making up stories about all the superficial fluff I’d been unknowingly padding myself with?

With as much gentility as I could muster, I addressed the lingering bits of my psyche that were still fronting like an underclassman at a party made up of seniors: the parts of me that ran around LA doing hot girl shit hoping my ex would see, the instinct to place my entire worth in the time elapsed between sexual encounters and the fullness of my social schedule, the guilt-fueled exercise wheel I couldn’t seem to get off of.

The world was huge, nothing was personal, and time was plentiful. Suddenly, I had so much freedom, I felt drunk on it. Instead of forcing things, and rushing through my day, I placed my faith in divine timing and let life inform me. In this glamorization of flow rather than grind, I acknowledged that things happen behind the scenes, and the great panic, while always a whisper, no longer owned me.

I began approaching things with the emphasis on learning. I wanted to listen, be courageous, and experience. Dating with those intentions at my core took all the pressure off. I didn’t need to find anything meaningful. Everything was meaningful simply because my mandate changed. I was there to figure out how to date consciously, be patient, and not give myself away in the process.

After I met my soon-to-be partner, I was careful not to scold myself for the times I fell into old habits. I obsessed. I waited around instead of making other plans. I was not immune to impossible situations, which love would almost always be. Part of taking back your power is being gentle with yourself when faced with impossible situations. Instead of giving in to toxic inner monologue and entertaining worst case scenarios, I developed methods to find my way back to myself and offered myself kind reminders whenever I lost my footing: I am happening, I am working out even if things around me aren’t. Rebranding my experience to lift myself up, posing it as an opportunity to grow and learn rather than a thing that was happening to me without my consent, never left me in a position of feeling helpless.

When we moved our lives across the country, and made our home together, I had to choose repeatedly not to let his experience become my experience. Freedom is fleeting in that way. It requires upkeep. And the best way I know to maintain my freedom is to go out into the world.

While he looked for work, I walked our neighborhoods. Sometimes, I’d bring a book, finding the cadence of my footfalls soothing. They’d act as a complete erasure of thought, freeing up my attention span to focus on the words before me. Sometimes I’d leave the house with nothing and be intentional with my gaze. Sometimes I’d put music on and dance in the sunlight or in golden halos cast by streetlights, moving intuitively, springing around the street without much care for who could see. I call these dips into suburbia my “Main Character Walks,” paying homage to the movies I’d grown up with, where every teen’s experience was magnified by a good song and the will to let the rest of the world fall away.

I took myself on dates to the dive bar a short drive from my house. I’d sip amber lagers, read, browse Instagram, and write small lists of my favorite titles for the wait staff who asked me for book recommendations. I filled my home with pretty things. I stretched before work, opening my hips up lovingly to support me as I sat at my desk all day. I played jazz as I cooked and read by candlelight in the bath. I journaled daily, leaned into whimsy, resumed therapy even though I’d “graduated” from therapy years before, and every time I was sad, I let myself be sad.

I think we forget that we can be whatever we want to be in this life. In moments of desperation, when the world starts to close in once again, I remind myself that I can move to a seaside town and work as a waitress, go back to school for journalism, or become a foster mom. I don’t need anybody to see the world. In fact, some of my most romantic moments have been the ones I spent totally on my own, writing a story about myself that inspires me. A story of grand triumph about a girl who reunites with possibility and figures out how to extend and endure beyond difficult conversations, breakups, bad days, and eras of feeling misunderstood.

I remember not long ago being told “you’re not the main character,” and finding the craze around that musing a bit backwards. There’s this idea that being inherently good requires self-sacrifice, that the experience of others should be as important to you as your own. But I believe in putting yourself first. In keeping it simple. You do you. Whatever that looks like. Whatever the fullest expression of you turns out to be. Not because your life is the only one that matters, but because tending to your own wounds, centering yourself and finding conscious presence allows for you to be there for others, to keep your eyes on the conflict in the Middle East, to listen to Black educators grieve generational and modern traumas, all without burning out.

Bad friends, bad endings, bad jobs, bad outcomes — life isn’t as personal as we think it is, life is only as personal as we make it. Part of self-preservation is remembering that the story you write about yourself is the only one that matters. This is not to say you should abandon your humanity and become devoted to individualism. This is to say that being an advocate, lending your voice to a cause — it requires clarity and alertness, things that come from taking good care of yourself. Afterall, when you’re ready to get back out on the road safely — with mindfulness of your car and an awareness of others — the only cracked windshield you need to worry about replacing is your own.

Footage from Charlee Remitz's 'Garden' Release Show in Los Angeles

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 20:47:03 GMT

Charlee Remitz, with the help of friends Melanie Iglesias and Jared Harper, threw her album release show at the 11:11 in West Hollywood to both celebrate the release of "Garden", and raise money for the Garden Foundation , a non-profit based out of Las Vegas

LA Weekly names 'Garden' album of the week (and other press)

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 20:37:42 GMT

“It’s disarming, the way that she hypnotizes with her voice and, yes, production, before tearing out your heart with her lyrics.” – LA Weekly

“Do I like it because it's swathed in a synth-filled musical cocoon? Yes, but I also love the hopefulness here.”

– Refinery 29

“Since her 2015 breakout LP, Bright White Trims, Charlee Remitz has been delivering alt-pop songs of sadness and self-fulfillment.” – Alternative Press

"A synth-pop feminist anthem for the next decade, 'Pretty Genius' is a light shining for those going through similar dark moments, inspiring them to find the undeniable glow inside of themselves." - Hollywood Life

“[Pretty Genius] has a unique relaxed, organic feel to it. She tells her story in a stream of consciousness with her voice floating over ethereal synths and you may want to listen forever.” – GlamGlare

“US frontwoman takes her euphoric cues from Christine & The Queens with this sweeping alt-pop delight”

– Mystic Sons

“Charlee Remitz is a rising star on the Los Angeles alt-pop scene. Her enigmatically ambient sound is the perfect vehicle for the emotive musings that characterise Remitz’ bold songwriting.” – Purple Melon

Pretty Genius Music Video Premieres on Hollywood Life

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 20:26:05 GMT

"When trapped – literally and metaphorically – in a poisonous relationship, Charlee Remitz is the hero she needs in the striking video for ‘Pretty Genius. She talks to us about the visual and what fans can expect on her upcoming album." - Jason Brow

Pretty Genius on Alt Press

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 20:11:14 GMT

"Since her 2015 breakout LP, Bright White Trims , Charlee Remitz has been delivering alt-pop songs of sadness and self-fulfillment. For her most recent track, 'Pretty Genius,' she explores heartbreak, discovering by the end of the song that sometimes you have to be the one to catch yourself when you’re falling. The track’s available for streaming here." - Alt Press

Pre-Save Garden

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 20:32:10 GMT

Charlee Remitz announces new album, Garden , written and produced by herself. Pre-save/pre-add the album now: Link to Garden here

Charlee talks with SheBOPS Magazine!

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:17:13 GMT

Read the full interview here: https://shebops.net/charlee-remitz-interview/

"My Worst" Out Now!

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:04:43 GMT

Charlee Remitz released her newest single, "My Worst" Friday. Link to all streaming platforms here: https://song.link/myworst

EDM Sauce premieres My Worst exclusively!

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:59:40 GMT

Back in June we were mystified by Charlee's To Tell You The Truth – a pulsing alt-pop triumph that shunned trends and transcended anything of the genre we'd heard for some time. She showed great promise for the future and our appetites were whet for things to come, and our expectations have been both met and exceeded with the latest, My Worst.

“To Tell You the Truth” Acoustic Out Now!

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:49:06 GMT

Watch on Youtube or stream on Soundcloud

The “To Tell You the Truth” Lyric Video Is Here!

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 19:54:18 GMT

Available on Youtube here.

To Tell You the Truth Out Now!

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 19:37:18 GMT

Charlee’s newest single is out now! Click this link to stream and buy on your preferred music app!

“To Tell You the Truth is “What if?” in musical form. A brilliant shade of curiosity. A mystical world you frequent when someone enchants you. A love/hate moment you must cherish before, all too quickly, that enchanting “What if?” becomes “What now?” – Charlee

Purple Melon Music Premieres to Tell You the Truth Exclusively!

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 19:42:14 GMT

Thursday, Purple Melon exclusively premiered Charlee’s newest single “To Tell You the Truth.”

“23 year old singer-songwriter Charlee Remitz is a rising star on the Los Angeles alt-pop scene. Her enigmatically ambient sound is the perfect vehicle for the emotive musings that characterise Remitz’ bold songwriting. The contention of her parents’ divorce delivered a great deal of pain and heartache, from which Remitz now pulls strength. She wears her heart on her sleeve, as is apparent in her stunning new single ‘To Tell You The Truth’.”

The Leftovers Music Video Out Everywhere!

Thu, 17 May 2018 19:33:04 GMT

Charlee Remitz released her highly-anticipated music video for The Leftovers, a single she released fall of 2017.

Click HERE to watch it now!

CELEBMIX Premieres The Leftovers Official Music Video

Tue, 01 May 2018 18:53:03 GMT

Alt-pop singer-songwriter Charlee Remitz has returned with a brand new music video! CelebMix is pleased to bring you the exclusive premiere of the video for Charlee’s most recent single, The Leftovers”, which dropped back in Fall 2017.

Charlee Remitz is native to a small town in Montana. At 18, she moved to Tenessee to pursue a career in music- alternative rock in particular. While living in Nashville, she switched directions, focusing on honing an alternative pop sound. Six months later, she released her debut EP, These Veins, which has been described as “an intimate musical experience”. This authenticity is the basis of Charlee’s music. “Music gives me the perfect platform for my voice,” she says. “With it, I am heard and recognized by my audience and by my self.” In 2015, after moving to L.A., she dropped her debut album Bright White Trims, which was her first release to chart on college radio. Most recently, her EP Saints Until Fridays dropped in 2016.