Burned Down

I’m thinking back to February 28, 2011, the morning everything shifted. Hannah and Ines left, and the whole structure of the thing that had kept us together just… dissolved. Everyone else went with them. We’d started this as rebellion against loneliness, just putting our thoughts somewhere because we didn’t know what else to do with them, but it had rotted from the inside into this service provider mentality. Rules everywhere. Obligations. The complete opposite of what we’d actually wanted.

There’s this moment when you can feel the pressure start. When the audience shows up, expectations follow, and suddenly you’re not writing what matters to you anymore—you’re managing what other people think. Every word gets weighed. Hannah and I kept trying to make space for the things we genuinely cared about, but it was like trying to build something in a storm. The emails and opinions and commitments just kept burying us.

By the end of that week I wasn’t sleeping. Too much red wine and the kind of panic that doesn’t resolve into anything except the realization that you’ve completely failed at the one thing you loved. Everything I was writing felt like garbage. Everything about how we worked felt corrupted. I remember thinking: this can’t be how it ends. So I burned it all down.

What came back from that fire was simple: absolute freedom. Post an essay or just a photo. A song. A video. Whatever Sara and I wanted. No performance. No framework. No obligation to be anything except honest and personal. After managing everyone else’s expectations for so long, it felt like breathing again.

I think about Ines and Mischa and Asumi a lot. Especially Hannah. I wanted to thank them for the nights and the texts and the memories. It was genuinely great. But some things have to end.

It’s been nine years of this. The drugs and the sex and the stories and the absolute refusal to be boring—that survives. The rest was just scaffolding to keep it standing.