The Ghost in My Own House

Five years of running something that other people read changes you in ways you don’t notice until you’re sitting somewhere wondering why you feel like a ghost in your own house. That’s roughly where I ended up with this blog. What started as a personal dumping ground—private texts, intimate photos, videos I made myself—had grown into something that expected cultural commentary and photographer portfolios and new music videos. All of which is fine. But I had stopped talking.

The further back I pushed my own writing, the worse things got internally. Depression settled in. Fernweh—that specific German ache for elsewhere—became a constant background noise. Burger King at two in the morning became a coping mechanism. The blog was doing well; I wasn’t.

It felt almost like the last time I’d genuinely blogged was five years earlier, when I killed my old site TOKYOPUNK out of heartbreak and future-anxiety and a restless hunger for change, and started this one. Everything grew from there: more readers, more contributors, more scope. But I’d given up the thing I started for. Somewhere to throw things out of my head and into the world, to make room inside.

The plan was to fix that. Get back to writing about my own life, my own obsessions, my own disasters. Less editorial machinery, more mess. The king was back. Or at least he was trying to be.