Dear friends,

When I started to think, seriously, about storytelling, I wanted to feel it in my bones.

I devoured it all. Myth and folklore across centuries and continents. Shapes, structures, and symbols. Heroic journeys. Anti-plots. Meandering, spiralling, and exploding. Fractals. Snowflakes. Grids.

But none of this accounted for what I felt in my bones – that story is conjured between people in relationship with something bigger than them. Time. Desire. Catharsis. Love.

That story has a deep internal aesthetic and formal commitment, however minimal.

I love found footage cinema as much as fairy tales. In each case, it is the internal logic, world, and voice that are relatable in the broadest sense. Not just 'this could be me' but 'I feel this. I see you. I feel your world’.

I'm less interested in how polished something is and how many tropes it hits in what order (though this can be very fun) than the relationship we build together.

If I really feel into the work, I can develop something like a crush on the art and the artist. A desire to follow their process, to see drafts, to discover the contours of their imaginations.

A relationship is about mutuality and symbiosis not extraction and manipulation.

Of the hundreds of thousands of words I have written, only a fraction of have ever become books, stories, essays, or letters. The vast majority are ritual offerings to the craft. To the cosmos. To love.

I used to feel white hot shame at my inability to let these words go. To be working in the dark, underwater, in isolation.

But I have Jupiter and Saturn one degree apart in my 12H which is ruled by Venus. My Venusian works, art, creations, and pleasures are fated to be made in the dark, in madness, delusion, and dreams.

My ambitions are not quicksilver; they shift like tectonic plates, slowly reshaping my inner landscape.

I am deeply private and the act of sharing is always in the hope that what I bring out will be understood. That it will be read as my consciousness seeking yours.

What I believe about story is also true of the stories we tell about, and to, ourselves. And I have been telling a story – that I am a woman.

A few years into actively questioning my gender – a private, solitary occupation – I found a Tumblr quiz that told me my gender is the inky void between stars.

Stars as gender felt more real than the girlhood I had been curiously detached from.

I had struggled to come out as queer as a young adult, in spite of being in a relationship with a woman for several years at that time. It had been impossible to speak those words aloud in my family, in my Catholic community.

I felt myself more starlike, and less real, as the inner and outer worlds diverged.

Two years ago, I did finally, formally, come out to my family. Just to have done it. To have said the words.

And now, I am putting something else into words.

My gender is the inky void between stars.

For shorthand, I am using they/them pronouns which I love because they contain multitudes – fractals, starbursts, dark matter, voids.

My name is Lux. For light. For stars. For prisms, and spectrality, and neon.

Until next time,

Lux ✨