Resurrection – Vol. 3

When I turned 25, I decided to move to Los Angeles from the D.C area. It didn’t happen until the following calendar year, but December 2015 was when the choice felt right and real. This year, turning 35 a few days ago, I’ve decided to move back.

I’ve felt both cursed and blessed to have a birthday just 10 days before the end of the calendar year. Whether I like it or not, I am given twice the dose of self-reflection as most. I guess I also naturally tend toward introspection–my journals dating back to age five are proof.

On the morning of my birthday, I got an incoming WhatsApp video call from my dear friend, Franziska Ostermann, a German artist I’ve had the pleasure of cultivating a long-distance friendship with since 2021. She graciously offered to pull tarot cards for me from her Cyborgeoisie Tarot deck created and designed by the artist Allapopp, virtually.

"Okay, technically you need to be shuffling the deck so, focus all your energy on the cards as I do it so they have your energy!" Franziska, a vision in her signature white outfits and accessories sweetly demanded of me. I stared, eyes wide at the slightly pixellated cards spreading around her desk.

If you’ve never had a tarot reading, it’s customary to ask the cards a question you’d like guidance on. The cards will not give you explicit answers so it can be helpful to make it something broad with many ways to evaluate it. I pondered, and then the perfect question popped into my head.

"Will moving back to the East Coast help me develop further as an artist?"

I sort of know the answer. Or at least, I know enough to know that I have nothing to lose by taking this chance. I have a subletter lined up for three months (so as not to lose my prime-located rent-stabilized apartment). The absolute worst case scenario would be that I just…come back? But if I could have ancient cyborgian spirits affirm my choice that would be nice, I guess.

The spread and my thoughts on it were as follows–

My ideology of who I am and what I need as an artist is shifting. LA gave me what it was supposed to give me over nine years. I became the person I was meant to become there—but both the city and I have changed. My time in LA has been marked by co-existence: with systems, platforms, markets, identities, and expectations. Now, I’m at a turning point. My values are clarifying. What I need now feels less about expansion and more about alignment. Leaving LA doesn’t feel like running away; reflects an ideology of having faith instead of fear, which I cultivated while I lived here.

Cyborg immediately brings me back to my teenage self and to growing up online in the early 2000s, forming my identity alongside the rise of the internet, technology, and digital selfhood. The hybridity of human and machine, body and archive, memory and system is completely native to me. It perfectly aligns with the work I’ve done with “Teen Margaret,” the GPT model I’ve trained on my teen diaries. “I Wrote Her Into Existence” lives in the lineage of all of those things. This present version of me is a successful amalgamation of all my past selves, integrating all those histories instead of rejecting them.

I think Empathy and the Future means making room for how my younger self felt about DC—the judgment that it wasn’t “enough,” the pain tied to memory, and the vulnerability of returning, including living with my parents again after nearly twenty years. It also means recognizing that empathy moves in both directions. Into me and out of me. The girl who wrote those diaries held space for a future version of me she couldn’t yet know. Returning to DC, and even to the house where the diaries were written, allows for a deeper, more grounded relationship between these selves.

This reading was a welcomed splash proverbial of ice water on my now 35 year-old-face. All of the above has been tumbling around in my head for the last week. Fortunately, though, I had the privilege to continue some of these threads with the brilliant Anika Meier in an interview for OBJKTOR. I think it’s my favorite conversation we’ve had to date and I hope you enjoy it!

I also guess I channeled my Cyborgeoisie Tarot reading when I got dressed for my birthday, too. In case you were wondering, I spent the day doing all of my favorite things in LA–eating, seeing art, thrifting, sampling perfumes and going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thanks for (continuing) reading my writing here. I’ll see you next year! ;)