Okay, it's Halloween. I'm supposed to be brooding. I have the hair for it, the tattoos, the general aesthetic going. I should be posting something dark and mysterious and leaning into the spooky angle. Instead I'm sitting cross-legged on my secondhand chair at 7 a.m. in an oversized flannel, Lazarus the pothos drooping over my shoulder like he's reading along, thinking: what actually makes me feel good? Like genuinely, inexplicably, stupidly happy?
The "little things that make me happy" trend has been running hot on TikTok and honestly, I love it. I know the cynical take would be to roll my eyes. Another softness-performing trend, another batch of aesthetic coffee cups and golden hour windowsills. But I refuse. Not today. I think we're all so scared to admit we're soft that we under-document the actual joy, and that's a tragedy. So here is my honest inventory. From a person who writes songs about religious trauma and has a skeleton-hand tattoo on her forearm. We contain multitudes.
the first sip of coffee
I cannot overstate this. I'm not a morning person by biology. I'm nocturnal the way caves are dark, which is to say completely and without apology. But I have trained myself to get up early enough to have this moment before the world starts asking things of me. The coffee is always the same: dark roast, oat milk, made in the little stovetop moka pot I've had for three years. I don't have a fancy machine. I have that scratched-up aluminum pot and the ritual of waiting for the hiss.
When it's done and I pour it and take that first sip... before I look at my phone, before I open any app, before I remember what I was anxious about at 3 a.m. There is this two-second window where I am completely at peace. That's it. Two seconds. But I protect those two seconds like they're scripture. I have rearranged my entire morning around them. If that's not a spiritual practice I don't know what is.
Also cold coffee I forgot about and then found again and drank anyway. There's something chaotic and satisfying about that too. But the first sip hot is the one. That's the one I'm talking about.
When a Kick Drum Finally Sits Right
This one requires some translation if you're not a recording nerd, so stick with me. I've been deep in the weeds on the record I'm making, tracking vocals at 2 a.m. when the neighbors are asleep and the apartment is quiet, messing with drum samples, EQing things until my ears give up and I have to step away. The technical side of home recording is genuinely maddening. Everything sounds slightly wrong until suddenly it doesn't.
The kick drum is one of the hardest things to get right in a home setup. There's a frequency battle between the kick and the bass guitar that can turn a song into mud in about thirty seconds if you get it wrong. I've spent embarrassing amounts of time on this. Hours that could have gone toward learning a language or getting a real hobby. And then sometimes everything lines up. You pull a frequency here, push the attack there, pan the bass just a hair, and you hit play and THERE. It's there. The kick drum sits in the mix like it was built for that exact pocket of space. It punches. It breathes. it's right.
The sound I make when that happens is not dignified. It's something between a gasp and a cackle and I don't care even a little. That moment of things clicking into place, creative or mechanical, is one of the best feelings I know. I chase it constantly. It's most of why I do this.
Clean Sheets on a Thursday
There's a very specific magic in clean sheets and I've decided the day matters. Weekends feel obvious, like you planned it. Mondays are aspirational in a way that can backfire. But Thursday? Thursday is a gift to yourself. You're tired, the week is almost done, you have not yet ruined Friday. You pull back the covers and they smell like detergent and possibility and you think: I deserve this. And you do. You absolutely do.
I am not a naturally tidy person. My closet has a system that only I understand. There are at least two half-finished notebooks on every flat surface. I have a corner of my studio space that I affectionately call "the pile" and it contains cables, a capo, a receipt from six months ago, and one sock. one sock. So clean sheets feel like an achievement, not a given. They are the one domestic act I perform with religious consistency and I think that's why they hit so hard. In a life that's organized chaos, clean sheets are the one pristine thing. I'm in bed by 10:30 on clean-sheet nights. Asleep in eleven minutes. I track this.
Strangers' Dogs
I don't have a dog. I have Lazarus, who is a plant, whose needs are essentially just "water me occasionally and don't move me to a darker corner." Dogs are a different commitment entirely, one I am not in a season for, as much as it pains me to admit that. My apartment is not huge. I travel for gigs. Dogs deserve consistency and someone whose schedule isn't "recording at midnight, sleeping until 10." So I don't have one.
What I DO have is the privilege of strangers' dogs in the park and on the street and in the occasional dog-friendly coffee shop. And Biscuit, my neighbor's absolutely unhinged beagle mix who I dog-sit sometimes and who greets me like I've been gone to war every single time he sees me. The pure democratic joy of a dog who doesn't know you and decides you're wonderful... there's nothing that hits like that. A dog doesn't care that I'm tired. A dog doesn't care that I've been second-guessing a lyric for three days. A dog just sees a person and thinks: yes. You. I love you. Let's be friends right now.
I always stop for strangers' dogs. Always. Their owners are used to it. The dogs are delighted. I am recharged in a way that twelve hours of sleep can't replicate. If you have a dog and you know me: bring them. Bring them everywhere. I will abandon whatever I was doing to crouch down and let your dog sniff my hand and I will not apologize for this.
the handful of other things I refuse to be embarrassed about
Let me rapid-fire the rest because I've been known to over-explain and I want to get these down before I lose my nerve.
The moment a melody comes to me in the shower and I have to run dripping across the apartment to hum it into my phone before it evaporates. The brief look on my face when I check the fridge and there's exactly one piece of leftover pizza. My aunt Deb's voicemails, which are always fifteen minutes long and always start with "I don't know if you check these." I check these, Deb. I save them all. When a vinyl record I ordered months ago shows up at exactly the wrong time and I have to stop everything to listen to the whole side. The specific hush of the apartment right after the neighbor's dog stops barking and before the city traffic picks back up, like the world held its breath for one second.
Sunday, my beat-up acoustic (not the day of the week, though she's named for it), has this one fret buzz on the G string that I've never fixed. it's a flaw. It should bother me. Instead, when I'm running chord changes late at night and I hear it, I feel like I'm home. It's the sound of a guitar that's been played hard and loved hard and survived. I know every scratch on her. She knows all my drafts. That buzz is a feature now. I've decided.
The point is this. I have written songs about grief and theology and the specific kind of loneliness that comes from losing your entire cosmology. Heavy stuff, real stuff, and I mean all of it. But I also mean this: the joy is real too. The coffee and the kick drum and the clean sheets and Biscuit barking like I'm the best thing that ever happened to him. I don't have to choose between depth and delight. Neither do you.
One of the lies I absorbed somewhere along the way, probably from the church and probably from indie-artist culture and probably from both, was that taking pleasure in small things was shallow. That caring about a song coming together or a particularly good cup of coffee was somehow less than the big serious feelings. Nope. I reject that. The small joys are not a distraction from the real work. They ARE the work. They're how we stay human while doing the hard things. They are fuel.
Happy Halloween. Go find something stupidly small that makes you happy today. Protect it. Tell no one who would ruin it. Or tell everyone. Come back and tell me. I genuinely want to know.
I love you all a truly unreasonable amount.