There was a time when music didn’t feel like a decision.
It was simply the place where I felt most like myself.
From age 3, I studied classical piano for seventeen years. I sang, performed, learned music theory (this was always my least favorite), then eventually found my way into a cappella groups and theater. Long before I knew what kind of artist I might become someday, I understood innately that through music and performance I always had a way back home to myself, no matter how lost I might become everywhere else.
The decade after college (at Duke University, where I had been free to embrace every facet of my creative spirit through studies and extracurriculars in literature, theater, and music) thus proved to be deeply fracturing, as I succumbed to the myriad pressures of sociocultural expectations and left behind the only things that had ever really made me feel like ‘me’ in favor of trying to build a life that made sense on paper.
And year after year, I became more and more capable inside it.
But also increasingly empty.
How does one go from being something their entire life, then flipping a switch and suddenly not being that thing anymore without feeling like they’ve lost their entire center and are being ripped apart?
From my experience, I’m not so sure it comes and goes in a gentle whisper.
In 2018, unable to ignore the version of myself that I’d locked away for so long (and who was by now all but screaming), I gave myself permission to walk away from ‘my good life on paper’ and started over… as a DJ.
As some of you may know by now, that’s where SOHMI begins.
In the beginning, every finished record, every new room, every person who connected with the music felt like incontrovertible evidence that I had chosen correctly. That this was it, the rightful shape of things now, and it seemed like things would always feel as good as they did then.
By 2022, the impossible dream had become a real career.
I was touring across the country. Supporting artists I had only ever imagined I might one day share the stage with, eventually playing my own headline shows. I’d started my own record label. Played at Outside Lands, Bonnaroo, and Coachella.
But somewhere inside all of that forward motion, something confusing was also happening.
My relationship to the dream was starting to feel different.
What had begun as an act of fierce self-belief, asking for permission from no one but myself to take back my life and return to music again - had slowly become something that looked a bit like the opposite. Suddenly I found myself feeling like I was constantly seeking approval from everyone outside myself to justify that I did in fact deserve to call myself a real artist each day. This approval was ‘granted’ by bookings, releases, momentum, social media numbers and streaming numbers, and if any one of these axes of growth wasn’t constantly climbing it sometimes felt like I might die along with the project.
Without realizing, I had effectively handed all of my hard earned agency and authority back - to the ‘sociocultural pressures’ of the music industry.
What I desperately needed was better systems, greater separation between selves, and a deeper return to self-belief. But the faster things ran, the less attainable these things felt.
Until 2025, when I reached a point where my mind and body firmly hit the brakes and forced me to slow down. It was finally time to figure out how to properly establish these things if I ever hoped to be able to continue pushing forward in a way that made me feel happy and good. I needed to learn how to build a life with better balance, in which both artist and self could healthily coexist and survive.
At first, slowing down felt really scary.
The quiet felt extremely uncomfortable. Being distracted and busy is much easier than confronting the things you’ve been running from.
But eventually, the quiet began to reveal something valuable:
it slowly revealed to me what still remained.
What I still cared about.
And what I found was that the first parts of me to return cared not about appearing successful; they were the parts still curious about sound. About the relationship between light and sound in a room. They were the parts obsessed with hypnotic transitions between two tracks, letting traces of records echo into each other through mixing and improvisation. The parts that still wanted to make music from a pure place, to use my voice, to turn my love for fashion and material fabrics and billowy silhouettes into something original and beautiful that I could inhabit. And the part of me that wanted to write down everything that had happened so I could make meaning from it.
In sum, this revealed to me that the second act would not be about a perfect restoration of ‘the way things were’.
Maybe a second act begins not when everything has been repaired back to the way things were, but when we finally stop trying to return to our previous form.
If the first act of this journey was about allowing myself to become an artist at all, the second act will be about allowing myself to become the artist that I actually am.
I still want many things, some of which feel scary to want and dream about.
I still hope the music will travel further and the rooms will grow larger filled with greater and greater community.
But I want success to expand this life, not completely consume it.
I don’t know exactly what shape things will take now…
But for the first time in a long time, I have faith it will be something I can remain inside.