What is Searching for Stars?

It's a multimedia memoir — part book, part mixtape, part constellation of memory. Think of it as stories pixelated through sound, image, and nostalgia — a place where music and memory echo together. Imagine getting to know a new friend through her mixtape of memories, each story another piece of a constellation slowly taking shape, like sitting together in a fireside chat beneath the stars.

What does "musical echolalia" mean?

Echolalia is when words or sounds repeat — like echoes that return without being invited. Musical echolalia is how songs and lyrics loop in memory, shaping how we feel, remember, and even communicate. It's the heartbeat of this project.

Is this a book, a blog, or something else?

It's all three, and none at once. Searching for Stars is a living memoir told in fragments — part website, part audio archive, part retro dream. Imagine a mixtape that keeps unfolding into chapters.

Who is this project for?

For readers. For music lovers. Nostalgia chasers. For kids of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s — and for anyone who's ever pressed rewind on a memory. It's for seekers of light in the dark, and for those who feel music deep within their soul. It's for the little girl inside me who dreamed of being a writer, who thought in music video formation and remembered in lyrics long before she had words to explain it. It's for anyone who carries loops of sound and story in their mind and is still searching for ways to make sense of them. It's for my children — the living record of my life and the love story their father and I have built — so they will always know who I was, and how they inspired me to finally share my voice.

The pixel art style was inspired by our kids' love of old-school Nintendo and Sega games — a love my husband and I were proud to pass on to them. Memory itself often feels pixelated — fragments, pieces, little glowing squares that come together into something whole. Vivid sensory-filled memories, retro games, mixed CDs, VHS tapes, and the texture of nostalgia. I usually start with real photos from my life or family albums, then run them through tools like ChatGPT, Canva, and PicsArt, cropping, layering, remixing, and refining until it feels right. The visual art helps bring the stories to life like a pixelated scrapbook.

Can I listen as well as read?

Yes — the site weaves together audio narration, Spotify soundtracks, and pixel art. Each story has its own soundtrack, so you can hear the memory as you read it. You can also listen to the project in its entirety on Spotify, or hear the Searching for Stars soundtrack.

Where should I start?

Anywhere. That's the beauty. The project is a constellation, and you can enter from any star. It never happens in order — it comes in bursts, like shooting stars revealing their story one streak at a time. Certain images throughout the site are clickable, leading you to other pieces that share similar characters, themes, memory vibes, or synced timelines. Small bridges between stories that hum with the same rhythm.

Will this become a book?

That's the dream. Searching for Stars is being built as a digital-first memoir, but its fragments are already shaping into a printed constellation. Someday, you'll hold it in your hands like a mixtape for the soul.

How can I support the project?

Read. Listen. Share. Tell a friend who loves music. Post your favorite piece, or just press play. Every echo helps keep the stars alive.

What inspired Searching for Stars?

It was born from a lifelong love of music, memory, and storytelling — from mixtapes passed between friends, to songs that became soundtracks for entire chapters of my life. It's both a personal archive and an invitation for others to remember alongside me.

Is this project autobiographical?

Yes — it's my story, but told through music, movies, and memory loops that connect to something bigger. While it's personal, it's also universal, because the songs that shaped me are the same songs that have carried so many others, too.

Once in a Lifetime: Drowning in Echoes

The water runs.

A slow, steady stream, swirling down the drain in quiet, hypnotic loops, disappearing before it can be traced.

I watch, but I’m not really watching.

My hands move scrubbing, rinsing but I don’t feel them.

The motion is automatic.

I blink, and my reflection stares back at me in the window above the sink.

Not just my face, but everything behind me...

A home filled with pieces of a life I built, a life I love.

And yet, in this moment, it feels as though I’m watching it all from behind glass.

“And you may ask yourself… how did I get here?”

The lyric surfaces like an old thought, looping through my mind, circling back in on itself.

How did I get here?

How did I move from one version of myself to another, without ever noticing the shift?

Somewhere along the way, time started slipping

through my fingers.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling the weight of the days.

Somewhere along the way, I started floating through them instead.

Time Slips:A Life in Fragments

The past pulls at the edges of my mind.

It rushes in not as a story, but as flickering moments, half formed and shifting in flashes.

A bonfire crackles against the night.

The air smells like burning wood and autumn.

Laughter moves through the trees, warm, familiar.

For a moment, I can feel the heat on my skin.

But before I can reach for it, the moment fades.

The Teenage Years:The Numbness of Survival

The cold seeps in.

Normangee, Texas. A town that feels like it exists in the space between moments.

A trailer park. A space too small, too dark, too empty.

Electricity that worked sometimes.

Hot water that worked never.

Nights spent staring at the ceiling, feeling nothing, waiting for time to pass.

No money. No car. Sometimes, no food.

A life that didn’t feel like mine.

There were two versions of my mother.

One burned bright, laughing loud enough to shake the walls, dreaming fast enough to outrun time.

She could make life feel electric—wild, golden, bursting with possibility.

Her energy could set the whole world on fire.

And then...

The stillness.

The weight of silence pressing against the walls.

A shadow behind her eyes, something too deep for words.

She would drift, fade, disappear into herself,

and I would hold my breath, waiting for the return of her fire.

I never knew which version of her would wake up each morning.

I never knew how long she would stay.

But I loved her in every season.

Through every storm, through every silence, through every light that flickered and fought to stay.

I still do.

Time passed. Days blurred.

I floated through them, waiting to be somewhere else, someone else.

The Rhythm of a Life Interrupted

A drumbeat.

A Texas night.

Trey behind the drums, keeping time, locked into a rhythm that feels bigger than us.

Bobby on guitar, a song filling the air, laughter in between the music.

Trey was alive in a way that made you feel more alive, too.

And then...

A night that doesn’t feel real.

The kind that splits time in half.

Trey was gone.

A town brought to its knees in a single night.

His mother’s screams at the funeral.

The weight of silence that followed.

The way it never really felt real.

The way it still doesn’t.

Some things, you never get over.

The Music Fades…

A dimly lit coffee shop:Shaky Ground, Lake Charles.

The hum of conversation, the smell of coffee, the low buzz of an amplifier warming up.

My brother on stage, the glow of the lights cutting through the haze.

His hands move across the guitar, lost in the music, in the moment, in something bigger than either of us.

I watch from the crowd, feeling the sound pulse through my chest.

I am alive.

And then...

The memory flickers.

The scene shifts.

The music distorts, warps, stretches.

A different stage, a different night.

Bobby again years later, on tour.

I watch from the side of the stage this time, the energy of the crowd electric, moving in waves.

The music is loud, alive, vibrating in my bones.

I don’t know if I have ever felt more present than in moments like those.

But even those nights—those real nights—slip through my fingers now,

echoes of a room I can no longer step into.

The Void:Losing Time, Losing My Dad

The water still runs.

I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.

I think about the time that has passed since losing my dad—

How I drifted through time, how life continued even when I wasn’t sure I was part of it.

Some days felt endless.

Other days vanished before I could register them.

I laughed. I lived. I kept moving.

But was I present?

That’s the worst part, isn’t it?

Not just the grief, but the fear of waking up one day

And realizing you weren’t really here for any of it.

The flood of memory feels like falling backward into water sudden, consuming, impossible to resist.

Somewhere beneath the weight of time, I can still feel the ache of what was lost before it had a chance to exist.

My first pregnancy ended before I could even hold the word mother in my hands.

And yet, the grief arrived as if I had carried it full term.

The anxiety followed relentless, sharp, shapeless.

Days stretched into months, and I floated through them, afraid of a body that had failed me, afraid of time slipping forward before I was ready.

Jamie:A Steady Hand in the Chaos

My mind wanders, and memories flash like lightning bolts.

The times we packed up everything and moved, just because.

Driving through states with no plan, no direction,

just possibility stretching out in every direction.

And then...

The rain.

Warm, heavy summer rain, falling in thick sheets.

Jamie and I, soaked to the bone, dancing in the downpour,

barefoot in the front yard, barely newlyweds,

laughing like we had all the time in the world.

Water pooling in our footprints, hunting for crawdads,

thunder rolling in the distance.

It felt like something out of a dream,

like for a moment, the world had paused just for us.

The memories keep looping, cycling, pulling me under,

Until a touch brings me back.

Jamie.

His presence is like gravity, something steady, something real.

His arms find me, his voice cuts through the fog.

A Tether Back to Now

The water still runs.

Jamie pulls me close.

My children laugh.

A sound so light, so golden, it fills the spaces between the past and now.

I let it pull me back.

The past is still there, tucked into the edges of my mind.

The loss, the love, the echoes of every version of me I’ve ever been.

The weight of time still lingers.

But for now...

I am here.

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Searching For Stars

She Gave Me a Beautiful Window Back to My Soul: Healthy Is the New Skinny (A letter of light and gratitude for Katie Willcox)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • February 2, 2026

I don’t remember deciding to look in the mirror. I was already there, half awake, the house finally quiet in that fragile way it gets after a feeding. Same bathroom. Same light. A body that no longer belonged only to me, still learning its new outline. I tilted my head, not with panic, not even sadness just habit. Like checking a bruise you already know is there. Like waiting for an apology that isn’t coming. What annoyed me wasn’t what I saw. It was how quickly my brain tried to narrate it. The subtle inventory. The mental before and after photos. The unspoken timeline of when I was supposed to “feel like myself again.” I remember thinking, with a tired little laugh, Wow. I just made a human. And I’m still doing this. Still scanning. Still measuring. Still standing here as if my body hadn’t just done something borderline miraculous. And the most unsettling part wasn’t the criticism it was how normal it all felt. Like this was just part of motherhood. Like this quiet self surveillance was simply another thing you were supposed to carry. I didn’t necessarily feel it all at once. There was no dramatic breaking point. It was more like a quiet irritation that refused to go away. The kind that taps you on the shoulder while you’re trying to move on. I remember standing there thinking how strange it was that my body could do something as massive as bringing a whole person into the world and somehow still be treated like a problem to solve. How quickly the conversation had shifted from look what you did to okay, now fix it. I hadn’t failed at anything. And yet, the language in my head sounded like I had. That’s when something finally clicked not so much with anger or rage, but with clarity. This wasn’t intuition. This wasn’t health. This wasn’t even coming from me. It was inheritance. Passed down quietly. Polished to sound responsible. Framed as care. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Katie this is where you enter the story… Someone who said the thing out loud that I had only felt in pieces. Someone who named the difference between discipline and disconnection. Between health and harm. Healthy Is the New Skinny didn’t tell me what to do with my body. It asked a better question altogether: What if the problem was never your body in the first place? That question rearranged everything. You gave me language where there had only been pressure. You replaced noise with permission. You handed me tools not commandments and trusted me enough to use them. And that trust mattered. Because the moment I stopped fighting my body, I started listening to it. And the moment I started listening, I realized how long it had been trying to take care of me. It felt like getting this beautiful window. Not to change myself or crawl through but to finally see clearly. I kept thinking about how these things actually get passed down. Not through lectures. Not through rules. But through the tiny stuff. The comments made in passing. The jokes you barely even realize are jokes. The way you talk to yourself when you think no one is listening. Especially kids. Especially daughters. It hit me one night, sitting on the edge of the bed, that someday they wouldn’t need me to explain any of this to them. They would just pick it up. The same way I did. The same way most of us did. Quietly. Without consent. That realization felt clarifying. Not heavy. Just honest. Some patterns don’t need a big exit. They just don’t get invited into the next room. And because of you, Katie, I found the strength to stop fighting myself. To stop trying to fit my body into some mold it was never meant to belong in the first place. To me, you are truly one of the most beautiful women and souls in this universe! Beautiful is the woman who breaks cycles. Beautiful is the voice that replaces shame with truth. Beautiful is someone whose work doesn’t just inspire it liberates. Thank you for changing how I live inside my body. Thank you for changing how I mother. Thank you for helping me choose health over punishment, presence over performance, and confidence that doesn’t ask permission. You saved me in ways you may never know. Thank you so much for opening the window. I’m raising the next generation with it wide open to limitless views of beauty! Lauren