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.

This Song Will Change Your Life

Garden State

A Cinematic Ember for Searching for Stars

There was a stretch of my life where nothing was wrong, exactly.

The days worked. The routines held. I showed up.

And still something felt oddly absent.

Like a radio tuned just off the station.

Close enough to sound like music, but never quite landing.

I didn’t feel broken.

I felt… muted.

Functional. Responsible. Awake in all the practical ways.

Asleep in the ones that mattered.

⸻

When I was young, my emotions didn’t come in small sizes.

They arrived fully formed, without warning, and stayed longer than expected.

I didn’t know how to explain that then.

I just knew everything felt too loud and too hollow at the same time.

One morning, I decided I wasn’t going to school.

I pushed furniture against the bedroom door—not dramatically, just firmly.

It was the only way I knew how to say I can’t do this today.

The response was swift. Efficient.

Questions I didn’t know how to answer.

Clipboards. Soft voices. Doors that closed quietly.

I learned early how quickly intensity gets translated into something that needs correcting.

⸻

Over time, I learned how to be steady.

How to keep my voice level.

How to tuck things away so they wouldn’t spill out at inconvenient moments.

Quiet became a skill.

Then a strength.

Then, eventually, a way of life.

From the outside, it looked like growth.

⸻

By the time I graduated high school, I was already practicing adulthood.

Not the hopeful kind.

The practical kind.

That year, most people were talking about futures: college plans, dorm rooms, what came next.

My parents were unraveling in real time.

My dad disappeared in ways I didn’t yet have language for.

Contact thinning. Distance growing.

The quiet between us stretching longer than I knew how to cross.

At the same time, the house I was living in emptied out too.

Adults leaving. Responsibilities arriving early.

A trailer with no hot water.

A sense that whatever safety net I thought existed had quietly been folded away.

By the time I walked across the stage, I already understood something I shouldn’t have had to yet:

that showing up was not the same as being held.

That summer, I didn’t fall apart.

I adjusted.

I learned how to move forward without asking too many questions.

How to carry myself like someone older than I was.

It looked like maturity.

It felt like going quiet again.

⸻

Around that same time in my life, I met Jamie.

Not in the middle of some dramatic turning point.

Not at the end of anything.

Just in that quiet stretch after youth, when everyone is pretending they know where they’re headed.

We became friends first.

There was no rush to define it.

Just time, conversation, the kind of closeness that builds without needing to announce itself.

He was carrying his own version of quiet then.

The kind that comes after heartbreak.

After loss.

After believing deeply in something and wondering if it’s wise to believe again.

I didn’t know any of that at the start.

And even if I had, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

I wasn’t trying to fix anything.

I wasn’t offering answers or reassurance.

I was just there.

Still open.

Still talking.

Still laughing.

Still present in a way I hadn’t yet learned to restrain.

Over time, he told me that being with me felt like coming home.

That he felt more like himself.

That something in him remembered how to believe again.

I don’t think it was because I showed him anything new.

I think it was because I didn’t ask him to become smaller, quieter, or less himself.

Sometimes presence is enough.

Sometimes staying open without instruction, without armor gives someone else permission to do the same.

⸻

When my dad died years later, I didn’t fall apart the way I expected to.

Life kept moving. I kept showing up.

But something inside me went very still.

It wasn’t the sharp kind of grief.

It was quieter than that.

A deeper hush.

The kind that settles in after everyone else goes home.

I recognized it immediately.

I’d been there before.

⸻

Garden State lingers in a beautiful chaotic way in my mind.

Not because of the plot.

Not because of the quirk.

Because it understands that strange space after loss—

when the world expects you to resume,

and you do,

even though something fundamental has shifted.

Andrew in the film doesn’t return home to grieve loudly.

He returns numb.

Managed.

Mistaking the absence of chaos for stability.

I knew that feeling.

Sam doesn’t feel like a character

she feels like an interruption.

She doesn’t arrive with answers or instructions.

She doesn’t try to organize grief or soften it into something manageable.

She stays exactly where she is unguarded, unarmored.

And because of that, everything around her has to adjust.

People tend to call that kind of presence strange.

Unreliable. Too much.

But what I see is someone who hasn’t learned how to disappear to make things easier for everyone else.

There’s a difference.

⸻

“This song will change your life,” she says.

It’s not a dare.

It’s not a prophecy.

It’s said plainly, like an observation.

New Slang by The Shins: songs don’t come looking for you.

They arrive sideways through car speakers, borrowed CDs, half-heard scenes.

They don’t announce themselves as important.

They just stay.

I didn’t know my life needed changing.

I didn’t know I’d gone quiet in ways that weren’t helping anymore.

I only knew that something in me recognized the sound.

⸻

There’s a moment in the movie where the static clears all at once loud and beautiful.

Mine was quieter.

No collapse.

No dramatic turning point.

Just a sensation returning.

A feeling moving again after a long time of stillness.

And that was enough.

⸻

I don’t think music changed my life all at once.

I think it reminded me that change was still possible.

That feeling—real feeling it wasn’t something I’d outgrown.

Just something I’d set down carefully and forgotten to pick back up.

Going home doesn’t always look like packing a bag.

Sometimes it’s realizing the place you used to return to no longer exists.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky,

a song meets you there without asking you to be anything other than awake

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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