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

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.

Sam doesn’t feel like a character to me.

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

That’s part of why Garden State lingers the way it does.

Not because of the plot.

Not because of the quirk.

But 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 doesn’t return home to grieve loudly.

He returns numb.

Managed.

Mistaking the absence of chaos for stability.

I knew that feeling.

⸻

“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.

The song is New Slang by The Shins, but what mattered wasn’t the band or the genre or the moment in indie history.

Back then, songs didn’t come looking for you.

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

They didn’t announce themselves as important.

They just stayed.

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 film where the static clears all at once loud and beautiful.

A scream into open space.

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 the 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 anyway

quietly,

without asking you to be anything other than awake.

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Searching For Stars

Get Up, Dress Up, Show Up (A Letter of Light in Honor of Jillian Owens)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • January 13, 2026

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a mother. It’s one of my earliest memories — that knowing. Long before I understood how fragile futures could be, or how quickly a body can turn against the stories you carry inside it. In 2011, my husband and I saw two pink lines on a test we never expected to turn positive. And almost just as quickly, everything unraveled. There was bleeding. Bed rest. Words spoken softly by doctors that landed like doors closing. A ruptured tube. Emergency surgery. A body barely saved in time — and a future suddenly put into question. What followed was a kind of quiet devastation. Not just grief, but a fog. A stillness where days blurred together and getting out of bed felt optional. My sewing machine sat untouched. The parts of me that loved creating, thrift-store treasure hunting, making something beautiful out of almost nothing — they went quiet too. Around that time, I found someone who believed in getting up anyway. I don’t remember the exact moment I found her — only that I did. Somewhere in the haze, I stumbled onto a blog. Onto refashioning. Onto creativity that didn’t ask permission or require perfection. Onto a woman who showed up daily — with humor, intelligence, kindness, and a sense of play — and made something beautiful no matter what the day looked like. Her name was Jillian. She embodied a philosophy I already knew by heart — one that my cousin Alisha used to live by and repeat often: Get up. Dress up. Show up. Jillian didn’t do it loudly. She did it her way. Through thrifted dresses and careful stitches. Through learning and sharing. Through smiling at the camera with a softness that felt real. She showed that even a day at home could still be a day you showed up for. And slowly — almost without realizing it — I did too. Her website was genuinely great — thoughtfully designed, beautiful, functional, and easy to follow. The way she explained each refashion made learning feel accessible instead of intimidating. I learned so much from her details and descriptions. She was a truly gifted teacher, and her work absolutely leveled up my upcycling and thrifting skills. I started checking in every day. She refashioned clothes, loved thrifting, and had a dachshund named Douglas. Honestly, that alone would’ve pulled me in. The rest though…her beauty, light and the soul of her project just added more layers of awe. There was joy in the way she moved, in the way she explained what she was doing, in the way she treated clothing not as something precious or untouchable, but as raw material for play. Even on ordinary days — even when she was staying home — she showed up as herself. Fully dressed. Fully present. Fully in it. Watching her felt like permission. Permission to take up space again. Permission to care. Permission to make something simply because it felt good to make. She wasn’t chasing perfection. She was practicing presence. And in doing so, she reminded me of a part of myself I had misplaced — the part that loved creativity for its own sake. The part that knew how to make something beautiful out of almost nothing. Slowly, my feet hit the floor again. I dusted off my sewing machine. I went back to thrift stores and started treasure hunting the way I used to — curious, playful, unafraid. I remembered how good it felt to learn something new, to craft, to sew, to stitch, to reshape. For the first time in a long time, I felt like myself again. I didn’t know you, Jillian. But I knew your presence. I knew your rhythm. I knew the way you showed up — day after day — with creativity, humor, and steadiness. I knew the way you stood in your body and let it be seen, unpolished and unapologetic. I knew the joy you carried into ordinary moments. Watching you felt like witnessing a kind of wholeness. Not perfection. Just presence. The kind that says this life is worth showing up for, even on hard days. You didn’t know what I was carrying when I found you. You didn’t know how hard it was for my feet to hit the floor, or how much of myself I had lost in that season. But you reached me anyway. You helped me remember how to stand up again. How to get dressed for my own life. How to show up — not for an audience, but for myself. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for living your creativity out loud. Thank you for making space for joy. Thank you for finding beauty in disaster. Thank you for helping me find my way back to the heart of myself. My feet hit the floor and I plugged my sewing machine in again because of you! This light you left behind is real. And it’s still moving. In loving memory of Jillian Owens (1982–2021). Forever Refashionista.