Can you die of excitement? I'm gonna find out soooon.

But god, I really hope not.

Forgive me God, for not writing this with any real preemptive exposition and going straight into a manically long episode –

Context: I’m about to move to New York City from Los Angeles, and it’s a big cross country endeavor and such.

Reality: Holy shit, every day I wake up with this weird sense of dread.

Below: how I made sense of it on this fine July 4.

Ya know, there’s this planet in astrology called Pluto (yeah, I’m sure you’ve heard of him and it’s debatable whether he’s a planet, but whatever).

He’s supposed to symbolize new beginnings following destruction of paradigms. He’s akin to Hades, god of the underworld, in Greek mythology. Every time you reckon with your shadow and the beliefs and patterns that aren’t setting you up for the life you live, and journey into the deepest of your psychological wounds, you can bet Pluto is there facilitating the whole thing. It’s what inspires you into your “phoenix rising from the ashes phase”. …Bear with me here.

Annnnnnd, my Sun sign (my ego) in good ol’ hardworking Capricorn is the same as the USA’s Pluto sign. (Yes! They get a birth chart for their birthday! Cute. Every empire had to have one, eh!) And Pluto in the sky as he is now is currently doing a doozy by choosing to “retrograde” on the exact degree for us both.

What this means, if you don’t want to look it up yourself, is…. me and the USA are really dying to who we thought we were.

Think of it as the subtler shadows crawl out and choke us all into changing; me, a little millennial here on this big rock, and the "greatest country in the world,” all reckoning with our greatest demons and watching our darkness play out in the most terrifying yet productive ways possible.

But sometimes, Pluto showing up is you realizing you kicked so many of the demons away, and now your darkness is your light, and that is how life has been??

And maybe your biggest ego death is to not associate “dying” with what will precede “you being able to have the best time ever.”

*****

And today, I came face to face with Pluto himself, while nursing a mild fever and driving home early from a concert on July 4, the dread genuinely rose to a fever pitch.

For days, I’d been thinking… can it get any better?

I felt my happiness was rooted from a place of reckoning with grief, sadness, anger, despair, and finding them all enjoyable helpful emotions that never took control of me.

After years of terrible mental health, I was shocked that Hades practically shrugged at me and said I could come and go as I please through his underworld.

That I could feel negative emotions touch me for a second, and then them just… fade away?

I’d made this decision earlier this spring to move to New York, to be the writer I’d always wanted to be, to live behind my comfortable West Coast beachy, sunny routine, and I was very excited about it.

I was aware I was finally ready to put my voice out there in the realm of fiction, and in the community. But what was this terror I’d been feeling? It wasn’t about people, it wasn’t happenings… it was like… a terror that I was this happy?

So then you can picture me listening to Carousel by Blink-182 cruising down the I-10, windows down, hair flapping in the wind, wondering a bit about this, and suddenly I look to my left and —

BAM!

Fireworks set off!! SEVERAL OF THEM. All in front of me.

Right at the last rays of sunset were lighting up all around me, and it was — I kid you not — terrifying. Because I saw my ego death being lauded and celebrated, lit up in front of me.

I didn’t get why I thought it was my ego death, but I was starting to think about what could be the words to explain my feeling. And the answer came to me in a way that was so sharp, biting right into my burning forehead, and I knew the exposition of my fear:

Holy shit I’m going to die of excitement.

I realized for how terribly I felt physically at the moment (blaming fever also for the weird drug trip like thoughts right now), I’d never, ever, ever in so long felt SO excited for something and felt it ROOTED in reality. Rooted in rightness. Rooted in like, wow I’m really confident in my desire to go to New York?

I felt like I was going to die because I felt “right”. Because I felt valid. Because I had achieved the most happy any human could ever be, and I didn’t even know how to explain why I felt that way because I had for a long time already but not been able to speak of it. I had finally beaten depression, not at that moment, but ongoingly, for a while now.

It was the realization — the sense of ‘ego death object permanence’ I was having about the state I’d been in for a while — that was what was blunting me over the head.

I felt genuinely like I had no choice but to bellow, THIS IS THE SEASON FINALE OF CRYSTALLLLLLL AS I’VE KNOWN HER, at the spectacle of light banging up around me, slamming on the gas pedal as I screamed at the top of my lungs.

I was overcome with shock, that, I had never been so proud of myself. I had never felt so secure in my ability to surmount ANYTHING. Face ANYTHING. The excitement for New York feels rooted in a sense of RIGHTNESS, and I don’t know how to describe it with anything but that feeling.

But thoughts rushed into my head, thoughts like, Wow, this feeling of euphoria I have right now is what every human wants to feel and maybe seldom have.

Not initiated by any drugs, it was the feeling that… I had complete agency and had engineered circumstances for myself that would lead to so much, fucking, fun. I had already had a taste of it while sitting on the subway in May months ago, but now, it hit me that this would continue.

And I realized, that I could only feel this because I’d been straight up living, for a while, in the days of “waiting for my life to start” again. I’d lived so fully that I had stopped living as voraciously as before. I’d stopped having erotic desire for LA because it’d given me what I was supposed to learn, and set me up for unbelievable excitement for a different city in a different future!??!

Because I’d lived out the life I had that existed in LA, and achieved a level of peace I had never realized could have a peak to it and entail a “phase 2” of my life journey. I had not known, that excitement for my life had slowly begun dying since 2021, and I’d been in denial because I didn’t want to leave the only thing I felt I’d ever built, but now I was actually needing to leave it to challenge myself further!!

The bond I had felt for Los Angeles was genuinely dying, but at this point, the fireworks echoed this sense of joy. Like I’d properly seen the beginning and now end of Crystal in LA and I was allowed to leave. Like that it was okay. Like that every day I’d spent recommitting to this city that I moved to for no other reason but to just exist in, where I’d barely had a career to hang onto or a community to attach myself to — I was allowed to exit it?!?

And the dread finally was revealed to me, what it’d been this whole time: a fear I could not feasibly be this happy, at 27, with so little to my name in terms of material assets, yet I felt like the wealthiest person on the planet. I felt like It could GENUINELY not get any better than this.

And I wept at the tragedy of genuinely fearing I would die of excitement.

I was genuinely terrified that I would never live to see the fruit of my anticipation — never get to test out whether New York would belong to me as Los Angeles had belonged to me, never get to dance in the streets feeling like I am here.

And it was because I’d felt loved by Los Angeles that I could identify this feeling was even possible for a fraction of the eroticism I could feel in a different location.

New York had the melting pot effect of millions of lives crammed into buildings, on the subways, in the streets, just waiting to touch each other that I’d always felt a little bit remiss to have in LA unless I worked for it. It also had the writer community, the people from my past, the potential lover I’d been looking for —

What if I straight up died in the next few months before I lived to see whether this dream could be real?

At this moment, an image of Hades, god of the underworld, swam into my mind. And I felt… better?

Because lord, that would make for a terrible “lesson” if I just died because I was afraid of feeling good about myself. I wouldn’t learn a thing!

The darkness is here to kick your ass, but not kill you. Right?

As I drove past the fireworks, weeping greatly at this fear but also weeping at the comfort, I almost drove right into fireworks being set off on my goddamn street.

Turns out, some of the fireworks Los Angeles was enjoying tonight were happening right here, by the front porch of the home I’d lived in the longest in my adult life. My porch.

The adrenaline of staying up to wait for the fireworks to end, coupled with my fever and the nasty Emergen-C I was drinking, would hopefully run out soon.

But as I parked my car a few streets away and took shelter inside, I realized, as I type this by my bedroom window, that I don’t have a fucking apt metaphor for what it means that the fireworks was by my front porch as well as lighting up my ego death weird moment while driving home. I don’t know why I’m still sitting here and I don’t know why I literally feel like “queen of the underworld” has finally been achieved as a title in my book.

I don’t even care about explaining that idea to anyone. It just fits. And as someone who’s felt they had to justify so much for so long, I suddenly ceased to care. I was just feeling.

Maybe like the fireworks, acceptance and peace about my acceptance and peace is just destined to be “closer than I thought.” So despite how I fear, for the first time in so long, dying before I get to experience even more happiness than I’ve already had — maybe that happiness will be closer than I thought too.

Maybe that’s my ego death. To just… feel and be like, cool, life will go on whether or not I think I deserve it.

The ego death is about my deservedness of the work I’ve done. I’ve come a long way of waking up every day in my childhood from ages 7-14 feeling like I wasn’t allowed to exist, and hiding for years from feeling like people would always hurt me. Now I’m still capable of being hurt, but also very capable of surviving, and damn I will continue to do that!

This is a long, tangled, ranty potentially nonsensical testimony to the fact that, I think I’ve found something I was looking for a long time, and didn’t realize I had until I felt my body orient itself east towards New York. I finally found what I’d been looking for, which was, peace? Which was feeling ready to just enjoy life, and be surprised by it like these loud noises in front of me?

To get to where I’m no longer “kind of okay with death,” is truly interesting. I’m not afraid of the death itself, actually. Or not getting to be in New York. I’m afraid I will die of the feeling I have right now, which is —

That everything is enough.

That achieving this feeling is why I will be happy in New York.

That I created something amazing, memorable, and belonging to me in Los Angeles for the past five years, and no one can ever take this sense of ownership from me, no matter how much my finances suck or my heart gets broken or my body betrays me —I finally got somewhere in my life I can point to as “relevant” and “built by Crystal.”

I do think I want some more money, some more experiences, some more notoriety, but fuck I’m ready to just be cool with the fact that This is enough and I’ve felt every day the enoughness when I wake up.

Even on my worst days, suddenly, somehow, I feel enough.

And the dread of fearing I’m not “allowed” to feel enough and then realize that leads to more blessings… that I’ll die before I can actually upgrade further… well, I’d only fear that if I’ve reached a precipice of philosophical inspiration.

Damn, this feels good.

I wish to feel at the edge of a new tomorrow all the time. Fireworks don’t need to bring that to me.

Hallelujah.