May the 4th Be With you

Before I joined The Corsair, I was just Ashley. No particular job title. No claim to fame, really nothing to sneeze about. During that time I searched deeply for who I was, what I wanted to say, and who I wanted to be. For most of my life my thoughts were chaotic, confusing, and didn’t have a lot of rhyme or reason to them. They got much worse when I turned sixteen and was kidnapped by a family friend for almost a year. It's not a topic that I openly speak about much, and I try not to think about it more often than not.

That year was traumatic, violent, and still affects my daily life. If I learned anything from years of therapy and inner searching after that incident, I learned that life happens. There’s no stopping it, and there’s no way of truly controlling what happens to you, or why it happens. It just does. My need for control over all things in my life is strong and untamed sometimes.

It gives me anxiety, and I think it makes me look for an exit in rooms a little more than a normal person, but it's also my superpower. Through my own trauma I learned how to help heal others, and lift them up through their own healing from traumatic experiences. Trauma can come in all shapes and forms and it doesn’t discriminate in any way.

This issue features a woman on our cover with passion in her eyes, fighting for what she believes is right, and our top story is a USC rally against sexual violence. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it is for me to edit these sorts of things, and to stomach the fact that people are still fighting to not get assaulted. Even though I’ve dealt with a lot of the things that happened to me, it still affects my emotions in a powerful way.

But it's not all bad. Those emotions make me who I am. Someone who is passionate about social justice, art, and life. My favorite movie, Sabrina (1954) has a line in it that I decided to live my life by a long time ago. “I have learned how to live, how to be IN the world and OF the world, and not just to stand aside and watch. And I will never, never again run away from life. Or from love, either.”

The line is delivered by Audrey Hepburn as she writes to her father from Paris, and has stuck with me for years now. I think of it everytime I think I’m too afraid to accomplish something, or honestly if I’m feeling plain old cynical. The power that we have as humans to accomplish things we never thought possible, and to push ourselves in times of turmoil as well as fear, is so incredibly vast. Especially when we are surrounded by people who inspire us. (Even if they’re on our TV screen.)

Which leads me to this last week. I went out of my comfort zone, and pushed past my fear to interview one of my favorite singers. Who I found at a time when I was down, and in my own head. Their music inspired me to keep going, and to keep pushing myself to be who I wanted to.

Their music in a way makes me feel less alone in my head. LP is an artist in charge of their own sexuality, their own being, and uses their creative voice to express feelings of love, heartbreak, excitement, and every emotion in between. When their management returned the email I had sent, and told me that the interview I requested with LP was a GO, I couldn’t believe it.

When I interviewed LP, and our conversation felt more like a catch up between old friends I was on cloud nine. We shared conversation about how the other did during quarantine at the height of COVID-19, and discussed our favorite bands. They asked me how I was doing in general, and we even discovered that we have a mutual friend here in Los Angeles. (Bonavega, I’m looking at you.)

The fifteen minute “Phoner” (As her management called it) turned into thirty minutes of natural conversation that showed me, anything is possible, and that even if my thoughts get chaotic, I have a team behind me that feel like I do sometimes.

This issue is really special to me, and I’m excited to present you Issue 4 of The Corsair.

May the 4th, be with you.

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