So what ever happened to Only Child Syndrome?
No no! Not the Substack you’re reading right now! The deceased (but archived) Music + Talk show on Spotify?! Here’s the long answer:
When I took my effective hiatus from the show, I was about to get married, and was heading to Latin America for a year of adventuring and backpacking. It was a hiatus from everything. I tentatively packed my portable mic and downloaded my editing software to my iPad (lighter than a laptop for travel), but I suspected that the show would become largely tabled until my return.
Over my year abroad, I managed to publish four frantic episodes, featuring songs we listened to on our frequent day-long drives headed south on the Pan-American, with bits and pieces of scattered memories and reflections on Spanish-speaking life. While enthusiastic, it was low production and at times half-baked.
The best episode was my last, made while driving from Lima, Peru to the northern Chilean border. It was the holiday season, and I managed to reconnect with my community back in New York and build a compilation of submitted voice memos with 2024 predictions. It was my best work on the road, not only in my subjective opinion but based on listens and ratings. Only Child Syndrome works in conjunction with a community. I realized through the positive reception of this last and final episode that the Only Child Experience was on hold until I returned.
Upon my return, after peeling open my laptop for the first time in a year, I logged into my Gmail and was met with an email from Spotify’s Creator Department - the Music + Talk feature was getting discontinued. I had three weeks to post, after which the feature would disappear from my creator profile.
Do I post a farewell episode? Do I post ten?
No, no, I answered my question. Do nothing.
So I did. Or, I guess, didn’t. I kicked the can down the line and went on a cross-country road trip for three months with Hayden, my husband, in my dad’s 2001 Mazda B3000. We outfitted the truck bed for living, squeezing in a mattress with a whole lot of canned food from Costco tucked underneath, all pressed under a $100 truck cap off of Facebook Marketplace. We visited family, friends, and 20 national parks. Unlike my time in Latin America, when I frequently lapsed in documenting my travels, I journaled almost every morning. I wrote about the free places we slept on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, the people we met at diners, and the conversations Hayden and I had in the quiet moments. And yet, even as the pages of writing and reflection piled up, I never considered pulling out my mic to record. Without a landing place, I didn’t see the point.
I did consider the demise of my creative outlet. When the adventure ended and my life went back to a normal grind, what would I produce and share? I reached out to radio stations and marketed my show, but the moment the show got picked up, it didn’t seem like a solution. It wasn’t the equivalent of what I built on Spotify, and I’m not the radio host I was when I created Only Child Syndrome at my college station.
Hayden and I parked on our street in West Philly for the first time on August 29th at 7:30 am, a Wednesday morning. We had left the last stop on our road trip, Ann Arbor, at midnight, and drove through the night to move into our first home in a year and a half. Over the weeks that followed, we moved in with my oldest friend in her new house. We washed the layer of dust off our clothing using our very own washer and dryer, hung up prints and paintings from our acquired collection, and cooked at home with food from Aldi, Hayden’s happy place. It was all the mundane things we dreamed of on our most exhausted days on the road. Clothing on hangers, utensils in drawers, and most importantly, family and friends nearby. Our love and commitment to each other had traveled with us across borders, but our context was back.
If you feel comfortable taking it from me, a girl who spent one and a half years on the road, this would be my only cautionary message: no matter how much you love to travel, the unknown will never feel as good as the community feels. Home is what gives “away” meaning. And just as quickly as the adventure unfolds, it wraps up, dropping you off at the next gritty, grind-y chapter of rebuilding what was depleted and deepening the good that was always there. I think that’s what Only Child Syndrome was for before, and what it will be here, spreading out over Substack in words and audio.
Commentary on Brooklyn people took up a lot of time on my old show. I loved interviewing other Brooklyn people, making fun of them, praising them, and cheering them on. I loved being a Brooklyn girl recording a Brooklyn show. But I was never, as they say, putting anyone on. So much content comes out of New York City. So much art is about it. So many interesting people inhabit it, and not for nothing, everyone already knows it.
When I was away, a citizen of the world, I loved to observe, and I’ll be sharing a lot of observations and stories in my posts to come, but I was always just a sponge.
Now, I’m completely taken by Philly people. Philly cool people, Philly corporate people, Philly people on the trolley, Philly people in the grocery store. I love it, and I love the idea of being seen as one of them. And here’s the thing, I feel like a lot of you don’t get it, and frankly, need to be put on. So there will be a lot of that. Recorded conversations with people you should know, selfishly so that I can get to know some of them too.
I’m also going to share vignettes from my life while I was gone. My wedding day. Hiking the Inca Trail. Waiting in a really long gas line.
And of course, there will be music. For now, I can’t synthesize the music and the talk like I used to, but I’m going to embed a playlist in each mailing and fit in commentary in ways that make sense. Here’s this week’s:
So join me, and sign up for the newsletter to become a part of the Only Child Syndicate, the cool subscriber nickname that Hayden just came up with. Let’s give this a try!