Issue One

Spring of 2018, I had a mental breakdown. For years I've struggled with pinpointing exactly what caused it. I was a workaholic in a loveless relationship in a roach infested apartment uptown. If I wasn't working I was helping my family, brainstorming creative ideas for other people or getting as drunk and/or stoned as humanly possible.

 

 Maybe it started when the yellow cab I took home crashed into the divider off the exit for 125th street on the Westside Highway, when I walked home after rattling around the backseat because I had no visible injury. Maybe it was seeing my one cool uncle in a casket, though I don't remember feeling much while I was sorting through the zipping personalities, fielding tears and gossip, sharing flasks and cigarettes. Maybe it was in all of the in-betweens, the takeout boxes and dutch guts on my table like candles and potpurri, the ash in my keyboard. Perhaps watching my mom struggle to walk and breathe, watching the world get simultaneously more hostile and cartoonish. All of this to say that I'll probably never have a proper autopsy of the big breaking point, but a bunch of these things swirled in the toilet bowl that is my brain until it all flooded over.

I do remember the day it really ~started happening~. I was going to dinner with my ex and my cousin, our art collective had just finished and submitted a music video that went on to do really well (maybe a story for another day, let's stay on track now Amber) and we were celebrating at Pio Pio in midtown. Before I could order some ceviche and a Modelo, a rush hit me like a truck. 

 

There was something behind my eyes that couldn't let me take in any of my surroundings, it was tunnel vision, I was in a fish bowl. I could smell a million things at once, all of them making me feel sick and yet I knew I couldn't breathe. My face and hands were made of fizz, my mouth went completely dry even after I chugged a glass of water. I ended up spending that evening outside, chain smoking cigarettes and crying on the phone to whoever would listen that something was wrong with my brain. I was sure that I was going to die, and worse, I'd seen flashes of everyone I knew dead too. Some people I was sure were going to happen sooner rather than later and I couldn't parse if dying or survivor's guilt was harder to swallow.

 

The city I'd grown up in, the lights and the noise and the backdrop of chaos that used to soothe me had suddenly taken new and terrifying shapes. Existing at all was a too-tight itchy sweater, digging into every pore with something wiry. I spent days after living in an anticipation that this feeling was looming in the distance, ready to come take over again and render me, the world's most stable person, completely helpless. I couldn't deal, I couldn't be, let alone be tasked with being smart or strong or reliable. Everything that I'd tethered to my sense of self was gone and suddenly I was just in the abyss, nothing to stand on. Who was this person inhabiting my body, this person who was suddenly terrified of everything? Spoiler alert, it was me all along. Fear was my soft underbelly and I was on my back. 

 

I won't bore you with the all of the details of what it took to get out of that paralysis of fear, the jaws of which almost ended me completely. I'll say this: fear is still a thing I look in the eyes of every day, a part of me that's controlled but not bested. Creating and consuming horror and other fear-related genres, making fear a study and an artform has been a huge turning point for me and the inspiration behind creating this issue of The Can. I love seeing different flavors and textures of art come alive in one space where they can be appreciated and a truly human experience can be shared. 

 

The world has become a scarier place since 2018; 2025 has left anyone with a shred of a soul with a lot to fear. Rights are at stake, bigotry and greed are justifying massacres and trafficking, fascism hangs over us, a threat getting louder and louder. There's much to fear and even scarier, much to do in an effort to stop it. 

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Anyway, I hope you enjoy this labor of love.

xoxo, Amber

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