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Moyé first went live in 2021. I had built it outside my fine arts degree, and it became more than a platform for me. It became a yellow canary; I could gauge how well I was doing in life depending on how well Moyé was doing. If the staff weren't hearing from me, it meant I was busy and preoccupied and needed to make time for the things I loved. If we were doing well and stable, so was I.

It also became a place of refuge and stability; I took rest under its wings. When I didn't feel creative gratification or enough support from my degree, I could seek out different perspectives through Moyé. I could ask the diversely disciplined staff for their opinions, and I could set up interviews with people to get their perspectives. It was also a child I created myself that I fed, nurtured, and grew. It grew into a magnificent thing that I, as the editor, cherish.

The staff and I have this running joke where they call Ashley and me the mothers. I have no experience being a mother to a real, breathing human baby, but in a way, I feel like I am to Moyé. I see the relationship and the dynamic change. At first, my entire job was to nurture. Moyé, at its best, is the love of my life, the reason I wake up in the morning. At its worst, it is a high-maintenance burden that I can't imagine my life without.

When Moyé was first born, it had my eyes, my messiness, my ears, my photographic style, my nose, my wit, and my aesthetic. It needed constant attention - if not, it would cry and screech, and I actually risked it dying. Then it started to grow and developed characteristics of the staff and contributors who have helped raise it. It was stronger. It could defy me, sometimes for its own betterment, sometimes to its own failing. It could fly away and come back as it pleased. When someone poked it with a stick, I no longer felt it on my own skin but instead felt an empathetic, "Don't fuck with my child."

That's when I knew it was safe enough to bring into a space where I had felt creatively unsupported and unsafe to be vulnerable. But as I moved Moyé into my fine arts practice, there were obviously side effects. My bird-child, being built like me for real, does not take change seamlessly. I am afraid that some venomous poison concocted from various flavours of fear and shame that were poured into me infected the bird. It grew symptoms similar to complexes a child with a mother wound would have, and so I had to put it in a shoebox as one does.

My exploration these past six months was to resuscitate the bird. But there was a time in the course when I had to let Moyé be while I took a short step back. When I returned, I was faced with Schrödinger's conundrum. If I open this box, will Moyé be alive or dead?