Emily Nicole Murray
Featured: July 23rd, 2025
II have a tendency to cycle through obsessions, so when I first started thinking about answering this prompt, I was thinking about sports, and how teamwork and different positions show up differently in athlete’s lives outside of their sport. And then on top of that, their birth order. My brother plays softball (youngest of two, only boy, outfield), one of my roommates plays basketball (middle child, only girl, power forward) and the other plays volleyball (“youngest” of three, twin, middle blocker) and one of my best friends played D1 volleyball (youngest of two, only girl, outside hitter) in undergrad. I only ever played these sports as a child, and my main sport was swimming, which was individual (oldest of two, only girl, freestyle, backstroke, individual medley) unless I was in a relay, in which I was usually made to be the backstroker for the mixed medley. In high school, I was in color guard, meaning I spun six foot poles with 4-5 foot flags on them and everyone I tell that to says that makes sense. While thinking I’d switch into the band instead, I learned how to play three different types of saxophone and every drum available on the field.
The last thing I rabbit hole researched was the show Succession, I finally watched it. Wild. I can’t even comprehend how any of those characters operated in the world but I’ve also never been in such close proximity or had access to that amount of money or power so I was reflecting a lot on that this past month. Then I had to take a flight and the policies of the airline I was taking had changed so I spent hours reading through to try and understand the corporate gibberish of whether or not I could still check a bag for free on my return flight. So, y’know. Capitalism.
If I had the chance to talk all day about one thing… I’m a pretty big talker in general, but as for all day topics or things I could possibly teach a class on, probably storytelling and the tarot. The fool’s journey is something we all can relate to in some form, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Some people also get to experience Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey but I don’t think it’s as universal. That, or about how literally everything is drawing, but that’s might be a cop out because that’s what my practice is. “My whole life is a drawing separated into different groups of drawings and here’s why:”
Honestly I could probably tie those together into a class and the first lesson would be me showing 101 different illustrations of the fool card, getting into the history of it and then asking everyone to make 10 sketches of what their own fool card would look like. (I’d take this class, should I start an online class??)
I don’t have pictures of literally any of these things right now so here are some pictures of a bachelorette party that I helped plan and felt like an additional obsession because I then proceeded to rabbit hole down the wedding industrial complex.
