I AM PAIGE
LUNA

$1I moved to New York City to become a professional dancer. Then I choreographed, owned a dance company, worked as a production assistant, became a personal trainer, went to culinary school, built businesses, and opened Scarlet Kitchen & Lounge. I know. It sounds exhausting. Imagine living it.

Some people call that reinvention. Some members of my family probably call it further evidence that I have never known how to sit still or what the fuck I'm doing. They may all be right.

But every time I changed direction, I was following something I couldn't ignore. Even when the new thing made absolutely no sense to anyone else. Especially then.

At the time, I thought I was starting over again and again. Looking back, every version of me was following the same thread. I just couldn't see where it was leading yet. Eventually, it led to a restaurant, an ending I never saw coming, several identity crises, and forty-eight chapters. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

$1Now I write. I create. I move. I dance, train, make art, tell stories, get on camera, and follow ideas before I know exactly what they're going to become. Sometimes the art is a chapter. Sometimes it's movement. Sometimes it's a conversation, a video, a photograph, or a sentence that won't leave me alone until I do something with it.

I'm building a body of work around identity, belonging, ambition, starting over, and what happens when we stop editing ourselves to make everyone else more comfortable.

At the center of that work is my first book, I Am Here for It. Forty-eight chapters later, this is apparently what all those lives were preparing me to create.