A place for things made, discovered, and shared.

The Lantern Room is where we share creative work from the Speak Your Truth Now community—music, writing, visual art, photography, film, handmade work, and whatever else people find along the way.

Some pieces may tell a story. Some may carry meaning only their creator understands. Some may simply exist because someone wanted to make something.

There is no required message. Creation is enough.

From the Community

From the Artist

Weightless captured what I can only describe as a final awakening—the moment when so many things I had been carrying finally became clear, and I realized I didn’t have to carry them anymore.

It wasn’t dramatic. It felt lighter than that. Like something had quietly released.

I wrote from that feeling, but when I shared the song, something unexpected happened: other people seemed to recognize the feeling too. Their stories weren’t necessarily mine, but the emotion was familiar.

Maybe that’s what becoming weightless is. Not forgetting where you’ve been, but realizing you don’t have to keep carrying all of it with you.

From the Artist

Leave the Dishes is about something that sounds simple but has never been particularly easy for me: putting the work down and allowing myself to just be.

There will always be another task, another responsibility, another thing I could finish before I stop. It can become easy to believe that rest, fun, and play are things we earn only after everything else is done.

But everything is never done.

This song reminds me to leave the dishes sometimes. Go outside. Turn up the music. Take the drive. Be ridiculous. Be present.

The dishes will still be there when you get back. Your life is happening now.

From the Artist

Disappearing Ink! is about the family systems we’re born into before we even know they’re systems.

Long before we’re old enough to understand our families, we begin learning the rules. Who we’re supposed to be. What we’re allowed to say. What we don’t talk about. Who needs protecting. Who gets blamed. What love is supposed to look like.

We agree to things before we even know we’re agreeing.

Some of those agreements follow us for years because they don’t feel like rules. They just feel like the way things are.

Disappearing Ink came from recognizing those invisible contracts and beginning to question them. What did I actually choose? What was handed to me? And what happens when the words I never consciously agreed to no longer get to write the rest of my story?

From the Artist

My mother had been drinking, and I was in the car with her and my sister. I knew I didn’t want to go with them. So I made a choice that probably made very little sense from the outside: I jumped out of the moving car and rolled onto the blacktop.

I chose the street.

Not long afterward, masked men entered my cousin’s home during an armed robbery. One of my cousin’s friends chased after them and was shot and killed—on the same stretch of road where I had rolled out of that car.

I have carried the strangeness of that for a long time.

The song isn’t really about choosing danger. It’s about what choice can look like when you’re young, and none of the options in front of you feel safe. Sometimes the thing that looks reckless from the outside is the only way a person knows to say, I’m not going with you.

I didn’t have words like boundaries, agency, or family systems then.

I just knew I could open the door.

So I did.

From the Artist

Becoming My Own is about reclaiming your power—not power over anyone else, but ownership of yourself.

So I did. Family, relationships, expectations, old roles, fear, and even versions of ourselves we created simply to survive.

Eventually, you begin separating your own voice from all of that noise.

And something changes.

You stop asking for permission to become yourself.

Becoming My Own captures what that feels like to me: not becoming someone new, but recognizing what was already there and finally allowing it to take up space.

In many ways, this song holds the essence of Speak Your Truth Now.

Your power was never about controlling the world around you. It was about realizing your life belongs to you.