By: Daiyu Tang
Photos By: Daiyu Tang ((No AI except blood notes on SL taken photo with PS overlay))
Isla Hawthorn was singing when I first found her. I’m rather pleased dear reader that I’m starting this article with something other than ‘a journalist was murdered’ or that ‘someone had been stabbed outside the Gein’. Hathian and despite a lick of paint Columtreal do not often hand me soft openings without hiding something sharper underneath, and Isla’s voice carried in the Hathian Performing Arts Centre (‘HPAC’) despite the sound-proofing material of the recording booth a tone that suggested weight of a song which was not simply being performed… It was being survived or at least coming from a place of where survival had been needed.
When she stepped out and realised I had been nearby, she apologised for the volume.
“Oh uh.. Hi… sorry if I got too loud. I’ve been kind of on a roll,” she told me. Considering I work there when not at the Observer, and that music is a part of the place, it really wasn’t an issue. There are worse things to hear through a wall than a student making art. Trust me dear reader, Hathian has provided most of them to me already; screaming whatever some gangs might say is not an art. Singing is.
Early Years: Pageants, Cattle Drives and Performance
Isla is now a student at Columtreal University (‘CU’), studying psychology with a wider goal of becoming a victim’s advocate. She, as a former victim is making a choice to do something that would benefit others like her. Perhaps the music, psychology and her career goal all come from the same place; a need to turn survival into something useful. Something that can help and heal.
“I survived,” she told me. “My focus is showing them how to not just survive… but to thrive.”
Before CU, before Hathian, and before the darker headlines that later followed her, Isla was already used to being looked at. Old pageant coverage the Observer dug up when doing a little bit of background research shows her winning early, stepping onto stages as a teenager, singing, dancing and learning how to hold herself under lights.
The music started even earlier than that. “I started singing as a kid on cattle drives,” she said, explaining that when she was about six, her father let her help move cattle between fields. What would take two hours on horseback became a day-and-a-half journey with several hundred head of cattle, campfire songs, and adults indulging a child who wanted to pretend she was in the wild west.
“One of em had a guitar, and they all started singing old cowboy songs. So I started with those.”
From there came song writing, YouTube uploads, deleting, reworking, a “little closet studio”, and eventually an open mic at Rader Records that reminded her how much she missed performing.
“So… I sat down and started up again,” she said. “Slowly posted them on YouTube and figured I’d give others a chance to hear them too. That maybe something I sang or said would vibrate just right with their soul and they’d feel the peace that I find music is good at bringing.”
‘Vibrate just right with their soul’ is a line I would suggest CU’s public relations department steal immediately.
Slasher Survivor: The Headline She Did Not Choose
Some readers may already know Isla Hawthorn’s name from older Cedar Park headlines. The public record is ugly enough without the Observer needing to chew through it for spectacle, although you can view our research in the following link if you wish.
A string of killings in Cedar Park became known through stories about the ‘Cedar Park Slasher’, murdered teenagers, false suspicion, curfews and fear.
Isla Hawthorn was reported as the sole survivor of the final attack from a killer with a reported violent fixation on her.
But in HPAC, there was a different version of Isla to the one shown in the articles. The version in my office was a young woman who talked to me about music, maths, Sigma, cattle drives, pageants, open mic nights and the difficult business of becoming a whole person. I know all about that and while trauma sharing can be over-rated, sometimes it’s nice to know there are other people, around campus, who have gone through some pretty terrible shit and lived to tell the tale. Now, you might say in Hathian there’s a lot of those survivors; but many of them become twisted and cruel and start to perform the very violence on others that they themselves suffered. Not Isla… (so far – Hathian caveat)
“I’ve been through some terrible shit,” she said. “It doesn’t define me. It doesn’t dull my sparkle and who I am as a person. It taught me things I needed to know though. Like how to keep moving forward.”
Some people survive by becoming hard enough that nothing gets through, we wear our scars as armour. Perhaps I fit into that description. Some survive by staying bright out of sheer spite and hard work (and I use the word spite here, only in the sense it spites those who tried to take her down). Isla has that brightness and while in the traditional sense there was no spite; by existing and creating and doing she is spiting those who put her down.
“I think I needed this… the catharsis of just… telling my story and my feelings through songs,” she said. “You don’t write what I’ve been writing if you’re good.”
A New Chapter: Finding Me
Isla’s current project is called ‘Finding Me’. “I’ve lived my life based on a promise to always live for those I lost. But this? This is me accepting that I have to live my life for me and on my terms, because in the end I survived and I’ll always carry them with me.”
That may be the core of this article, really. Not forgetting. Not pretending the past did not happen. Not dressing trauma up as a neat little lesson. But learning the difference between carrying memory and being crushed by it. Isla, I and other survivors will not be crushed by it. Even those who purport to be the ‘games masters’ (Yuugen reference incoming) are by their very acts demonstrating being crushed by what has happened to them in the past. With Isla, this wasn’t what I took away.
“So it’s a sort of letting go, of acceptance. Of realizing that grief isn’t something I need to drown myself in. It’s kind of like… a phoenix almost, rising from the ashes, tempered by the past but ready to see what else life has for me.”
Her sound, she explained, is shifting too. What began in country, pageantry and so on has grown into something that sits somewhere between the Texas she came from and the rock or punk-influenced sound that better fits who she is now.
“So this stuff is more about this now grown side of me. I’m not 16, 17, 19 anymore. I’m not a teenager. I’m an adult, with an ID that allows me to drink and everything. So my style needed to grow up too. And so it has.”
At CU, Isla is not just passing through. She has joined Sigma, made friends, found work tied to her degree, found other work she can do for fun, and somehow convinced the University to let her take advanced calculus over the summer for enjoyment. “Hathian took some getting used to, but I got to do an open mic night, I’ve made friends, and I’m slowly learning where more things are,” she added.
When asked how she would explain the past without letting it control her, a thing I often think about as I write about the latest atrocity, she took a moment and then answered:
“Who you are, and who you become are not two separate things like alot of us are taught as kids,” she said. “Learning to merge the two sides of yourself, and to never let anything or anyone dull that sparkle that makes you, you? That’s what I’d say.”
My thoughts as your editor? That is not a bad lesson for the University, or Hathian, or anyone still trying to work out whether their scars are a map, a warning label, or simply proof that something healed badly but healed anyway.
