Meet O

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful O a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

O, so good to have you with us today. We’ve got so much planned, so let’s jump right into it. We live in such a diverse world, and in many ways the world is getting better and more understanding but it’s far from perfect. There are so many times where folks find themselves in rooms or situations where they are the only ones that look like them – that might mean being the only woman of color in the room or the only person who grew up in a certain environment etc. Can you talk to us about how you’ve managed to thrive even in situations where you were the only one in the room?

Being non-binary, there are a lot of situations where I kind of stick out in a room. This becomes very apparent whenever I go to an industry meetup for audio professionals, where most of the room is populated with men to the degree that they almost look copy-pasted from each other. I don’t blame them, the getup they wear is very similar to how I’m often dressed: comfort first, lots of pockets for holding adapters and batteries and other bits and bobs, plausible deniability business casual. I never really know what they make of me when I enter these rooms, although I get “she/her” more often than I would expect to, especially with my (admittedly, quite patchy) facial hair and deep voice.

This lack of social awareness has actually kind of been a benefit to me, though, because it’s a lot harder to get somebody *out* of a room than to prevent them from coming in in the first place. I’m being kind, finding gigs, expressing myself creatively, educating, all while happening to be transgender. My hope is that every positive experience that someone has with me tips the scale towards a more empathetic society. I make an effort to be positively memorable, and that’s gotten me into some wonderful situations.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I believe in the power of the imagination, and audio is an excellent conduit. Your brain is flanked by your ears. I also feel like we rely too heavily on our eyes to pass judgement. What someone looks like tells you very little about what they have to say, especially in an age where most of the daily contact you have with other people is through a digital veil.

I always knew that I wanted to create things, whether it was the camcorder home movies of my early childhood where I loudly fed my sister her lines, “The princess can’t get married, she has to continue the family clowning business!” or my first podcast in my teen years, sat on my bedroom floor with a friend, an Otamatone, and my freshly unboxed Blue Yeti. Growing up in suburban Colorado, I edited videos for small YouTube channels, filmed local dance recitals and musicals with my dad, helped to build up a broadcasting program at my high school, wound up with a job at the University of Colorado Boulder mixing together the livestream videos in Grusin Hall (a million thanks to Kevin Harbison), and started making my own documentaries. All the while, I was navigating my own queerness and gender identity, speaking out in small but impactful ways to make my world more inclusive. I spent a brief stint in Chicago (my first flight from the nest!) before COVID lockdown forced me to have a serious life-evaluation and lead me to set my sights on Canada and start taking Testosterone.

Now, fresh out of Toronto Metropolitan University’s RTA Media Production program, I’ve gone all in on sound. If you can hear it, I want to learn about it. I’ve dipped into the worlds of production mixing, post-production sound, podcasting, music, radio, live audio, and voice acting. For my university practicum thesis project, I dove headfirst down the rabbit hole of gender and voice, and created an immersive audio documentary called Soundscapes of Self out of interviews I conducted with over a dozen trans and genderqueer Canadians. You can listen to it yourself at soundscapesofself.online!

My current project, feeding my inner cringe teen, is a podcast following Dashcon 2, a sequel to the infamous unofficial Tumblr convention (and massive flop) held in 2014. It’s been SO fun to flex my journalism muscles in the weird online spaces I grew up in. Listen to that at dashcon2podcast.com.

There are so many reasons that I love what I do. I’m autistic, and being able to listen to the world through a mixer with adjustable volume is a godsend. It’s also infinitely easier to talk to people if you’re holding a microphone. I’m still in the early days of my career, but with all of the opportunity I’ve already found in Toronto, I look forward to each new day, new project, new learning opportunity, and new group of passionate folks to meet.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I like to say that I have a passion for compassion. So much of life revolves around playing silly little games in order to avoid your animal humanness, to find ways in which we’re distinct from each other. And while, yes, we’re all very different, we have been gifted with the capacity to communicate and create in order to better understand each other. I’m a trusting person, I’m a silly person, some might call me naive, but I do it on purpose. Making a better world starts with you. Not to say that you’re responsible for it all, but every time that you make the choice to step out of line, to embarrass yourself a little bit, to relinquish some of your abundance, you whittle away at someone’s cynicism, and you do them a true service.

It might sound cliche given my occupation, but you also go a long way just by listening to people. A patient listener is something that is always in demand. Learning to ask when advice is wanted and when someone just needs to untangle their thoughts by unspooling them through their mouth. I’ve been known to be an excellent rubber duck. You can also learn something from every single one of these listening sessions, even if you’re just learning the quirks of the person you’re spending time with.

Which brings me to my third philosophy, curiosity. The person that I described as my hero in my entrance essay to TMU is Dr. Lindsey Doe, the educator behind the YouTube channel Sexplanations. Her motto is simple: “stay curious”. A world that you refuse to investigate is a world that you have no power over, and while that ignorance can feel blissful, there is no freedom like knowledge. Cultivating the part of you that wants to know “why?” is the greatest thing you can do to escape helplessness. So many rules are just made up.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I want to work with weirdos. I want to work with people who feel a compulsion to create. If your imagination runs faster than you can catch it, let me help you distill it and welcome others into your unique world. Let’s explore together and figure out what your ideas sound like when they’re bouncing around in your brain. I’m pretty easily reached online through the contact form on my website, ostecina.com, and I hope to hear from you! As much as I love following my passion projects, the best things I’ve worked on could not have existed without the expertise, experience, and love that others put into it.

Contact Info:

Suggest a Story: BoldJourney is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems,
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
Highlighter Series
What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?

Coffee? Workouts? Hitting the snooze button 14 times? Everyone has their morning ritual and we

Highlighter Series
What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?

Our deepest wounds often shape us as much as our greatest joys. The pain we

Highlighter Series
Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?

Culture, economic circumstances, family traditions, local customs and more can often influence us more than