what really happened, part 1

or, how bout them transparent dangling carrots? or, how I didn't know I was burning out until it was too late, and why I'm thankful it happened.

Happy Tuesday my friends. Hope you are feeling warm and cherished today, whatever your relationship status. Buy yourself a pastry! Even if you have a girlfriend! <3

Before I present the following piece of writing let me just do a tiny bit of housekeeping:

Only a few days left to snag a seat at my very first ever songwriting clinic this Saturday, Feb 18. <3 only $111 gets you 3 sessions with me and a pretty cool group of people this weekend. I can’t wait!!

In other news, Moda Spira and I released a new cover of “See You Soon” by Coldplay. It’s preettttyy dreamy, I’m just saying. :) This one is wistful, pensive, perfect for grey skies (or sunny winter ones, or nighttime in summer, or, or, or…) and I think you’ll love Moda’s beautiful vocals. I sing in the background of this one and we both produced/arranged. For full credits see Moda’s post here. The next one will come out in March and feature me on lead. In the interim while I get my new album all the way ready for launch we have a few little Coldplay songs coming out to tide us all over. Here’s the first one!

Art for ‘See You Soon’ by the team at Classic Reality. Prints coming to my store very soon.

Without further ado…what really happened?

‘What really happened’—a concept slipperier than a greased pig. ‘What really happened’ is elusive, because the best we can do at representing anything complex is compare narratives and find the harmonies between them.

For example: you and your partner are in a tricky, sticky conversation—the kind with trip wires everywhere, triggers scattered like landmines between the defense barriers popping up without anyone’s permission. You circle around and around the frustration or the offense, trying to make sense of the other’s experience in light of your own. It takes time, perhaps tears, and a concerted effort for you both—a choosing and re-choosing, amid sighs, accusations (no matter how gently said) and struggling to feel heard—but you get there. Your experiences may still diverge but they have been harmonized enough that the vibration between you leaves your heads and returns to your hearts; you feel relief, release, and maybe even romance. The space between you has been brought back into ‘neighboring country’ territory (from ‘north and south pole.’)

So what really happened to me over the past, oh, let’s say about ten years? It’s complicated. I don’t know, exactly. I know my experience, my narrative, my version; and that’s the only one I can share. I’m not trying to be smilingly political here; I’m just giving you this flowery disclaimer because I don’t want to preach to anybody. This is what I’ve experienced, but I’m not prescribing it, I’m not propping it up as morally superior, and I’m not pretending it’s the only possibility here. You know what I mean? 

This is my version of events. 

People sometimes ask me what god I pray to, or if I pray to one, and for a while there I said ‘I don’t know.’ And I didn’t know. I felt myself to be in a sort of wilderness of mind, and it sort of made me angry because that’s exactly what THEY were saying; ‘come home, you’re lost.’ I know I’m lost, I’d shout in my head. And you are too, only you won’t admit it.’

Sometime around 2015 I began finding myself doing a little bit of nihilistic thinking. And then, slowly, I did some more nihilistic thinking; and after a few years of that, I think it’s safe to say that by halfway through 2018 I could have easily been termed a ‘nihilist’ by anyone who would know—except that no one did know. I felt so ashamed that I was feeling and thinking in these ways that I kept it to myself. I felt so strange about the fact that sometimes I held my two children in my arms and told myself I didn’t love them, because love was just a cocktail of chemicals in my bloodstream and we are just making up all these high flown stories about that in some sort of futile pursuit of meaning. (Casual, cute, cuddly af, I know.) 

I did talk to my trauma therapist, a kind and highly skilled  (and very Christian) woman who graciously held my need to use the term ‘higher power’ only in reference to God; at that point, I couldn’t utter the word ‘god’ without feeling a sickening anxiety that could easily take over my whole headspace, my whole air space, my whole day. I thought like a nihilist, sure…I had let go mentally of the idea of a literal hell, but I still physically felt like I was in danger. And I was beginning to hate myself for being torn this way. There was a sort of enmity in my body, a constant struggle ranging from ‘tug of war’ to ‘nuclear war’ and everywhere in between. Some might have said I was depressed; I was never given that diagnosis by my (highly qualified) therapist. (I was, though, told my presenting symptoms were highly consistent with both OCD and CPTSD) (what if sometimes depression is just a word for what happens to people who are managing far too much internally and parts of them have to go to sleep to conserve energy) 

The worry—the constant, whining worry—was really weird for me. On one hand, I no longer intellectually believed in hell. I had started letting that one go in 2013. It took a while, but I’d gotten there. I didn’t believe it existed. I felt like I *knew* it didn’t. And yet, there was a part of me that just couldn’t stop *worrying* about it. And by ‘worrying about it’, I mean repeatedly thinking about it, about how it doesn’t exist but I still didn’t feel okay, going on an inner journey of self-criticism and self-questioning, arguing with my own thoughts, and helping to co-create a condition of stress that felt like it might drive me to the point of near-madness. It was like a chemical addiction, I think; my today arguing with my yesterday, my heart arguing with my cynicism, my fears arguing with my feelings. And I sort of got sick of that, pretty quickly. So I decided there had to be some way to get into a better place; some way to feel all right again. I didn’t think I could believe in anything anymore, but I also didn’t want to feel that terrible, so I was willing to be open to whatever might present itself as a possible solution. 

This is not an ‘and now I believe in the Christian God again’ story. I thought I’d just spare you any theatrical dragging out on that score. No, that’s not it at all. Music is my higher power.

In late June of this year I was sitting under the old maple tree in my back yard with a dear old friend and my partner; I stared up at the lace tangle of branches, some dying from age or disease (I’m not sure which, and I can’t afford an arborist right now) and watched the sun making rainbows with the dozens of spider webs that connected them. I had the thought that it was funny that I had ever called this tree “my tree”, as though it belonged to me. I felt as though the tree was laughing at me, ent-like, and I laughed along with this wise and seemingly near-sentient being. “My tree.” Insert cry-laughing emoji here.

I have received so much healing just by living here on this land. When I first arrived, I put my car in park in the new white concrete driveway, I stepped out into the grass and felt my knees buckle beneath me. I knew that I wanted to live here. I looked around me, stunned, at the old cedar trees, the maples, the walnut trees, and felt instant belonging. I looked around for a moment, wondering what to do. It didn’t feel right to just rush into the house and forget about the land it was built on; I found a small amethyst in the little gross sticky cup in my car that I *think* is for coins but that often ends up holding my starbucks drink stoppers or random things my kids leave there; I brushed it off, held it to my heart, and took off my shoes. Standing barefoot on the grass I said hello to the land and asked if I might be its caretaker. I walked over to a giant cedar tree that cast shadows over the red barn, placed a hand on it, and buried it at the base.

I wish I knew more about the people who have tended this land before me. Who lived here fifty years ago—a hundred years—five hundred? I know that I live on land once tended by the Tsalaguwetiyi, the Shawnee, and the S’atsoyaha. I know that the Tennessee river, connected to the Cumberland which passes directly behind my house, was called “the singing river” in those days and goes all the way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama — another “music city.” I know that I live here now, and my children spend half their time here. I hear this land singing back to me. I am home here, but not because I ‘own’ this land; I am home here because this land is graciously providing home for me. We are in a dynamic and (I hope) symbiotic relationship. That day under the maple tree in June, the tree laughed. “You call me your tree,” the tree said. “Ha…ha…ha.” Its laugh sounded like somebody recorded the Count on Sesame street and slowed it way way down.

This land has shown me that, for quite some years before I began living here, I was burnt out. I truly did not understand this until I settled in this home; I’d been pushing through it for so long that I considered it all ‘normal.’ Burnout is not just stress or tiredness, but is a deep exhaustion usually accompanied by cynicism and dread, and which feels as though it may never lift. (Read more here) Things had begun to improve quite a bit in 2019 when I first started communing with psychedelic plants but I continued to try to push forward through feelings of exhaustion when it came to my “work” — my music, my art, my creative expression. When I released Eden in 2020 I had been working on it for almost two years and running into walls left and right creatively and emotionally; I finally just said f*** it, I’m putting it out’—I just couldn’t bear to work on it anymore. It felt deeply frustrating and tiring to even work on music at all. Hello, burnout.

In my own lane, at a moderate level of fame, I had accidentally become a poster child for Catholics in a largely evangelical Christian business. I began to feel the pressure of (my projection of) peoples’ expectations and their hopes for what I would do creeping in not just to my music making in the studio, but into my thoughts at night lying awake in bed. I often thank my lucky stars (whichever ones they are) that I didn’t get more successful than I did…I would have never made it. I burned out on a mid-level career in a small lane of a dying music industry model. What would have happened if things had actually gone well? I shudder to think about it, if I’m honest. At least I’m pivoting from a place of relative anonymity; I may have had a successful run in Christian music but I wasn’t about to be in the hall of fame. However medium-sized my career may have been, falling from grace might have been the best thing that ever happened to me; I really did have to let go of the illusion of control, the delusion of safety, the conceit of stability, the self-deceit of people pleasing.

And now? I can do what I want. And I’m going to.

(to be continued)