You probably won’t ever see me talk much in the videos… if you do, it will be nothing short of a miracle. I suffer from a severe social anxiety disorder caused by past trauma. I am borderline agoraphobic. Meaning that, during this stay-at-home toilet-paper-shortage crisis, I am literally and figuratively, right at home. Isolation is comforting for a person who is afraid of other people.
Other people have hurt me in my life. Not just the typical things that hurt us. We all, at one point or another, deal with adversity, miscommunication, misunderstandings, and even the occasional bout with violence. The kind of hurt I’m talking about is the kind that changes you into another person. The kind that pushes you into a sort of inner cocoon of protection. You stop letting people in… you hide from them in plain sight. You make yourself really, really, really small. You don’t challenge yourself. You don’t allow your skills or talents or intelligence to be known, but you think about them all the time. You keep your thoughts, feelings, and stories to yourself. Most of them are too horrific for the average person to be comfortable hearing anyway.
I express myself through singing, writing, painting, dancing. It’s very, very hard for me to directly connect, as in a one-on-one convo. I am an artist, with all of its stereotypical BS. I tried to deny it for a long, long time, perhaps because it could be something to be proud of, inevitably destructing my self-proposed worthlessness.
This project is the most exposing thing I’ve ever done in my life. Ribs opened and pinned to the side, here is my heart, for all of Internetland to see. The words that I write always come from a place deep inside of me. I pour my feelings out every time I sing, and every time I write. I’m trying to say something meaningful. And my goal is to reach just one person. Just one. And convince them that they aren’t alone | I am crying as I write this, I really do mean what I say. | After everything that has hurt me in my life, I always remember that what got me through was music + writing. I would listen to songs that I related to, and somehow I knew that if the person who wrote that song had felt what I’d felt, that I wasn't alone.
During some of the hardest years of my life, MTV Unplugged was really big. I watched Nirvana, STP, Alice in Chains, and I knew those frontmen felt intense emotional pain. I knew they would understand…
This was also the time when Linger was a popular song. At such a young age, this song influenced me to my core. It helped shape the young woman I was to become. I even had a pixie haircut for a while.
Those singers are all gone now. But I will never forget how they were with me during the hardest times of my life. They heavily influence the music I am making now, and I am humbled to have a chance to do for someone else what they did for me.
Music touches people. Music moves people. Music saves people...
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay