[Feels so] Uncontrollable: then & now
It’s hard to willingly subject myself to the cringe that is triggered up and down my spine from listening to the me of 1994 singing cathartically into a microphone and haphazardly assaulting the strings of my first electric guitar. Even that run-on sentence seems apropos to the force at which I wanted desperately to get out the layers and complicated intersections of feelings I was experiencing at the time…
…and it was hard...and it took many years until I was able to find a path past my insecurity and self-deprecating perception of my own journey. So much so, that I conveniently kept my practice recording cassettes of my first years of trying my hand at being a Seattle musician in the early 90’s under lock & key. I think it was due to an inability to find peace and conciliation with the person that I was struggling to be in my early 20’s with the me I’ve been trying to grow into my adulthood. My memory of the me-child holds layers of shame, disappointment and blurry and confusing relationships. For so long, I wasn’t able to visit that version of myself without being reminded of what I have always considered my own bad choices and the failed endeavors that were the result of my shortcomings.
For some people it takes longer to trudge through all the junk-coding of our DNA to get to the more refined version that our current self has been working to curate. Some of this molding happens over years of personal work and self-healing, but sometimes it also takes the temperature of a societal culture at large to offer better tools for self-discovery, and in that shift there starts to arise better language to understand personal stories of transformation.
“...I’m hiding and I don’t know why...”
Among the many messages I internalized as a child ( I was the top middle of four siblings), was “you’re not good enough, you’ll never be good enough but try harder.” Some of the negative messaging I got from childhood was from my parents and the chaos of their complicated dysfunction, but it was also a part of cultural norms and conflicting ideas about women’s equality and worth, body image and how to support and identify the mental health of children in abusive families. All of which we as a modern society are still grappling with today, decades later.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to an independent mindset—this has put me at odds with the world, my parents and myself from a very young age. While I am convinced that I may never find myself fully on the other side of my childhood trauma, I have been working to accept and find equanimity in the experiences, failures and damages that were the foundation of my personal narratives.
In 2020, the 1st summer of the Pandemic, also know as the summer that we all ‘stayed in', I found myself compelled to revisit my box of cassettes that held my first music recordings. It was under the guise of wanting to get them digitalized. As technology has improved and become more accessible, I finally felt capable to tackle the feat of translating tape vibrations into x’s and o’s.
Hummingfish was the first incarnation of a band ( really just a solo project that I found some people to help me out with). Before that, I had tried to be in a band with a couple of guys that had put an ad out in the The Stranger (a classic Seattle Rag) for a singer for their band, and I answered. In the end I wasn’t the right fit for their project. However, Simon the drummer was super helpful and generous with his time to help me make these recordings which he then added drum tracks to. I only played around town for a brief time with a handful of shows…but one of the worst things any performing artist can have is a debilitating performance anxiety (aka stage fright). In a time where we didn’t have words like social anxiety and we didn’t talk openly about PTSD and we didn’t throw around phrases like ‘being triggered,’ having stage fright was the sabotage that kills anyones ability to ‘get out there’ or even ‘ fake it till you make it.’ There was also no internet to populate a digital version of myself to share with the world safely from the confines of my home.
As an artist, sometimes it can feel like what I do is invisible. For most of my life, the idea of calling myself a musician or an artist would evoke a fear of fraudism in me—even though I felt confident in my work and continued to put in the hours to refine my voice and my intention. When someone introduce themselves as a dentist or a carpenter, most people have a general sense of what that means. When someone says they are an artist or musician, it will mean whatever preconceived idea, notion or subjective version of what art or music is and base their opinion on their biases of what they consider to be good or bad. When you grow up with an ingrained sense of never being good enough but pushed to keep working anyways—there is an immediate sense of feeling unable to portray value in your work. In the creative world, if you aren’t able to exude the sense of value in your own work, it’s very hard to convey to others a sense of value in it.
In the spaces of time where I haven’t found my way to present my work ‘out there’ it can feel as if I don’t actually exist at all. However, when I sat in my studio one day that summer of 2020, I listened to a young girl belt out notes and words from a different version of myself and for the first time I was listening with empathy and not judgment. Inside of this listening experience I had a flash of awareness for my eclectic trajectory filled with purpose and passion lined with so much visual art and hundreds of songs and tens-of-thousands of hours of creative processing.
…I see you all in my head…it’s so much sweeter in my head…
It was almost like I was time traveling through my personal experiences of being human, and also through the years of my creative outputs that I kept working to realize into being outside of my head.
Listening to this rough cut of a raw moment, I got to be the audience that I never felt I could find at the time and still feel I long for. It was like, for the first time— I really heard myself as someone working through a lot of confusing emotions completely on her own as a result of being pushed into adulthood way too soon. The me-today listened and I was present. With the tape whirring on the small cassette player I had in my basement studio, I had a tremendous rush of relief that poured out from finally understanding the grief of this very young and desperately lonely and sad person. For so long, I hadn’t been able to hold space for her, but that day I felt a strange sense of completeness. I was in tune with the words she was singing, her sentiment, the raw edge of her voice—this song I had written so many years ago from a completely different place in my life felt as relevant that day as ever.
In an instant I knew that I had to re-record this song and re-imagine it for today. However, I didn’t really change anything. I just was able to come at it from the years of learning better skills as a musician, producer and visual artist. I was also able to approach it from the place of deep love and understanding for the person that was the me-child of so long ago.
As the me of today (and also the nurturer and supporter of my own child through to adulthood), I believe I was able to see that me-child who was suffering back then. I wanted to connect in with her and finally hold that space that she never truly felt was held for her in all those years trying to survive on her own. I wanted to reach back and let her know that she moves forward though time and keeps going; that she keeps writing songs; she keeps painting and more; that it also is still hard to be her sometimes; That she feels she’s got it in one moment but it’s still all so uncontrollable the next. But she hides less and less and when she’s does find herself in the tall grass, she doesn’t feel as small.
Original lyrics from my old Macintosh computer and printer that had the annoying tabs you had to rip off circa 1994
early 90’s Gig poster for a show at the Ditto- an old “hole in the wall under the monorail” music venue.