Blog post no. 35: This is what healing feels like.
I have a very profound way of self-sabotage. Whenever a momentum starts to rise, meaning that things start working out and some good stuff starts accumulating, like a prima ballerina I execute a set of subtle yet effective moves that put me to a halt.
Basically I trick myself back into exhaustion, loneliness and shame.
Nice.
So when I started releasing these new songs last November I built a set of emotional, energetic and social anchors to keep me away from this behaviour.
And they worked.
But the fun thing about growth and healing and unlearning subconscious habits is that there’s usually something else underneath!
Since the old triggers didn’t work anymore, I got to discover some new ones.
And — tadaa! — I found myself back in that familiar and safe place of full stop. I had fallen right back to my own inner Mariana Trench. And there I was, with my personal flock of strange fish that include shame, guilt, apathy, abandonment, disconnection, fear, exhaustion, resentment, codependency and repressed anger, among some other creatures which I don’t really even recognize. What a cheerful bunch indeed.
The annoying thing is that though I tried so hard not to do the thing I always do — kill my own momentum — I did it again.
But what I realized this morning is that actually this was the test. This was the real test. Not the ones I prepared the anchors for. Those were the warm-ups. The test runs. But thanks to those I now passed the real test.
How do I know I passed the test? Because this week I surfaced from my deep water safe place of self-inflicted misery (with some of my strange fish crew) and to my great shock (and there’s no irony here whatsoever) I realized I had not been abandoned.
People waited for me.
People waited for me and they weren’t mad.
People waited for me and nothing had gone wrong.
People waited for me and they were happy to know I’m back.
People waited for me and they were excited to get to work with me.
People waited for me.
PEOPLE WAITED FOR ME.
I feel love and grace and acceptance pulsate in my nervous system like an electrical wave. This is what healing feels like. A million little stars flickering inside of me, like the vastness of the universe would not be expanding only outwards but also inwards.
The thing is, the next song has been ready to be put out for a while. But I just didn’t ask my graphic designer to do the cover. (That’s what kind of a halt I’m talking about here. I just literally stop. And then I get on the self-blame-train.)
But yesterday I did ask for the cover. And I realize all is okay. So many good things are queued already. I just had to get out of my own way, like I so often have to.
The “delay” here is like a month. Who even notices? And what happened in between was an epic level personal journey. And apparently this time I got it. I passed the test. I got off that self-blame-train and simply called my people: “It seems I got on the wrong train. Yeah, I know that happens. I’ll be right there, thanks for waiting for me.”
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I’m an artist working on my album. These blog posts will be used as building blocks for a book about creativity once the album is done.
Listen to my music, and come say hello on any of my social media channels (FB, IG, TW). Thanks. xo
