Episode 27: The Music That Made Me

HOW TO REMEMBER WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE. Worshiping contradictions. STUDDED BELTS! IT’S NOT ALL JUST REIKI HEALING ENERGY & SALAD! My giant fluffy RIDICULOUS labradoodle. I have drunk a LOT OF WHISKY and smoked a LOT OF CIGARETTES in my life… & a story about someone I used to love.

Excerpt 1:

“Amidst all of the winter disconnect, the weird and startling news I got last week, the well just lots of sitting alone in my house… Isolation can get, well, really isolating. And I’ve been through a lot in the last year, and sometimes I think, since I’m mostly grounded in the present, I forget where I came from, what I have done and accomplished in my life, and just how far I have come from the woman I used to be. So much has changed in me over the last year, but It seems somewhere in that process I have forgotten who I am in some indescribable way. I don’t think we talk about it often, how changed we are from these last two years of complete upheaval. And sometimes it’s important to get back to our roots.

For me, it’s the pissed off teenager blasting the Ramones from my tiny weird sports car, wearing my leather jacket, black eyeliner, and a cigarette hanging from my lips, mainlining espresso like it was my job (well kind of because it was my job, I trained baristas for a while in my past life). And you know what, she might have been a little scary, and a little angry, and definitely dramatic, but she was also HOT. And FREE. And WILD. And boy did she like some good music. And she was still and always a hopeless romantic, only she’s been burned by love a couple times, and kept on going. Searching maybe for her next fix, in the arms of someone new, in the crunchy baseline of a song, out alone driving down streets with no name at 100 miles an hour, windows down and hair flying in the wind. 

So how to remember who you fucking are when you have moments where you have forgotten. Well for me, and remember folks, I am only an expert in one thing: my own personal experience. For me, I had to clean my house, and my truck, and put on some old music, and stay up wayyy to late and watch the formidable lunar eclipse from my hot tub, and put on my leather jacket and what’s left of my old leather boots, and crank up the volume in my car and drive. 

And think long and hard about who I used to be, and who I am now. And reach wayyyy back into my psyche and pull out the badass that believed she could take on this world by storm, just so long as she had some black eyeliner, some leather and some white stripes to play. And I remembered that you aren’t confined to one thing in this life, we are multitudes that exist. And I can still be her, and be a reiki practitioner, I can do it my way. I can be raw and loud and brash and still hold space for love. I have learned, that there is no perfect picture. There is no one here without a past, without versions of them they have left behind. There is no one size fits all when it comes to being a human in this word. And you might say, “Well how can you go from holding healing space to this devil may care chick with an attitude.” And to that I say, “Screw off!!” Haha No I’m kidding. But in all fairness… my ability to do my job well falls in direct correlation to my ability to fully enjoy myself, embrace myself in all of my many facets. And it seems in the process of learning to be love and light and compassion, I had forgotten that my darkness, my depths, my rawness are just as important parts. 

The world was a cruel place for me as a young person, and I got hardened, time and time again, but never fully, never enough to break me completely. But just enough to jade me. And I wouldn’t be able to do what I do, if I didn’t deeply understand that the suffering I experienced was teaching me something. And it turned out it was teaching me compassion, and diversity of experience —and to love the things, even the people sometimes, that this world wants to cast aside. It taught me to love the grit, the real, the rawness the messiness of human experience. To find pleasure in it even. 

And I forget sometimes, that I have risen from the ashes more than once in this life. And I have grit my teeth and survived, beatings and bullies and sharp words and searing pain so brutal it would have killed a weaker person, and it almost killed me. But I have become what I am despite, or maybe because of it. It is a freaking miracle I’m even alive to tell any story at all, to speak about anything. 

And let’s be honest, because of that, sometimes, I feel like my life should be grand and flashy and exciting. But well at the moment it is NOT. It’s sitting by the wood stove, and making another bowl of greens and veggies and steak. It’s knitting a scarf and studying the nervous system. It’s understanding relational patterns and self-regulation. It’s finding a killer pair of winter pants at the goodwill. It’s snuggling my giant fluffy RIDICULOUS labradoodle, and listening to people tell me their stories, a lot (like a whole lot). And like sometimes, I go out to dinner, sometimes. 

It is not glamorous, or flashy, or even incredibly fun or exciting. But it’s calm, and it’s peaceful, and it’s quiet and it’s balanced (mostly). And so I forget, often, who the fuck I am; what I have survived and why, and that, well, I used to be a little bit of a badass. Breaking hearts and taking names. And that’s not wholly me anymore, but somewhere, deep down, she’s still there. And every once in a while, I just need a little reminder; that it’s not all salad and reiki healing energy. 

So here’s to all the whisky I have drunk in my life, all the cigarettes I have smoked, all the hearts that I have broken, all the days I didn’t think I would make it to the morning, all the punches, all the vicious words thrown at me, all the shame and anger and frustration. Here’s to my studded belts, my drawers of black eyeliner, my red lipstick. Here’s to the ride or die BITCH I used to be. Here’s to the back roads, the rough sex, the sleepless nights, the death of innocence. And here’s to the music. For the next 50 minutes, you will get to know me just a little better, a little deeper, a little rawer.  And maybe somewhere in there you will meet her. And realize that despite it all she was still kind. And that she would have been there, to walk with you through the darkness, no matter what your story. 

Because some things don’t change. And well some things do. 

So come on a trip with me, back in time, to some music that made me who I am today.”