Sunday blogs - why I write (in four iterations)
When I was a little girl, I used to build these dense, several-feet-long enclaves with an arbitrary assemblage of my toys. Polly pocket pool house paraphernalia, my brother's legos, tinker toys, Fischer Price trucks, barbie dolls, the whole nine. My parents have several photos of me occupied in such a manner. I'm sitting on the ground with my legs tucked around my body, looking up quizzically from a four foot long multicolored creation as if my parents were disturbing some sort of top secret amalgamation. Sometimes there was a larger story in my imagination used to tie the pieces all together in relevance, other times their placement made sense for a reason unknown. Perhaps it was just an innate feeling that made the imaginary come together in such a way.To an outsider, it was most certainly organized chaos. But to me, every trinket, every being – human, animal, or lego – was placed in this intricate creation with purpose and intention. My parents had never seen anything like it, and knew the next creation would be nothing like the first.
Of course, I didn't have the words to explain my endless imagination at that point, and I had made those little cities, enclaves, whatever you want to call it, entirely for my own amusement. I didn't feel the need to explain why it made perfect sense to me to anyone else. I was just a kid playing around and doing what felt honest to me, and that impulse follows me to this day. It's not that I actively sought being misunderstood in a creative sense – it just kind of happened that way. There's always something more to be said to become deeper entrenched in significance, and that was the premise of much of my creative endeavors.
As I got older, I found that I had lost a hint of my unabashed toddler confidence – I did want people to understand my creations, and I now had the tools to explain them. So I did so in overabundance. I had a million journals in elementary school, middle school, all full of every manipulation of words and ideas I could fit in to one $1 composition notebook. It was only a matter of weeks before my notebooks were full of drumbeat patterns, fictional stories with chapters in the tens, observations, journaling on my personal life. It was a place of safe expression and a place to try and understand myself as I grew up. I notoriously over explained things in my English homework, went on and on in my notebooks without filter until I got out everything I felt needed to be said. Words were a powerful tool that I used to translate what used to be toy structures in to stories, and later, musical compositions as well. Any of my teachers knew me as a straight A student who took until the very end of class to get through tests, ensuring that I had explained my thought process on my terms, my time, and at my leisure. It was my understanding that words were my most natural pathway to connect to other folks without room for error – speech didn't come so naturally or fluidly. I often couldn't think before I spoke. I wanted everything to be thought through, documented, mediated, monitored, crafted, curated, and entirely laid out on the page.
When I started playing music more seriously, I realized how concerned I was with being understood fully. Letting go of that idea entirely was very new to me, and I knew I would have to get used to it because the nature of improvised music in particular is not one of immediate understanding but rather reveling in the unknown and unforeseen. One person will never perceive the music the same exact way as someone else. I was never much of a lyric writer – I preferred extensive prose or descriptions to a scattered few lines embedded with hidden meanings – but I felt that my music was always more powerful with an explanation, much like historical excerpts accompanying paintings in a museum. I always felt my work, and consequently, myself – needed more explanation than what meets the eye or ear. At almost the opposite end of my younger self, I found an artistic strength in pushing folks deeper in to understanding, perspective, context, stories that make us us. Why we became the people we are, what the past reveals about the present, the chronology to those not living inside our very heads, carrying our particular experiences along the way. My music and my writing became about this. And for this reason, I don't see my life living without one or the other. They are constantly in dialogue, chasing each other like cat and mouse, riding off the heels of what happens at the intersection of rubber doll clothes and wooden building blocks.
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Anyway, that was more innocently why I started writing.
What is not so innocent to admit is that I write because I don't know if I'll ever feel like a good enough musician alone. I don't know if it's imposter syndrome or just strategic. The hard thing about being a musician and a perfectionist is that knowing and working with some of the best musicians in the world is a double edged sword. You learn so much, you are grateful to be asked to play and hang (they certainly don't have to do you any musical favors if they don't want to), you are getting the best possible musical education in this way, and much of it leads to meaningful mentorships. You also wish you could be one of those musicians, but you don't have the decades of touring and performing under your belt, the years upon years of lived experience, musically, emotionally, habitually, spiritually – you're just not there, and there's no shortcut on that kind of journey either. Getting comfortable with the fact that you will have a slow build on your way to being one of the best used to gut me and my intense work ethic. So in case the bottom falls out, I write.
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I write
because I will never waste written words
when given the room to think -
because all communication demands the above
and the kitchen sink.
Because it keeps me from scratching a toxic itch,
picking the softest skin to shreds,
weaving broken shards in to mink.
It keeps me believing in an empty ceiling,
a broken bone,
a stained shirt,
the mundane fork and knife,
a faded scar,
a badge of honor dissolved by horrors.
- for the poets,
the romantics,
and the like
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Sometimes I don't know why I write, but it feels as natural an impulse to follow as brushing my teeth in the morning.
Sometimes I write because a journal has always been a friend. Not in some anthropomorphic Dora the Explorer kind of way. In a way that a journal does not need to be concerned with strained emotional labor or burden.
I can mention when I am vulnerable, devastated, uninspired,
nauseous like a 19 year old waking up next to empty Jim Beam and a sleeping man they don't recognize,
nervous like the split second before a drop tower plunges,
or when the grace of somebody's fingers leaves you for the very last time,
(or so you hope, if you've learned anything about will power).
When you find yourself sitting on a bench next to your loneliness and try to figure out what that says about your capacity to love.
When you lose the laundry card
and the bad bottles of wine
dropping like the dead leaves in September
all in one week.
When you know they're in the neighborhood but they don't bother to say hi anymore.
Perhaps the journal receives the last moment you went trudging after optimism to find it curled up in your bed,
resting in your swelling heart
on a pure Saturday morning,
stared in to an iris so hard it made your insides melt.
It remembers every time you fly away on a free plane,
glaring out the oval window at the human bits and cruising microscopic cars
when you're 10,000 ft up,
just for a time and a place with your creative mind.
For when you are so soft
and wonder if it's possible to stay in it forever.
All it does is listen,
holds those words up in tree pressed permanence,
in precise digital code,
the easiest form of rest,
release,
a way to inch forward with the most stubborn feet.
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Lastly, I'd like to think because I am constantly searching for meaning. I am not always finding it – in fact, I think I am less close than I have ever been. But I find that I keep searching for it anyway.