The Creative Awakening
Gifting myself confidence
My friend Kasey texted me one morning, eager and excited: “I have anxiety!” But it wasn’t the kind of shared anxiety she and I feel when we are around large groups of people, in unfamiliar spaces, or more specifically for me, an elevator. There were no gaps in her text messages, only long drawn out explanations of this new kind of, as she described, “overwhelming pain.”
It’s a pain many of us share when we watch someone propose when we’re bitterly or hopelessly single, the same kind of pain when you’re picked last in dodgeball, or when someone screenshots their deal announcement after sitting in the query trenches together, hoping for that one yes from an editor at a major publishing house. The shallow description for rejection would be simplified into jealousy. Perhaps jealousy is a part of that pain, as sadness and relief are with grief. No emotion is simple. Watching people succeed can make us feel all kinds of emotions, including one closer aligned with awakening.
“Why should everyone else get to succeed? Why shouldn’t I be giving myself the same kind of opportunities?” Kasey continued questing The Void, which I’m convinced often sits in every technological exchange.
"I’ve been there, too,” I said. I’ve watched so many of my friends go for the things they want and attain them shortly after.
Why couldn’t I do the same?
Once, a former friend wanted to get a new job and move to her former home state, and she did. It happened so fast, that when she told me, I was ashamed of my own instability—working countless part time jobs with a small savings account. My heart surged for her, but raced out of that fear of impermanence, abandonment…
In this one instance of panic, I spruced up my resume, and began the search for full time positions. I applied to all of them, many out of my comfort zone. And then, as easily as her transition back east, I made mine into assuming the role of a full-time Catholic high school teacher.
Benefits! My own classroom! Retirement! And the realization…I can get what I want.
I can get what I want.
Okay, so I thought I wanted to be a private high school teacher, but the reality is I was moving further away from my value system. During those brief six months, I let go of my creative writing, my MFA slipping through my fingers while I became besties with the school’s priest at a Kairos retreat. This was not me. I am the worst Catholic in the church! I correct the notes when the priest goes flat. I want to be creative, not spend my time praying…and praying that parents would leave me alone because their privileged child did not want to do their work.
I can get what I want, I cried to my friend who had moved. She felt that I was demeaning the work she cherished. My emotions were being simplified: ungrateful. While she adored working in traditional high school systems, the politics of the administration was diminishing my creativity and my spirit. And she didn’t need to learn prayers and attend mass, which I happily avoided for a good decade.
I can get what I want…and so I applied for another full time position at a community college. At my MFA residency that year, I learned that to continue getting what you want, you need to look in the mirror, strike a superwoman pose—holding your chest up high and the confidence in yourself higher.
The superwoman pose became a ritual before everything in life thereafter. I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that one move helped me, because it was not the pose that did the work. I did. Believing in myself, gifting myself the confidence that I lacked for so many years because of traumatic childhood upbringings and bullying (even as recent as my MFA program), and going to therapy to excavate my self-worth—all that work. And more.
“So I decided to do something about it,” Kasey said. “This burning desire to stop sitting around and get my work out there.”
“This sounds more like a creative awakening to me. You recognized yourself as an artist deserving of living a creative life and to share your gifts,” I texted Kasey back.
“A CREATIVE AWAKENING!” she screamed in all caps from an island in the Pacific.
“IT’S THE COOLEST FEELING,” I shouted back.
Although I achieved my academic dream—I still yearned to connect with a part of myself that had been lost by deeper insecurities with my voice and ability to create music.
In the same year that I began my full-time academic career,
launched her first songwriting workshop: Storytelling Song. While I still shook with nervous energy, it was the kind of painful panic Kasey, Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, and Jonathan Larson expressed in Tick, Tick… Boom! Like they were running out of time, like they needed to do something great, unleash themselves before regret and death came for them.“Come with an open mind,” Greta chirped in an email.
In those first weeks I wrote my first song, with instrumentation—all led by her gentle guidance. I dug deep, singing about, what now might merely be the fleeting feelings of limerence in a tender ballad, “What If…?”
What if I keep making songs, what if people hear what they like…what if I get to lead the life I always imagined myself leading?
I continued writing music, following Greta in a longer, more intense workshop: Writing Your Record.
For three months I wrote, composed, arranged, and found another friend embarking on his new journey of producing. Together, we spent the next few months creating a 10-song LP that I would release that December (2023) called, Seasonal Unraveling.
Close band acquaintances in
listened to Seasonal’s first, and only single, “Fearless,” while driving around the southwest in their van. After their show at The Roxy in Los Angeles, all three members congratulated me. I rambled to Keith Murray, lead singer, exclaiming how incredible it was to have someone I’ve admired for so long listen to my—“Shut up,” he said tenderly.
“Sorry, I’m fangirling,” I said.
“Over yourself,” he smiled.
I didn’t believe it then, but I was. I was fangirling over how I made this moment possible by being fearless, “falling in love with myself…” after taking the leap into the unknown and releasing music I had only created months before.
Weeks later, while in New York watching We Are Scientists end their tour at the Bowery Ballroom, I met their opening act, Sean McVerry. Watching him perform made me feel that ache again, that pain to be that vulnerable, dive deeper into the world of song. I approached him after the show, and he put my music on his playlist without hesitation.
I, however, hesitated writing him an email the following year to ask the unthinkable. Who was I, this unknown artist with a flop-worthy album, to request a talented musician to help me write another flop-worthy handful of songs? But the fear of never knowing, made me write the damn message anyway. As easily as he had placed my music on his playlist, he said he would help me write Off the Hinge.
For the first time in my life, I had what I wanted: a band. I was not only an educator, not only limited to the practical things in life. Sean, We Are Scientist’s drummer Keith, and their friend, Zeno, helped me actualize the sounds of what I feel are the most authentic versions of my voice, of my writing…of me.
“I’m supposed to make shit with near-reckless abandon,” Kasey continued.
“That’s how I felt with music. I was like, you know what, a Disney producer isn’t going to find me. I found myself and I’m going for it,” I resolved.
Perhaps sometimes pain is not necessarily meant to be associated with hurt. Pain can be longing, pain can be the emergence of truth. For me, pain remains a knowing that I am worthy of every creative opportunity brewing within me.
Other ways to support me…
Buy Off the Hinge for $1 or whatever you’d like on my bandcamp site.
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Love this so much, Ashley!!
Happy to be in the creative trenches with you!