The day the music died
For 11 years after my dad died I avoided music as a means to feel. Pregnancy brought this tool back to me out of necessity and became my first psychic language.
*Heads up* I briefly describe a death and also mention vomiting.
Visiting 12yr old heaven. MuchMusic, Toronto, 1997
Grade nine “talent” show, 1999
My fangirl waterpencil homage to Keith Flint of The Prodigy, 1998
Performing (horribly) for patients at the hospital, 2000
Nothing says serious bassist like a sassy Wolverine haircut, 2001 🐺🎸
Me and my dad, photos circa 1990-2003
Audio Transcript
This is Divine Interruption.
I'm Sarah Hildreth Rankin.
Today, I want to talk about music and a journey that I've had with it throughout my life.
So growing up, I was exposed to a lot of music.
Every person in my household was into music in their own way, and that really imprinted on me at a young age.
My mom was into a lot of 60s folk music, everything to do with the hippie movement, and also Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, so a lot of Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
My dad was more of a purist for jazz.
He had these very specific decades of music that he was really into.
And he'd also traveled a lot and worked on documentaries and did sound for them.
So he brought in a lot of world music from all around the place, all around the world.
My brother was quite a bit older than I was, and he became a DJ at one point, and was really into like techno and electronic music.
So he would stay up really late in his room, recording and making his own music.
And I would fall asleep in the next room and kind of just absorb all of that music into my being as well.
And I worked with music a lot, and with sound.
I loved recording everything off the radio and making my own mixtapes for when we would go on trips like across Canada.
I'm like, this is Sarah's traveling tape.
I'd make my own commercials.
I would do audio plays and put together like radio dramas, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
My mom had a bunch of VHS workout tapes, and I even like interviewed the people on the workout tapes so I would record, there was one with Cher.
Cher was completely dressed in black lace and doing some form of sweatband workout with mini weights.
Absolutely ridiculous, but I interviewed her, so I would tape her saying certain things, and then I would ask her questions and use her responses.
So I did a lot.
There was even a radio club in my high school, and I was one of the presidents of that.
So yeah, that was a thing that actually existed.
So I was really into music in all of those ways, but I definitely couldn't play it, not musically talented at all.
Somehow, I became a bassist in like three different bands throughout school.
I don't know how that happened.
I think everyone was just being really nice.
They didn't want to leave me out or something because I couldn't read music, I couldn't play a bass guitar.
I had to use a pick because my fingers would hurt so much, and I could really just move my finger up and down and try and like hold different parts of the guitar.
It was horrible, absolutely horrible.
And I think it was more of like an excuse to hang out in the garage or in the band room and eat ice cream and talk about music and kind of like, quote unquote, practice.
We even did a talent show in the band I was in in junior high.
And there's pictures, a lot of denim, a lot of denim was worn on top of denim, because, you know, that's what it is to be in a band.
And I think, like any teenager, I feel like music is a pretty pivotal part of defining your identity and telling other, you know, your peers, like who you are and what you're into.
Spending hours waiting on the phone line on like Ticketmaster to get tickets to like Bon Jovi or Weezer or whatever the concert was.
And it was a big deal.
And I would, you know, curate all of the CDs in my CD collection in my room and make them very obvious.
So when I could have people over, I could kind of impress them with, oh wow, what a collection, you're so like worldly.
I remember when I was just 12, 13, we had like a CD-ROM disk drive, and that was my first CD player.
So this huge box, and I would put my little headphones in there, put in my like no doubt, Tragic Kingdom CD and just listen to it on repeat, on repeat and like fall asleep like that or like The Prodigy.
And you know, that was just like a part of growing up and something that I really remember.
So there's so much just music ingrained in our beings.
And for me, definitely, like I was just really into it.
But I also used it in a way to just feel.
And isn't, I mean, music is emotive, right?
It taps into something.
When people write songs, they're writing about their own experiences.
And there's so much emotion there.
And it just really helps us feel.
And I really used it to help me feel, you know, sitting for just hours as a teenager, just kind of like just crying to different albums, and just really feeling myself, and using that music to tap into my inner world.
And I would even make tapes, not just for myself, but for others.
I remember, you know, someone would be going through something or having a tough time, or grandma died.
And I remember making these tapes where they would like take you on a journey, and like side A would be starting kind of slowly, and then getting sadder and sadder and sadder, and just allowing you to really feel, right?
I'm like, I want you to feel, and I want you to cry and process all your grief.
And then you switch to side B, and side B would like be a slow build up, and it would get a little more hopeful and a little more joyful.
And by the end, you know, hopefully you've like switched your mood around in the 45, you know, minutes that this tape, you know, went through that journey.
And that was something that I did a lot of.
I was just really into that, creating this experience through music.
And it was really my direct line to emotion.
And just, I think that was just a part of existing.
It's like, we're emotional beings, and we feel, and we feel so deeply.
Or, you know, I do, I do.
I assume other people do, but I can't say that.
But I do feel like we're here to, you know, really feel.
So it was such a big part of my life, and I was always using music in this way to really feel myself.
But that changed, and that all changed when my dad died.
I had just turned 22 years old.
I was working at a bakery in a small mountain town in Alberta.
I was serving pizza pretzels and muffins and cookies and slicing bread.
And one night, I received six calls from my brother.
At some point, I called him back, and I was like, hey, what's going on?
Is everything okay?
And he said, you know, you need to leave.
You need to get out of there.
Dad's in the hospital.
I said, well, I can't really just leave.
Like, I'm working.
I live in a different province.
I don't even know how to get there.
What's happening?
He's like, no, like you need to leave right now.
You know, he was in Toronto.
He's like, I'm getting on a plane and I'm going now.
You know, figure it out.
So I was living in the Rocky Mountains, and my parents had moved to Vancouver Island, so they were on the West Coast.
So that's about eight hours.
So I ended up driving eight hours all the way to the ferry terminal, just outside of Vancouver, slept in my car, and then arrived at the hospital the next morning after we got on the ferry.
And yeah, my dad was in the ICU.
Apparently, he had had an accident.
My parents had moved about a year prior and had built this houseboat.
That was kind of their dream when they both had retired, they wanted to move back to the coast.
And he had built this scaffolding above the stairs, the main staircase in the house, because he wanted to paint the ceiling.
And apparently, like he built it himself, it wasn't sound.
Something happened, he tripped, he fell right through the scaffolding and fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom, just landed right onto his head.
And honestly, in that instant, as far as like I fully believe in what I think happened was, you know, he died.
I think his soul left his body at that point.
He fell, he hit his head.
The injury was so major that he was essentially gone.
So he was in the ICU, he's on a breathing machine.
You know, he looked really weird.
He obviously was just being kept alive.
Like you could see by the contractions in his chest that he wasn't breathing normally on his own.
And his head was misshapen, and it was just swollen, right, because he'd had this injury.
So it was a lot.
We kind of all held hands and stood there, and within a few moments, we kind of said goodbye, and then they decided it was time to take him off the machine, because he wasn't really alive anymore, and he wouldn't be able to sustain being alive.
And yeah, that was a very intense moment.
I've never witnessed something like that before.
So I can only think of people who work in medicine, or paramedics, firefighters, everyone who does emergency surgery, all of those things, witnessing death on a regular basis.
So for me, this was very foreign, the first time I'd seen it happen before my eyes.
And not to be too graphic, but after we said goodbye, they're like, okay, we're going to take the breathing machine out.
And they took this thing out of his throat and his nose, and blood just started to pour out of his face.
It was really intense.
And at that moment, I knew that I couldn't be there anymore to kind of see that.
It was just, it was way too much, so much stress leading up to this, and coming here, and then this is what's happening.
And yeah, then he was just gone.
He was gone.
And it was just, I can't really put it into words, right?
When you experience something like that.
And my dad was a very complex person.
He was very secretive.
He grew up in a completely different era.
You know, he lived through World War II.
He was quite a bit older in terms of like having a dad.
He was a bit older and had a whole life inside of him that I never knew about and only ever saw glimpses of.
And, you know, he had a lot going on, but he was also my person.
So in my family, just growing up, he was, you know, we had like a special connection.
So losing him like that, and so suddenly, it had only been hours before, you know, half a day before that I even heard this happened.
And then in that moment, then he's gone.
You know, it was just a lot to take in.
And after that, I had to go back to real life.
So I stayed for a few weeks, dealt with all the things, and then went back to the mountains.
And it was a really tough adjustment.
I don't know, it's when you've been through anything.
We are beings of change.
Things happen to us in our lives.
That's just a part of being alive.
People die, we all die, right?
That's a part of life.
And when it's happening to you, it shifts everything.
You are different on the inside, but when you return to, I don't know, I guess the externals of life, they're kind of the same, right?
Things seem to be operating in the same way, but on the inside, everything is different.
So, I really didn't know how to process what I had gone through, and I didn't know how to process with or really process how.
Like, there was no guidebook for this.
You know, I was early 20s.
I just turned 22.
I lived in this small town with, you know, it's a party town, and with a bunch of 20-year-olds as my friends, you know, we're all kind of going through stuff there and having a good time and whatever it may be.
And it just wasn't the place for me to, I don't know, maybe process in a good way.
And I didn't have an adult.
I remember just wishing, I was like, is there someone who can like kind of help me with this?
But there just wasn't, and that's just the way it was.
That was just the scenario I was in.
And I also just didn't know how to ask or who to ask or what to do.
And obviously, it doesn't necessarily make it easier, but I think that was something I was craving at the time.
I'm like, is there an adult who can just like hold my hand?
And it felt like life outside of me just expected me to be the same or expected me to hold it together, when really all I wanted to do so badly was just fall apart.
I wanted to just cry my eyes out for days, and I wanted someone to hold me, and I just wanted to, honestly, I just really wanted to feel what I was feeling.
I didn't want to turn that off, and it felt like there was no space in daily life to be that way.
And I think that is very societal too, like Western society.
And that was my experience was there was just no place or space where it felt safe enough to really feel and allow what had happened to sink in and to kind of move through that.
And I had to go back to work, that was expected, and they were as gracious as they could be about giving me time off in the beginning.
And then it was once I was back in town, it's like, no, I have to work.
And I did have to work, right?
I had to support myself, had to pay my rent, that kind of thing.
But it was just kind of back to normal.
This happens, everyone's like, oh my gosh, and you have a rallying of support as it should be, and then that goes away because life continues, right?
People's lives are continuing.
But I never found a way to kind of flow through that.
And I tried different ways of, like, I guess, coping or ways of feeling better or just feeling.
I remember sitting down, like, just in a really sunny, lovely afternoon.
I had the afternoon off and after work, I came home because I work really early shifts, five in the morning sometimes.
And I came home after my shift, and I was like, oh, God, everything feels off.
And I was like, okay, I just like pour myself a glass of gin, big 12-ounce glass, and just drank it, and just wanted to know, will this help me?
And it just kind of numbed me out a bit.
And honestly, I didn't like that, because I think what I was craving was to actually feel.
So the numbing wasn't supportive, and smoking weed was the same way.
It was like I was fuzzy, and then I was kind of like couldn't feel.
And it kind of made me more sad, because I could still feel this heaviness inside of me on my chest.
But I wasn't letting it out.
I was like trying to suppress it more, and I didn't want to be suppressed.
So I found that those things didn't work.
And you know, there are some people in my life where I don't know what, obviously, when somebody goes through a big loss or an experience that they're not coping well with or don't know how to process, it can be a lot on the other person, right?
And I was with someone at the time who tried their best, but it just didn't work.
And I remember moments where I would just sit at the end of the bed and just start crying and be like, oh, like, I need help.
And just having this person walk out the door, and just because he didn't know what to do.
And that just kind of further pushed in this idea.
It's like, okay, it's not okay to feel.
It's not okay to express this, and it makes everyone really uncomfortable.
And even like my boss telling me is like, oh, I wish we could have like the old you back.
Like, this shouldn't be, you know, oh man, we really miss her.
And I'm like, well, I don't know where she is.
Like, this is where I'm at right now.
And like, I get what you're saying, but this means it's not okay for me to just have this experience right now.
And my mom was having her own experience, and that was not a place to process.
You know, we were not going to process this experience together.
And she had her own things to go through, you know, her own journey.
And she very much did not want me to be, quote unquote, sad.
So I was definitely told like, oh, you shouldn't be sad, you know, let's not get sad.
I'm like, well, maybe that's exactly what I need to do.
So it just, yeah, wasn't a space to express those feelings.
And even then, so I tried to kind of hold it together, hold it in, because it didn't seem like there was any other way to cope with this.
And then I started to break out in hives when I would go to work, when I had to kind of take on anything above and beyond what I felt like, like when you're not, you know, your capacity is really low, you're not feeling good, you don't want to have to go show up, like tie an apron on and put a smile on and serve coffee.
I mean, maybe you do, maybe you do.
I didn't want to.
And I felt like I obviously had to.
And when I would honestly, it was truly like I'd walk through the door.
And within five minutes, when then I was ready to actually go to work, and I'd pick up the tongs and I'd go for the muffin basket, I would break out into full body hives just everywhere.
And this went on for, I don't remember, but it was an extended period of time.
And then I started throwing up, like just vomiting.
It wasn't a conscious decision.
I was not doing it on purpose.
It was just happening.
So I would eat, and then I would instantly have to throw up.
So I wasn't able to like digest food properly.
I wasn't really able to eat.
Whenever I would eat, it would just come right back up.
And this went on also for at least a period of two months, on and off.
And it was scary, and I was just really confused, because again, I didn't have the perspective that all of the systems of the body are connected, and that my emotional life is connected to my physical body.
And this experience I had is being stored in my cells, or that I need to express and move through what I've experienced to feel better, or to just allow space.
There was no space.
It was just kind of cramming everything back down, and not digesting.
Even that idea is like, oh, I'm not digesting this experience.
I am not digesting my food.
It is this violent expression of like, this wants to come up and out.
And I was sent to, yeah, I went to different doctors, and none of them, they were just like, oh, you're fine.
Everything's fine.
I'm like, I'm not fine.
I'm really not fine, you know?
But I guess I just didn't land in the right environment, and that was likely very divine.
This was the experience I needed to have at that time, because now I'm like, wait, there are counselors, there is therapy, there are different modalities, there are beautiful, wise women who help people move through experiences in their life.
All of these things exist, but that did not exist for me in my life or my world that was never brought to me at the time.
And yeah, there just wasn't, there wasn't a safe place to let this out.
There wasn't a safe place to be with pain, to have emotion.
And when I kind of went through that, it was kind of like I learned that it was not safe to be that way.
And I started to shut down and kind of shut off.
This very subtle wall went up where, yeah, okay.
Yeah, feeling is not a thing.
We do not share our feelings with others.
We do not show our feelings.
It will only end up in being criticized or put down or if I show this side of myself, this vulnerability, I'm going to be walked on or stepped on or really disappointed, and it's going to be too painful.
And that was like with music too, music became before it was this practice I had.
I didn't know I was even doing it.
It was just so natural.
And that stopped because now when I listened to music, typically what I'm saying is like something that taps in, right?
We all have that moment where we're like, oh, I can feel that.
And it's usually, like especially around grief or sadness.
And it would just bring it all up instantaneously.
And I was like, no, no, no, I can't have that.
That's gonna be super awkward.
Like no one wants to be a part of that.
If I listen to this, it's all gonna come up because now I've shoved it so far down and there's so much in there.
If it comes up, it's gonna be torrential.
And even I became like afraid of those feelings.
And let's be clear.
Like I am a big feeler.
That's a part of me.
That's a part of how I am.
Not everyone is.
But if you are a big feeler, you know.
And if you know, you know.
Like that's, it's just so important to feel all the big feelings.
And you feel a lot of things, not only yourself, but other people and situations.
Like any sort of commercial about any sort of animal or older adult who is struggling is going to maybe cause you to feel very intense feelings.
I cannot talk about garbage.
It's one of those weird things that makes me feel really, really sad.
And that's just, you know, that's, that's how I operate.
It's just a part of me.
And so I need that in my life.
I need to experience big emotions and I need to feel deeply.
But when I wasn't doing that with myself anymore, I started to cope by feeling like other people's pain.
And I wasn't doing this consciously, and I've always been able to hold space for people.
I wanted to be a counselor for a very long time, and I deeply care.
But I also found that I had shut off being there for myself and chose to be there for others instead.
At least that, you know, that did help me cope.
It allowed me to feel things and feel things with others, and I could hold them or be there for them when really, it's like a lot of times, we give the medicine that we deeply crave, right?
I'm like, oh my gosh, I really want someone to hug me and hold me and tell me it's going to be okay.
Or like witness.
There's something about being witnessed in our pain that I had always dreamed of.
Actually, I have like a fantasy about this, and it's like been ongoing since I was a kid just to completely break down in front of someone and have them like, see that, and then be there.
Maybe that's a messed up fantasy, I don't know.
But I dreamt about it a lot throughout my life as well.
I just really didn't believe that I was worthy of having my own pain be seen or heard.
But thank God, I could do that for other people.
Like, oh, I can honor them and I can listen to them and I can feel through them and with them.
And that felt so good.
But I don't really know how to share anything inside because it's so pushed down.
And if I bring it up, something horrible is gonna happen, right?
You start to believe these really deep things because you have this pattern of pushing down.
Or when you did express a little, when I did share a little or was vulnerable about it, then someone would push me away.
So that was just kind of ingrained.
And it wasn't just from that experience.
I grew up in a household that wasn't about feelings, and feelings were not really a safe thing to talk about or to share.
Or not even safe.
I would say that's what is learned that it's not safe.
But really from the outside, it's just like, no, no, no, no, no.
We don't feel like that's really awkward or like don't do that, don't be that way.
And there's just no space to feel.
So then that feels unsafe when you really do want to share or when something big comes up.
So yeah, I lived many years this way, not really realizing I wasn't feeling myself, but things started to build up because once you suppress something so major, then you're starting to suppress everything, and everything becomes, yeah, like not a safe place, I guess.
That was my experience.
But when I became pregnant, that was probably, I was 22 when my dad died, I was 33 when I got pregnant, so 11 years later, things kind of shifted again.
And now, I didn't really have any space for anything else but myself.
You know, I had these two beings growing inside of me at the same time, and I felt so trapped in my body, and all I really had space for was, you know, it's like kind of surviving.
And you know, anyone who's pregnant, everyone has a different experience.
And for some people, it's beautiful, or it feels good, or it's horrendous, or it's scary, or whatever it is.
For me, I felt very trapped.
And I couldn't be the same way I was before.
I couldn't do what I, you know, the capacity goes down because you're doing a really big job, right?
Your body is growing things, growing humans.
But I also felt like I had these two extra souls.
That's the way I'll say it, who had their own energy, and they were also in me.
So now I'm just like, whoa, I am beyond full.
I just felt so full, so trapped, and I've never been more full than that.
It wasn't just physically, it was like emotionally and mentally and energetically, and a lot of my capacity is shut down.
So even like my intuition and stuff at that time, which had been opening up slowly more and more the past few years before this, that kind of stopped, and all I could hear was myself.
I was trapped in my body to be with my feelings and my emotions and my experiences, and music kind of entered my life again slowly.
And I am not saying, let me say that, I never listened to music because that's stupid, that doesn't make any sense.
In like 11 years, I never listened to a song.
No, it was that I wasn't using it for catharsis, and I wasn't engaging with anything that would bring up emotion.
And if I heard a Simon and Garfunkel song, which was connected with my dad at the grocery store when I was buying a cauliflower, that would instantly trip a wire.
And I'd be like, holy shit, I need to leave now.
This is an emergency.
So I just wasn't allowing myself to feel, and I wasn't using music to feel.
It was all kind of like, oh, let's go have a dance party.
No problem.
But I wasn't feeling myself with music, and I wasn't listening regularly.
I didn't make playlists, like any of that kind of thing.
So when I was pregnant, I just started to kind of listen to music again.
It just kind of happened organically, and it was allowing me to just release a little bit of the pressure that I was feeling inside, which was really imperative because I just felt like I was overflowing.
So when I would listen to something, I would just kind of bawl my eyes out, and it felt just so necessary and so natural.
I was like, of course, I'm going to go sit in my room alone, eat a cookie, and just bawl my eyes out for 20 minutes, and then I'll come out and I'll probably be okay, because I'll feel a little empty, right?
So I started making playlists again, and it just opened that world up slowly.
And when I had my girls, motherhood, there's endless things that we can talk about there, but for the sake of what I'm kind of focusing on, that was really a journey, to be honest.
It wasn't really about looking after these beings.
It wasn't really about taking care of the kids or the babies.
It was really learning to mother myself.
That was, for me, what was happening.
And there's a lot there.
But really, throughout that process, now I was using music, and now I was feeling my emotions, and they were coming up, and they were constant.
But I was working with this tool that was helping me.
And now, six years later, I am making playlists all the time, and it feels normal again.
It feels natural.
And those playlists help me move through experiences, whatever it is.
And I have different ones for different things.
I'm sure a lot of people do this.
This is probably a very natural practice.
We use music to bring us up, or bring us down, or put us into a different state of mind.
It's amazing for that.
It's just so funny that I feel like the teenage version of myself and the kid version just knew and did it naturally.
And then life kind of shut things down, and I allowed how I reacted to what happened to me or what I experienced and what other people did and said.
I allowed that to kind of dictate how I was treating myself.
And I was not, yeah, communicating with my inner world anymore.
But yeah, she knew, angsty, angsty teenage Sarah knew how to feel herself.
So now I use it as just this direct line of communication with myself, and yeah, it's just really been a part of bringing me back to life.
It's almost like adding the soundtrack to the movie.
When you add the soundtrack, you're like, oh, it brings that whole movie to life.
It adds so much more color and nuance and feeling.
It's just such a powerful tool.
And when I opened up spiritually after my pregnancy, a part of that, when I started training and working with other people who were also learning, and when you like, I would practice on other people, we'd practice reading each other.
That was just so helpful in terms of gaining more skills and validating your experiences.
And it was so interesting because what my language was in the beginning was purely songs.
Like, I would hear lyrics and I would get song titles for people.
And that's honestly all that came through in the beginning.
That was the main thing that I could discern was, okay, someone's like, yeah, there's something, you know, ask a question about my relationship.
I was like, ah, yes.
Easy Lover by Phil Collins.
They'd be like, what?
I'm like, okay, go look up that song.
And then they read the lyrics like, holy shit, you know, that helps me understand my situation better.
Or I don't know what's going on with my family.
And this experience.
And then I'd be like, Savage Garden.
Oh my gosh, to the moon and back, yes.
And half the time, I would be able to also read into that song, even if I hadn't really even read the lyrics before.
And I could read the energy of that song, and then I would understand them better.
And that's just kind of, it was the language, because I had this Rolodex of songs and music that was quite varied, right?
And was so imprinted at a young age.
That it's almost like this universal, how should I call it, like universal energy?
Psychically, it's like I'm connecting with this energy, and it speaks to me, uses this Rolodex in my brain.
It's like, oh, music, she understands us, and this is a language, so this is gonna be our language.
And you can use these songs to understand the world, understand people, understand situations.
So yeah, this catalog really helped me.
And since then, it has evolved, but that was really funny.
It was in the first maybe month or two months when I was reading other people, it was always coming through with songs.
You know, it's when you hop in the car and you turn on the radio, and whatever you're feeling, that song and what you hear makes so much sense.
You're like, oh my gosh, this is speaking to me.
And that's because it is speaking to you, right?
It's divine, it's on purpose.
When you enter a store and the song is talking about something that you just experienced in your relationship, and you're like, whoa, that's really pinpointing that for me.
Or now I can feel even deeper into my experience.
So it's just like that, right?
That's when I say, when it's like a language, Spirit was using that language with me.
And yeah, I don't know, I just heard to come alive more.
Like as I felt more and allowed myself to feel more things, I was, how do I even say this?
It's like a whole part of my being and way of being just came back.
Like it opened up the side of me that I forgot about.
This like multi-dimensionality was coming back to me.
And that was a lot about opening up spiritually, but music was such a key part of that in just the way that I just was when I was younger.
And I can't really describe it again.
If you know, you know, because maybe you experience the world this way too.
I can't speak to anybody.
I just know how I've always been.
But when I see colors, colors have sounds.
And when I see letters or numbers or names, or I hear stories, everything also has a color and has a sound.
Energy is energy.
So I feel energy.
And a lot of that is helped through music and through colors.
So again, that probably makes like no sense.
But I just found that this whole side of me opened up.
So this perception of the world and how I used to be in the world came back to me.
And you know, like I said before, I just believe that we are here to feel.
And unfortunately, I don't feel like the way we are trained and the way we grow up, if we are following society's rules and we're living in this Western world, it does not support us in slowing down or taking space or holding who we are.
Like it makes no space for that.
And I think we're meant to like cry and bawl and scream and dance and like explode with joy.
And I am still very much just slowly coming back into this, coming out of like a fog, out of a cave, and being like, holy shit, when I feel things and I actually allow myself to feel them, guess what?
I feel so much better.
And guess what?
It passes, like the pain will pass the more you do it.
And like, I pretty much like cry every day.
And that's, I don't know, maybe that's weird.
It doesn't seem weird to me anymore.
It actually feels so right.
But I make space and time for it, because if I don't, it like gets backed up in my system.
And I don't need to know why I'm doing it either.
I'm probably crying for like a three-year-old version of myself who, you know, I don't know, knocked over a glass of apple juice.
Like, I don't know, but it doesn't matter, because all that matters is all of that was inside, and it needs to come out.
And I think for the longest time, I was just so afraid to feel, even though that was what I craved more than anything in the world.
All I wanted to do was feel my feelings, but no one told me that was okay.
No one showed me how to do that.
No one made space for it.
And I just kind of learned from my environment.
I was like, nope, we don't do that.
And after I shut down more and more, or even like stopped listening to music more, it's like I was listening more to other people's content or their voices, their thoughts, their feelings, less music that would help me hear myself or connect with myself, and more podcasts or videos or shows or whatever it was.
I was consuming other people because it's like I didn't believe I could honor my own feelings or my own thoughts and my own beliefs.
And yeah, I was really had to be like forced into a state of complete fullness where I was going to explode when music found its way back into my life.
Just helped me start to empty and honestly feeling and then connecting with herself and feeling connected, to me that is just everything.
Because once you can feel yourself, you don't need anything else.
Everything's already inside of you.
You're going to know what to do or where to go next or what is for you and what isn't for you.
It's just such a beautiful lifeline.
And it kind of is, I don't know, the basis for everything.
I could go on about this forever.
So I'm just going to leave it there because I have rambled about this for so long.
But yeah, go listen to a playlist.
Go connect with yourself today and listen to music, whatever it is, whatever does it for you.
Okay, thanks for listening.
Talk again soon.
Bye.
