These are fair questions. Questions I think about a lot.
But like most simple questions, the answer is a bit more involved.
I’m going to answer in my own roundabout way first. Then I’ll share how I envision this moving forward.
Why ESE? This is one of my favorite questions.
I like questions. I prefer them to answers. Questions lead to possibility, opportunity, new ways of thinking about things. Questions require us to listen. I think if you listen to the questions someone asks, you’ll learn a lot about them.
I observe in myself a pressure to come up with right answers.
I’m trying to let go of that. There is a lot of emphasis on answers. But I’m trying to take the side of the questions. Team questions.
I’m not trying to be obtuse. I come by it naturally.
I digress. Deflect.
The truest answer I can come up with right now:
I’ve finally healed enough from some stuff to get into some stuff. I’m seeking a new creative outlet, expression.
My first method of expression was singing. I am told when I was very little I sang myself to sleep, occasionally to the tune of the music box by my bed, sometimes with other songs I knew, sometimes with my own melodic meanderings.
My first cassette tapes were Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. My mother was slightly horrified to hear me sing along with “′Retta Rynn,” as I called her, when I was 4: “Cheatin’ on cheater don’t feel like a-cheatin or I wouldn’t be feeling this good.” (Bomar & Wilson 01:13-01:17) I had no idea what it meant, but I loved it. Catchy. Empowering. By the time I was 6, I was choreographing dances to perform for an empty room, an enthusiastic audience in my mind.
Singing was probably the first thing I did where I could get lost in the activity. Have a “play experience,” as I’d explore in my doctorate. Eventually that expanded. I grew up, got interested in lots of things. Everything changes. I changed and I change.
The pandemic is changing everyone. I write that in the present tense because the pandemic is still happening and so it is still changing people.
The first three years of the pandemic, for me, included the loss of my performance career, the end of my full-time contract as a college professor, and with both, substantial loss of community. Add to that the 8 people I knew who died of covid, the people I knew who died of other things, and friendships lost. Loss changes people. I’m not going to get into all of that now, but that context is part of this.
It was a big identity shift. Big change. After a long time of “art-ing” on one, albeit winding, path.
It is fair to say I was serious about artistic stuff–being a creator, an interpreter–by the time I was in high school. That was about thirty years ago.
Thirty years.
OMG.
“How can that be?!” you exclaim. “You are only 30 years old!”
I know. It is wild. Time is strange. (wink)
In college, I made a pact with myself: I’d do the singing thing until it wasn’t fun anymore or until I couldn’t do it anymore.
I take comfort in, against some odds, having fulfilled my pact.
I almost quit singing in 2006. Grieving the loss of a dearly loved family member and mentor and utterly overwhelmed with my doctoral studies, I was, to put it mildly, not having fun.
I spent three weeks in Alaska that summer. I trained, hard, before going. Not just singing, but also getting physically in shape. I’d signed up for a hiking adventure and didn’t want to be the person who slowed the group down.
I’ll probably write more about all this at some point: outdoor adventures, finding joy in movement, studying and performing at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, making lifelong friends, and ultimately coming back to myself. I decided to at least finish my degree.
I’m glad I did. The best was yet to come.
Things are different now; I am different. That’s as it should be. I don’t know if I’m coming back to singing in that same way. It’s ok not to know. Remember, I am team questions.
Of course, lots of singers working at all levels have been back at it for some time now. The lockdowns are certainly well over. You might be wondering, why not me?
I have many reasons, but the heart of it is: health.
You may be surprised to know I have three chronic health conditions or situations or issues, whatever you’d like to call them, not including “allergies,” a fascinating term in that it’s equal parts vague and specific, and some pesky tendonitis in my right ankle.
Two of these three were triggered by “mild viral infections” from which I did not properly recover, first 15 years ago and again 12 years ago. Neither initial illness was severe enough to warrant a doctor’s visit.
I continue to manage the consequences of so-called “mild” illnesses.
This is a lot more common than you think.
It is not easy to write this.
I know in publishing something like this blog there is at least one truth: at some point, I will offend people, say something that makes me a troublemaker, someone whose ideas others don’t want to engage with anymore. Like in performing, not everyone likes your voice or your interpretation or your tempo or your hair or your dress or your translation or how you turn a certain phrase.
You’d be surprised how personally people take tempo.
But I came here to get into the depths of my truest truths and there is a truth about my body that is true for everyone else’s, too: you can get a “mild” illness that a few weeks later results in a chronic condition. This was true long before covid.
That’s not to minimize covid, which for many people is not mild. Certainly not for those who died. Who struggled for months. Who suffer now.
Covid scares the shit out of me.
Early in the pandemic, I followed the disease research and mitigation efforts very closely. Somewhere I have certificates from webinars and forums I attended online, led by leading experts on all kinds of things covid-related. That’s a habit I can’t shake. That knowledge isn’t easy to find anymore, you have to seek it out. I do.
Such knowledge is inconvenient. And that has been a hard lesson for me.
May we all breathe without struggle.
I will do everything I can to avoid getting sick and to avoid putting my belovèd at risk. I know I am exceedingly lucky to be in a relationship where we agree on this point.
In this regard, I am “risk averse.” I am quite comfortable with that. It is, as they say, my life.
And so it came to pass that I met the other side of my pact: “until I can’t anymore.” Maybe not forever. We’ll see. But I’m not that interested in “forever.”
If masking caught on, things might be different. If vaccinations were popular, if efficacy didn’t wane before new ones were available. If we had what I’ll term a “culture of caring.”
A lot of things would be different for a lot of people if being covid-safe was trendy.
“If things were different, they would be different,” I once said to a friend when I was in college, about something totally unrelated to this post. Vapid but not untrue.
But just as I’m not interested in “forever,” it’s hard for me to connect with “would be.” Like “forever,” it’s expectation, myth. Loss. At best, a thought exercise, and I love those, but hard, for me at least, to extrapolate anything useful, concrete, –dependable–from it. All too often “would be’s” are not so different from “won’t be’s.” This makes me sad. And angry.
So I try to stick with “now.”
All of this is about responsibility; that is, how we respond. So what I am really talking about is my response. And my response to our public health situation is wrapped up in all that happened and all I’ve learned in these past three years, in my own health story, in art and loss and beauty and friendship, in everything that led me to pick up a six-year-old abandoned blog idea now. I cannot talk about why I am doing this without mentioning all of that.
This. And that. Intertwined like the braids in my long, dark hair in the fourth grade. The year I fell in love with the cello. The year I sang along to my mom’s Helen Reddy records. The year I choreographed “I am Woman” and performed it to another empty room.
So now singing is full circle, back to where I started. Me in a room. I no longer need the imaginary audience but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t there sometimes. I feel my air move, feel my body engage in the way I trained it to for years. Healthy. Breath. Sound. Glorious free sound, oh my soul.
As I prepare these posts, I am struck by how, in small ways, doing this is not unlike some aspects of being a singer.
You prepare. For hours. Alone. In a room. Eventually you let it all out, the amalgamation of all those hours of practice and rehearsal and thinking and analysis and study, you release it all on a focused stream of air. It is out and it is gone.
I write. For hours. Alone. In a room. I take a deep breath. I hit “publish.” It is out and it is gone.
Of course, I could shut the blog down in a second. A few clicks and it’s gone. But we all know “The internet is forever.” No takesies backsies.
I imagine those molecules I exhaled in concerts in Germany and Ohio and South Africa and New York and Alaska or practicing alone or in rehearsal with some of my dearest friends, mentors, colleagues, even strangers, or in rooms with faded carpet in Ohio, where I sang my sweet, tender heart out loud and clear, I imagine those molecules all released in oscillating waves of sound might somehow still be floating around, somewhere, somewhere. This and that. Here and there. Intertwined. Like all our lives are now. All of us across the years somehow still breathing music together.
The morning breeze lifts my hair and the thin branches of my favorite tree, with its delicate blossoms, gently gently soft soft, in the cemetery where we walk. Songs and sounds from years ago. They brush against my skin.
In the past year, I’ve made new friends, found new community, reconnected with dear ones, and, again, found my way back to writing.
I’m a little girl with a music box in a small room in Ohio who became a middle schooler with a notebook, who grew and read and laughed and ran and danced and cried and sang out with all my might to rooms filled with dreams. Standing room only.
What’s this all about? On the surface, it’s about me. But it’s really about sharing.
I recently took an online class led by author, teacher, Zen practitioner Natalie Goldberg. Two of my new friends and I did it together.
There were more than 700 people on the first Zoom call. I thought, “Wow. I have something deep and meaningful in common with more than 700 people.” That is something to sit with. To carry.
I think there are more universal thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears than we can know. At the very least, to quote Ingrid Michaelson, I know we are all “breakable.”
So why now, finally, simply? Distilled: it’s just time. Time to step outside myself again, onto my keyboard stage, in the theatre of substack, accompanied as you read by the sound of your breath. And then I’ll do it again. And again. In my own way. As long as it’s right. Or fun. Or I want to. Or I can.
My intended rhythm for posting is weekly-ish for three weeks, followed by one week off. Rinse and repeat. I’m learning about rest so I’m programming it in from the start. I’ll adjust as needed.
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