Your gal only writes to tell you about surgeries, apparently

From a collection of photos Shannon Beauclair took of me in May 2023, a few months prior to my bilateral mastectomy, so I could capture my body as it was beforehand. More later. I need to write more about this here. Saying this as a placeholder. It's been such a whirlwind I've barely had time to breathe let alone write here. □

I've been wanting to write more here, I swear, but the amount of stuff and intensity and thing after thing is almost comical. And as someone who likes to lean toward the light (while always keeping an eye on where I can do better and learn), it's been hard to know how to share about it all without it feeling like a laundry list. 

I guess a good angle is -- how can I keep working and writing and making music in the midst of, oh, a bilateral mastectomy the end of June, and then other (intense) things every few months as big struggles befall friends and family? Well, if you're an artist like me you've probably found refuge in your work. That is, when you're not recovering or lying on the ground crying just trying to make it through the day.

I think so often about Dani Shapiro writing about her meditation teacher, Sylvia Boorstein. Boorstein says she is often "on the edge of sorrow," but "easily cheered." I relate to this so hard! 

The more bad news I get (and I've gotten a slew over the past year), the more I find myself brushing off my pantaloons and crawling to the computer to write or the Rhodes/keys/piano to play. 

Thirty rounds of bad news ago I wrote a small bio for one of my bands, Trippy Hearts, that includes the sentence, "Songs on the hopeful edge of the existential ache." It just continues to be truer day by day. It was funny, though, I had a chiropractor say, "I have no idea what that means," and I was like, "Can I please come live in your head?"

But no, I don't want to live in someone else's head. It is an honor to get to write and make music and the times I get to do those things are such a gift. There are always road blocks to creating and sharing as much as I'd like (and I keep reminding myself THAT is what life is, too, not just writing a freaking song on some mountain of non-affect). But then I sit at the piano and something comes.

Steven Pressfield says, "There's always something in the box," and the more I show up to the page or the instruments the truer that becomes, too. I often have a single tear of gratitude in my eye. Ha! But really.

OK, I just really wanted to get my little toes wet over here after a long journey of existential ache with not a single blog post for eons. Maybe you feel it, too -- the urge to put something on paper or in the ethers or up on this woefully imperfect medium. I've been conserving energy for finishing a book and a proposal and songs, but I've been thinking of all my fellow artists weaving magic along the edges of the existential ache, too.  

Let me know how it's going for you, will you? Screaming in the car, like my husband and I (not at each other, but to purge)? Getting really really quiet? What are you up to amid the existential ache?