I’m walking into and deliberately with great intention making large life changes. I’m slowly taking and making fewer performing opportunities in order to step into my true life’s work, guiding people’s healing and self safety through vocal practice.
After a two hour SparkFile workshop last Saturday, I unearthed a Great Assumption. A fear I’m SURE is true. It has left me sleepless many nights over the last months as the trail gets clearer toward the next phase of my life: “if I quit singing again, in the prime of my voice, my community will abandon me”. Whoah! Feels dramatic, right!? It is.
Approaching this subject with a kind of a curious researcher mind, as prompted by coaches Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien, I realized I had been trying to tell myself not to think/feel this, it’s unfounded and irrational and I’m being my “over emotional” cry baby Carrie self.
Protective 23 year old Carrie protests, “But but but I’ve evidence and experience to prove it’s true!” Let’s hear her out, and hold her close. This is the evidence 23 year old Carrie presents.
When I was 23 and I quit singing after sexual trauma, many didn’t ask why I quit. My voice teacher and mentor, some long time family friends and general fans left me without question….but not without letting me know what a mistake I was making, what a talent I was wasting and how I had equally wasted their time and money they had invested in me. They didn’t notice the smile forced around the TMJ mouth guard I was now wearing constantly, the patches of hives pooling together to cover my skin, the shallow breath as evidence of multiple stress-fueled asthma attacks and puffs and puffs of albuterol daily. They didn’t ask, they just left.
23 year old Carrie has truly been given space to grieve this lately. Present day Carrie holds her dear, thanks her for speaking her truth and will walk her gently through the present day “evidence” in order to debunk this very assumption.
Present day Carrie presents this “evidence” having been in the music world for the last 15 years. The truth: I rarely see my music friends unless we’re performing together on a gig. Hence, if I stop doing music, stop creating these gigs for us to make music, I stop seeing those friends.
While this is often true, present day Carrie also knows this “evidence” is NOT evidence to support my fear filled assumption, but it is life. People move in and out of our lives. We need different people in our lives at different times for different purposes. Our needs then can be met in myriad ways. It is not abandonment.
Community will not abandon me, nor I it. Where there are deliberate acts of connection, there is community. This includes the people we make time for regularly, the “die hard” folks that have been and will be around, and also the people that move in and out of our lives, at different times for all kinds of reasons. Connection always equals being a part of something, someone, a path, a curious conversation that fuels an “ah hah!” moment, no matter how long on our life’s timeline it lasts. Sometimes mere minutes, sometimes decades.
We also get to grieve as some of those connections shift in order to make room and space for new things to take root, and grow. This is where this Great Assumption exercise led me, to a path of permission to celebrate and even grieve what has been in order to welcome fully with open arms and heart to what is and what is to become.