Honesty is my recovery.
chapter 01: discoveryHonesty started my journey of unlearning who I was supposed to be.
chapter 02: storyThen & Now
For 10 years I was in what I now know as a deeply transformative process - a decade long dark night of the soul. My reality was ripped out like a rug from underneath me, and for years I was stuck in what felt like unending grief, spinning in the shattered mess of what once held my life’s certainty. It was only later that I learned that the dark night came to wake me up, revealing all that I needed to see about my life. It came to liberate me from my own unconscious obedience to who I was 'supposed to be', to my conditioning, to my family, and the dreams I thought I wanted. It showed me who I had become in order to survive - hiding behind patterns of people pleasing, severe codependency, perfectionism, and performance. It took a great loss for me to start to seek what I really needed to find; my own authenticity - which was so far buried underneath the burdens of everyone else’s demands, expectations, and dreams of who they needed me to be. I started to see the depths I went to neglect myself in order to serve and rescue and save everybody else, trying to uphold a life that I learned was not even mine. This uncovered the extent of my own unacknowledged trauma… where hitting rock bottom gave me no choice but to finally get honest.
Where there was no longer an image to uphold, no one left to protect, nothing left to prove, and like in the Janis Joplin song, ‘freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’, I let the betrayal of rock bottom start to tell the truth. I started writing the wrongs, becoming a witness, validating my own painful experience. Letting rise what had been neglected, suppressed and denied. Singing on a stage my whole life and yet it was here that I was finding my voice for the first time. Realizing where I once unconsciously felt so unheard, unknown and bound by control, honesty was a retrieval, a revival and renaissance all on its own. I was letting go of who I had become by pleasing; through self-effacing transparency, vulnerability, and authenticity. Honesty became my recovery. Setting me on the path of setting my Self free
Honesty awakened my own path - liberating myself from the chains of my past.
chapter 03: songI released Honest to start telling my story.
artistWriter
“It takes a second birth, an awakening for us to speak our first words. Until then, we are merely repeating”
Setting the stageMy entire life was spent on a stage, made up in makeup, under the bright lights, singing and performing. Arriving in Nashville 10 years ago, I didn’t know I would be entering a new stage - the stages of grief and healing. Where I would begin to unearth the brutal yet enlightening truth of discovering Who I truly Am. My time there became a journey of unlearning. It was a dismantling and a rebuilding. Years spent traveling through the archives of memories of time to understand my past; going back so I could go forward - all along shedding the layers of who I was told I was and was ‘supposed to be’, reclaiming the parts of myself that I lost to placating, performing and pleasing. The depth of my own suffering led to an inner reckoning and awakening - first leading me so far down into the darkness of my despair that I had no choice but to begin to uncover what was hidden but always there. Then, where I once believed this all would have just buried me, what I found underneath was what had been neglected; my true nature, my essence. In the darkness of this time, I began to see myself in a new light. I came to know my own soul, plant new seeds, nurture and mature in my own growth. I grew deeper roots and stretched wide, so that I could begin breaking new ground and branching out - blooming into who I was always meant to be.
