THROWBACK: "Doing the thing that scares you"

looking back at who I was three years ago

Greetings folks,

This week, I thought I would share a throwback to the first essay I ever posted on Substack three years ago. It’s a short little thing that I wrote hastily after I put out my first song. I needed to talk about it, and I was too milquetoast to tell anyone about it directly.

… so I wrote about how scared I was to talk about it and voila! this substack was born.

It took all the courage I had to press post (for an audience of 3!). Then, I promptly retreated back into the shadows of the wife-and-mother identity that I was much more comfortable in.

Obviously, this was back when I was very much out of practice at taking risks and following heart pulls.

It’s been almost three years since then, and in case you missed all the *ad nauseum screaming* I’ve been doing from the mountaintops, I just put out an album and it is actually gaining some traction and critical acclaim. Which is to say that sometimes it can be very empowering to remember where we were in relation to where we’ve been.

Where were you in your artistic journey three years ago?

If you’re here reading this, I reckon to say that you’re a lot farther along it now. Probably because you pushed yourself to do the scary thing, and then pushed yourself to do the next scary thing and so on.

Now we’re all stronger, more calloused and used to living on our growth edges.

Heck yeah! Cheers to the scary things!

xxC

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Doing the thing that scares you

I don’t support doing things that scare you, unless you can’t not do them. Unless, not doing them feels like a shitty little sham of a life.

Originally posted September 6, 2023

My first Eddie’s Attic open mic. Fall 2023.

Perhaps because I turned 40, or perhaps because I just couldn’t stand it anymore, I started writing and releasing my own music.

Sometimes I like to call it a mid-life crisis, but that masks how important it is to me. It protects my vulnerability because if I call it a mid-life crisis, its just a funny little side project, instead of what absolutely consumes me day in and day out. Even when I try to go about my normal, little white-lady life, with my normal, little husband, and our two little (literally) kids.

At my core, I am a creator and a performer. If I am not doing either (or preferably both) of those things regularly I am not alive. I can function, sure. But I am not alive.

I have found ways to create and to perform, you know at karaoke, in the courtroom, on the storied stage of the Haddonfield community players, but it was just a cute little here-and-there hobby. Not my focus, definitely not my purpose, definitely, definitely not my life’s work. Good grief, no. You don’t think I think that highly of myself, do you? I could never!

This is why owning creating and performing, as an integral part of myself, is hard. It means that I must think myself worthy of other people’s attention and that is unspeakably bad. Women are socially programmed not to seek attention. We are taught to downgrade our capabilities and underplay our passions. Craving attention is bad. Getting attention is bad. It is all our fault. We are bad.

Thus, it took me 40 years to welcome creator and performer to the dinner table to sit alongside my more acceptable identities of lawyer, wife and mother. But I did, and now we’re all here. And mostly getting along!

And speaking of here, that song down there, thats here too. Or maybe it’s here. Either way, it’s somewhere! Which means I am doing the thing, and there is no turning back from doing the thing.

Here, here.

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Note: This feels kinda scary but I dug up the original demo I released, which is no longer on any streaming service. This was the first song I ever wrote and produced myself, and it was where I discovered my love of writing accent synth lines. I just listened to it and I expected it to sound lame, but I am actually surprised that it sounds pretty good.

This song is about how I didn’t feel like I was allowed to do cool creative things because I had kids and a family. I wrote it after I went to an open mic that went longer than I thought it would, and I felt really guilty about getting home late.

I redid the song with some real instruments in 2024, and it’s on my album here if you want to A/B it, but here’s the original.

“On Things” - Demo, September 2023.

“Maudlin Housewife” was my first ever artist name. I stopped using it when most people I played for at open mics didn’t actually know what the word maudlin meant. For album art I used a collage my kid did at preschool that I put text over.

It’s not that bad!

I thought I was like the worst most fraudulent imposter ever when I put this out! I was too ashamed to tell anyone about it! It’s wild to me now.

WHERE WERE YOU THREE YEARS AGO?

Is there anything that would have spooked you back then that you do happily and freely now?

What are you still working on overcoming?

My biggest hurdle that I’m still working on as an artist is learning to be more present and less perfectionistic during live performances, but other than that, I feel so much freer, it’s wonderful.