Something a bit different today, I have a song for you, just not one I wrote (which feels weird, but also kinda fun!?).

Many years ago, I connected with a very clever and talented composer/producer, Joe who goes by Minus Cube professionally. We shared the ups and downs or being indie artists trying to get anyone to notice us (haha/argh) and became friends, and then about two years ago he sent me a track he’d made and asked if I could write to it and sing it, which I did and sent it back and he loved what I’d written and sung and long story short we released our first collab ‘This All Ends Here’ in November 2024, a track we both hope will sit on a dystopian movie soundtrack someday (g’wan universe… 💫).

Then earlier this year he asked if I’d be up for another collab, this time a cover version of Dissolved Girl by Massive Attack. I was a bit intimidated because Sarah Jay Hawley has such a distinct voice and this is a prettttty iconic song for anyone who grew up with The Matrix. But, I gave it a go and really enjoyed the process! I’m actually learning that reimagining covers might be a little bit in my wheelhouse (more on that quite soon!) and it’s really fun.

So for anyone who likes cinematic style alt-roc… here is our version of Massive Attack’s Dissolved Girl (out in all the other places you find music too)

Are you kidding me? Sia Furler?

The Australian music artist I somehow knew about as a teenager in the UK in 2001 (back when we were still using dial up internet, and social media and Spotify didn’t exist to connect us to artists in milliseconds, to be clear) because she sang with Zero 7 and we were all listening to that album all the time. That Sia?

Sia who wrote and performed Breathe Me, the 2004 track that caused many of us to sit in silence feeling both completely exposed and beautifully held all at once? Which was also (devastatingly) featured on the finale of Six Feet Under (a huge show at the time)?

Sia, whose 2008 album (this was her fourth studio album, btw) Some People Have Raal Problems quite possibly saved my life and also (less anecdotally) charted at 26 on the US billboard chart, saw her perform on major TV shows (because I watched them!) and was certified Gold? For clarity, at this point she was 33. She’s 33 and on her fourth studio album, has landed major sync placements, has a billboard charting album and has performed on the likes of Jools Holland in the UK and the Late Show in the US (aside from all the Australian, European and other global appearances and the tours she’s done at this point).

That right there is a successful career, end of.

So then somewhere around this time a little known artist called Christina Aguilera becomes aware of Sia to the point of getting her to co-write for her album Bionic. Sia is 34 years old and writing for Christina Aguilera. Still not ‘made it’ though, in the eyes of many music bloggers.

Then her fifth album We Are Born (which features the insanely beautiful and heartbreaking track I’m In Here, by the way), produced by that equally relatively “unknown” chap, Greg Kurstin, (I guess?), also charted in the top ten across a huge number of countries, including reaching number two in Australia. Now, Sia was never a generic pop star in hot pants and a bikini top. Charting in the top ten, or twenty, or even the top 100, in multiple countries is a MASSIVE achievement. And that was in 2010. She was 35. I’d say she’s already the level of success most people I know would give anything to reach.

Then Titanium came out in 2011. A global smash with David Guetta (which she didn’t actually want released, apparently, but that’s a whole other story). But come on. We’re not going to acknowledge that Titanium was an absolutely massive hit song and surely made Sia a household name (if that’s one of the ‘markers’ for success here..)?

No? Still no?

Ok, so we’re now on her SIXTH studio album 1000 Forms Of Fear which came out in 2014. She’s 39 now, by the way, still in her thirties. The lead single was a song called Chandelier? Not sure if anyone remembers it.

But lo and behold, in 2016, she collaborated with Sean Paul on the track Cheap Thrills and ‘finally’ got a US number one hit, albeit as a featured artist. So now she’s made it, now she’s a breakthrough, now we set her as a marker for women over 40 ‘making it’ in music.

She had made it decades before. She had made it by the time she had people buying tickets to see her perform live. She made it by my making song people get goosebumps from.

Here she is below (in all her utterly adorable glory, btw) performing at The Troubadour (iconic London venue icydk ) in 2006 to an audience who adore her. Ten years before she ‘made it’ but living my (and many music artists’) literal dream.

I found ‘Some People Have Real Problems’ at 27 years old, on a CD rack at a service station, on a long drive after being signed off work with ‘anxiety and depression’ (nope, CPTSD, but that’s a whole another story) and feeling like the world around me was jelly. I knew I liked Sia but hadn’t heard that album. So I picked it up there and then in the queue and bought it, in that strange way millennials used to like, ‘buy’ music (weird huh). That album felt like a hug, a therapy session, validation, empowerment and softening all in one.

That album literally saw me through such an intense period of my life. I remember wishing I’d had Death By Chocolate to listen to during my first heartbreak and banking it mentally for any future daughters I may have. Beautiful Calm Driving felt horrifyingly accurate to experiences I’ve had. Buttons is lyrically absolute genius. I actually think listening to that album in the depths of near suicidal depression not only saved me but reminded me of my love of music, which I started to slowly turn back towards. It is an album many people reading this have probably never heard of. And yet it still creates a reaction in my body when I think of it. Not everyone will feel that way about it. But my god I needed that album and it found me when I did.

So yes, as a woman in my forties, desperately trying to course correct and build a life where I earn a living doing what I love most - writing songs, composing, producing music - Sia is absolutely an inspiration to me. Not because she ‘finally made it in her forties’ but because she’s been making impactful, beautiful art for twenty five years and is still going!

LIVESTREAM TOMORROW

If you’re a Sia fan, or just love hearing people talking passionately about songwriting and the artists they look up to, I’m going live tomorrow (20th July) at 7pm UK time with the incredibly talented to talk all things Sia, songwriting play a few covers and more. Hope to see some familiar faces there!

I’m wanting to show up more with my creative process, and be more human, more raw, more real. The only way to counteract AI ‘art’ is to lean into the imperfect, possibly cringe, unpredictable process of creating human art.

So yesterday for reasons unknown, I asked my substack followers to give me a word. The list I got was

Burl, Tardy, Boat, Manuport, Word, Momentum, Liminal, Glass, Paradiddle and Hobnob

As per the video below, I decided to slightly tweak the words that I couldn’t make work, so ‘tardy’ became ‘late’ and ‘paradiddle’ became ‘rhythm’. Hopefully that isn’t a cheating too much.

I set a 25 minute (pomodoro) timer, filmed myself writing it, recorded a rough demo and edited the vid. All in all from start to finish the whole process took around 3.5 hours. It was really therapeutic to just make something from start to finish in a small amount of time. I think I needed to be reminded that not every output needs to have a meaning, a purpose, to be a ‘big release’ or something to make income from. Also aside from a little reverb I’ve left my raw vocals in the demo. The guitar is pretty clunky (and also very out of tune in the video, sorry) and imperfect. Something about sharing all this feels incredibly freeing. No filters on my face, no tuning on my voice, a raw one-take vox and guitar. HUMAN CREATIVITY.

So, thank you to those who contributed words and helped create this (actually not terrible?) song out of nothing :-).

If you want to see the (painful) process unfold the ‘making of’ is below”:

I spoke about grief a lot in May, and then shared my song Bloodlines earlier this month and appreciated all the messages and words about that. We share so many experiences as humans and I do think the job of an artist is to pour those shared experiences through our own lens and then reflect that back out into the world for whoever is meant to find it. And it’s such a beautiful, almost indulgent, process to transmute pain into something else. I never take for granted that I get to do that, with or without applause, I have my own way of alchemising pain, and that feels like a privilege.

June was a lot, but then isn’t every month, week….day….a lot right now? For us all!? I literally have to remind myself to breeeeaaaaaatttthhhhe. My diaphragm actually seizes up sometimes in protest, I sort of contort to one side as my intercostals all spasm. More often than not some mindful breathing resolves 80% of it. People keep talking about breathwork to me, I’ve not really investigated it yet but maybe I should? (Also, I think my attempting to run (three times!)) this month, after basically zero cardiovascular exercise for months, may have caused my body to freak out completely (“What is she doing? This isn’t sedentary? Where’s the lovely sedentary gone?!))

So my June involved a week that held my daughter’s birthday, her party on the weekend, and my grandmothers funeral in between them. It was quite the emotional whiplash. Which was then immediately followed by what anyone in England can only describe as a disgusting heatwave. It was gross. Ugh. We actually had Australians living in the UK on social media saying ‘yeah guys, the heat in the UK is just awful, they’re not being dramatic’. Our country is not equipped. We don’t have air con like, anywhere. Except our cars I guess. We didn’t really have a breeze either, in a heatwave. We had almost a whole week of around 34-37C (94-100F?) sitting thick and heavy in the air and barely cooling overnight either. Everyone was angry and exhausted and just basically melting. Schools had to close! I took my kids to hang out in a supermarket for three hours because it had freezer aisles to keep it cool. May that weather never find us again. (It definitely will).

But music! I actually had some music output this month (hurrah!). I created a cover version of the song ‘Sweet Disposition’ by The Temper Trap for a submission to a publisher. It may lead to nothing, but doing these sorts of things is really helping me a) hone my sound and b) speed up my process! I’m realising if I actually want any form of meaningful income from music it will need to come from working with sync placements/production music, and then I can release my songs to the small but wonderful number of people who do care and not worry about the vanity metrics/ algorithm slavery required to ‘prove yourself’ as ‘real artist’.

It’s so funny, I have like, 16 listeners on Spotify (cos I’ve done absolutely nothing to drive any listeners for over a year) which probably looks….sad?….to an outsider. But I know that I made thousands of pounds in passive income from royalties last year from music that nobody even knows I made for TV libraries. Not to mention the upfront fees paid on making library music so far too. So, as a not-totally-stupid-person, why would I pour my (limited…) energy into trying to beg for Spotify streams of….uhhm….pennies, instead of investing that energy into trying to double or triple what’s actually already working? People love telling us there’s no money in music anymore. There is - it just ain’t on Spotify.

I’ve also been drawn back to my lovely piano this month. I was honoured to be asked to provide a piece of music to play at my grandmothers funeral. I chose a piece I wrote last year, which I recorded months ago and in full ‘me’ style…have done absolutely nothing with, it’s called ‘Butterflies’. I’m going to share it here, let me know if you close your eyes, if it feels like the right title. I’d love to know. I’m thinking I may create another pseudonym for piano pieces like these and start sharing them, again would love thoughts. I’ve swing back and forth on this for years, but I feel like its too different to my songs to sit under my songwriter work, but I’d also love to share these little pieces with the world. (I already have a pseudonym in mind too….!). Piece embedded below:

Meanwhile, times moves along, scarily fast (right? does anyone else feel that way, that time just…moves faster these days? Am I getting old and boring by saying that? I swear June felt like 8 days not 30….). I can’t quite believe we’re in July already and my goals for the year are, as always, still miles away. I don’t know if I overestimate how much I can actually do, or underestimate how much I have to do outside of what I want to do, or if actually the process or building a creative life means quite literally having the experience I am having.

I am going against the norm, so I don’t get to have normal comfort. I could go do a 9-5 job and climb the ranks of a predetermined career ladder. I could do that. It would be safe and secure and well compensated. I already did that, more than once. And it was unsustainable. So I have to remember that in not doing that, there is no predetermined route for me. There is no ‘do this for 18 months and you’ll get a promotion and a pay rise’, and there never ever will be. I don’t get to have that security, I don’t get to have that peace of mind. But what I do get is to experiment and try and grow and fail and learn and build my own path. I get to have the rare, beautiful, tiny moments of joy and fulfilment that come with building a life of design, brick by brick, against the tsunami of fear rising within me most days, all around juggling the rest of ‘real life’ and squeezing in unrealistic-yet-also-somehow-impossible-to-ignore dreams.

I heard someone once say ‘everything is hard, you just have to choose your hard’ and I think of it often. It’s hard to sit at a desk all day going insane with boredom over work you don’t care about, staring out the window at a world you can’t touch because you’re locked in an Excel document or a Powerpoint Presentation doing ‘busy work’. But it’s great to be paid monthly and have a nice holiday every year. It’s hard to not be paid a steady monthly wage and know you probably can’t have a holiday this year. But it’s great to be able to be in the world exactly as you want to and create things that only you can create, and try to prove to yourself and your children that there is another way. I’m trying to prove to my children that they don’t have to be locked in an office, or tied to a desk, building someone else’s kid’s trust fund for 40 years of their precious life. Man, every time I remember that, there is just no giving up.

I’ll wrap up there as this is a long one already. But to anyone else ‘choosing their hard’ and building a life that feels rather scary but with those priceless moments of amazing fulfilment and joy and validation…let’s keep at it!

I’ve been thinking about my grandmothers lately, and my song Bloodlines that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now.

My maternal grandmother died very recently and I’m still in the process of accepting her loss. She was a very talented artist who only really began to pursue her own creative dreams in her fifties, after years spent raising seven children. She always encouraged my creativity. When I was younger, she gave me a beautiful ‘How to Draw’ book that I treasure even more now. Inside the front cover she had carefully written her name and address in case it was ever lost.

There is something profound in the maternal line, knowing that, quite literally, part of me once existed inside of my mother’s mother. Now that we understand more about epigenetics than previous generations did, I sometimes wonder how much of her I carry within me, not just in memory, but in ways neither of us could ever fully know.

I’ve also been thinking about my father’s mother. She was a woman I never felt I truly knew or felt at ease with. There was a formality and a distance around her, I tiptoed around her, tried to sit still, sit up straight, not touch anything. There wasn’t any real warmth. She felt functional but not familial, which is deeply sad. I remember at her funeral hearing the eulogy I learned things that made me weep. She had loved singing since childhood. She was a singer and a dancer (a dancer, the stiff, rigid woman I knew?!). I suddenly found myself imagining my grandmother at nineteen, before marriage, children and responsibility, dancing and singing her heart out. Full of life and possibility. What the hell happened? I sobbed in the church at how little I’d known about this woman who I couldn’t have existed without. And it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t know her, but I still felt deeply sad. I never saw her dance. I never heard her sing, this woman I might have had far more in common with than I ever realised.

During the covid lockdowns, when the world felt uncertain and fragile and frightening, I found myself thinking a lot about all the women who came before me and went through worse. Women who survived witch trials, emigration, wars, poverty, oppression, dangerous childbirth and countless other hardships I’ll never fully understand. Women whose names have often been forgotten. Women whose sacrifices disappeared into history. Women who endured so much so that we could be here now, living this life.

That idea became deeply moving to me because it raised a question for me too: what am I passing on? Not possessions or achievements, but values, beliefs, stories, possibilities.

As women, many of us spend enormous amounts of energy doing work that is invisible. Raising children, healing wounds, breaking patterns, challenging narratives, learning to use our voices, recovering our creativity, leaning to define boundaries, choosing difficult paths. And sadly the fruits of that labour may not be fully seen in our own lifetime, whether as a mother, or an aunt, or a best friend, the interconnecting web of influences that shape the next generation are profound.

It reminds me of that quote about planting a tree you’ll never get to sit under. You do it because it matters and it will mean something in future. And I wonder about the women who planted various seeds for me, 150 years ago. And I wonder what seeds I plant will provide for great, great grandchildren that I will never meet.

And that is why I wrote Bloodlines.

The first verse imagines meeting one of those women in a dream, a distant ancestor whose face somehow mirrors my own. She recognises my struggles because they’re shared, eternal struggles. Despite everything she endured, she offers unconditional love. The feminine knowing is there, innately. The dream became a way of exploring the idea that pain, strength, wisdom and love can travel through generations.

The second half of the song turns in the opposite direction, instead of looking backwards, I imagined meeting a woman yet to come. My great-great-granddaughter’s daughter. Someone I will never know. Someone whose world will likely be unimaginable to me. Yet when we look into the water, our reflections are still the same, but there is a hope and a fire in her that had been lost for generations.

I think modern Western culture has largely lost its relationship with ancestors. We’ve become disconnected from the idea that we are part of a much longer story.

Bloodlines was my attempt to reconnect with that story. I hope it lands where it’s needed. xx

Bloodlines

I had a dream 
my great, great grandmother’s grandmother found me
she led me to a stream
when we peered into the water 
our reflection was the same
I felt as though I knew her 
though I didn’t know her name

she turned and took my face into her warm, worn hands
and when looked at her I saw the same lost plans 
she had seen enough to take the light from her eyes
but she was full of wonder and her good heart was wise

the longer that she held me I felt love personified 
she told me she would hold me until all our tears were dried 
she told me she would hold me til the light was back inside 
and that she knew the cost of all I’d tried

I had a dream 
my great, great granddaughter's daughter I found her 
we walked out to the sea
and when we stepped into the water 
our reflection was the same
I felt as though I knew her though I didn’t know her name

and when she pulled my hands into her gentle palms
I felt the love within her and my soul was calmed
she had learned enough to keep the fire in her eyes
she was full of wonder and her good heart was wise 

the longer that she held me I felt myself unfold 
she told me she would hold me til I broke the mould 
she told me she would hold me til we weren’t controlled 
and finally all stories could be told
❤️

It’s been a month since you last got an email from me. I don’t know about you but the intensity of my inbox makes me feel ill sometimes so maybe my very intermittent newsletters are a good thing…(?)

Oof. May. May felt like a month that happened to me rather than a month I actively participated in. I was super excited after April to keep the momentum going that I had built but life had other plans. So not much ‘studio’ talk in today’s post, but keeping my promise to round up each month honestly. Maybe someone will relate either way, as often seems to happen!

So May started off really well, I delivered my instrumental album to the music library, and I had my first ever podcast interview (me? whaaaat?) with the awesome which I loved doing (you can have a listen here if you’d like to hear me rant about the importance of women making their own music!). But things really took a turn and I ended up spending large parts of it in survival mode trying to navigate chronic pain, exhaustion, grief, family life, a school holiday, and (if I’m honest) outright despair that the ground beneath the music industry is shifting faster than any of us can process.

I found out that my maternal grandmother was likely in her last few weeks of life not long into May, and this brought up the usual intense emotions that losing any loved one does. For me, she was my last living grandparent, and also the one I spent the most time with in my life. She was my mother’s mother. It’s an inexplicable bond, no matter how you look at it. She had seven children and I’m the eldest grandchild of twenty-three cousins. The sheer volume of visitors she had in her final days was something truly moving. She was almost a 4 hour drive away from me but I knew I needed to go, and managed to find a day that week that I could drop everything and drive there, and ended up in a room with seven other family members (aunts, uncle, cousins). It was actually very beautiful, but also devastating. I've not been able to physically say goodbye to any of my other grandparents, so this was especially meaningful to me. After a few hours I kissed her sleeping face and told her I loved her and drove back home (another 4 hours) utterly exhausted. Two days later I woke to the news that she’d left this realm and I would never see her face or hear her voice again.

I don’t know if it was the exhaustion of motherhood (as always) alongside trying to earn money from the things that should be valued but that AI is increasingly destroying, whilst navigating the hell of hormones unleashed in a woman’s forties, and trialling food exclusions to reduce inflammation and/or the grief of losing my grandmother, but within a few hours of her death my body started burning in pain. Like, all over. From my ankles to my neck, it was just pain. My spine was on fire, my legs felt heavy and aching, there was sharp stabbing pains in hips, my rib cage…it was horrendous. It got to the point that the pain was around 80% of the pain of childbirth. I couldn’t find any position to alleviate the pain, painkillers took the edge off for an hour at most, so I just had to endure it.

So everything stopped. Everything HAD to stop. The universe has done this to me before. Because I never stop, I never want to give up, I never want let anyone down, I struggle to say no, and the only way to get me to stop is to literally stop me physically via pain in the body. To force my surrender.

By day three I was on the phone to a GP, who sounded very weary with my presumably ‘irrational’ pain experience. I know at this point that GPs cannot/will not help with much outside of prescribing antibiotics or antidepressants (oh, and trying to give you the coil, they loooove that coil) so it was me and my pain in my body (my ‘pain body’ perhaps, any Eckart Tolle readers here?) and I needed to fix myself on my own.

I have had enough bouts of chronic pain now to know that however real and debilitating, there is always a relief in a) surrendering to it and b) releasing fear about it. It's the last thing you want to hear when you’re in agony, but getting a hold of your psyche and calming the body down really does work. I managed to put on a Yoga Nidra meditation and focused on calming my racing heart and mind to allow my body to try to let go of whatever was causing it to spasm and ache and burn. To my intense relief, 30 minutes of meditation and relaxation gave me more respite than three days of taking painkillers had. I slowly regained control of my spirit and my mind and then my body started to calm down too. It took a few more days but I was able to walk again after about a week of being bedridden. Which beautifully coincided with my kids school holidays starting (you gotta laugh…)

So no music releases, no income generation and barely even touching my piano.

When your body doesn’t feel safe, when you’re in physical or emotional pain (no matter how much was may try to romanticise it as artists) in real pain creativity becomes a luxury rather than a refuge. So I just couldn't create. And then alongside all of that has been a growing sense of grief about the future of music generally.

Not music itself, because music will survive. Music is everything, it is language we all speak. It is sacred and healing and connecting and magical.

But, like many musicians, I’ve spent a lot of time this month staring at the AI-induced blackhole in front of me and wondering where all of this is heading. Wondering whether audiences even care if the voice they hear singing isn’t a real human. Wondering whether human-made work will become more valuable now or less. Wondering whether AI will be scoring all films and TV before we know it and just erasing an entire industry. Wondering whether we’re witnessing an evolution, a renaissance, a collapse, or maybe all of them simultaneously.

I don’t have any answers, of course. But May also stripped me of the energy to keep going or keep trying in the face of all that. Probably more the grief than anything else, but I was just emotionally exhausted and carrying the hopelessness that follows a loss, compounded by the endless news about AI artists blowing up on Spotify and why musicians are redundant now.

BUT….its not May anymore :-)

Despite the despair, the fear - the genuine, crippling fear - that my entire life’s work has been a total waste of energy because the goal posts haven’t just continually moved they’ve now been replaced with fucking holograms, I still keep coming back to the same thought: people have always needed stories and people have always needed connection. People have always needed evidence that another human being felt something and survived it. And that’s what songs give us.

So maybe that’s also why these little monthly blogs are worth doing, written by my strange human brain about my lived human experience of a month being totally flattened by grief and pain in a way that AI couldn’t ever experience, even if it could articulate it. And maybe thats why independent music will keep mattering, and will always find an audience of real, human, feeling, thinking people.

So no, May wasn’t a productive month ‘in the studio’. My plans remain…plans. I’ve not ‘executed’ or ‘boss moded’ anything. And my to-do list is frankly eating itself at this point.

But I’ve tuned in to myself, my limits, my pain, to my exhaustion, to my body and to my soul. Trying to trust and believe in the process, trying to remember that my worth is not measured by output. Trying to trust that creative seasons, like natural ones, are cyclical, things happen in waves, and there is no ‘clock’ I am up against.

Rest is not failure and recovery is not weak.

And perhaps the most important thing I did this month was just hold space for myself to move through something inexplicably painful, possibly life-changing, and profoundly sad.

June will have studio sessions and joy, I’m sure. And hopefully more posts because I did intend to do more than one monthly roundup!

I truly hope June is beautiful, fruitful, healing, peaceful month for every single one of you, and if it’s not, that you are able to give yourself grace to stop and rest if you need it. xx

How was April for all of you? We finally got some ‘actual sunshine’ over here in the UK, hurrah! I made some progress in April and also hit some walls, and am back into ‘recalibration mode’. This seems to be a bit of a cycle. I’m not sure if it’s one I can break either, as it may literally be how life works? Or….I do not to work on it so that I don’t hit the wall so hard each time? Hmmm.

I finally delivered my production music album which feels good. The deliverables took several days, creating cutdowns, alt versions, naming, exporting, checking, realising some of them had the wrong sample rate, screaming into a pillow, crying a bit because of course, going back in, re-editing projects, re-making cutdowns and alt versions, exporting again, re-checking. Yikes. It’s been a steep learning curve, but a very valuable one, and I’ve sensibly made myself a proper "process sheet for next time” which I’m very proud of myself for because that feels very organised and not at all like me.

Alongside all that, I’ve been slowly writing songs for the musical I’m working on. I’ve not given it anywhere near enough time so that will be a focus for May. It deserves proper care and attention!

April also held my birthday, I turned 42. I wrote about it more fully here, but it brought up a lot. I spent the day before in a slightly catatonic state, crying a lot (I was also luteal, let’s be clear). But also just…man, birthdays feel different now. I used to love getting dressed up and going dancing and nursing my hangover with a big breakfast the next day. But now they’re just…years passing with grief. We’re quick to shut women down on that: “be grateful you get to age” (very valid, and I am grateful for my life), “ageing is ‘beautiful’” (ha ha haaaaaaa NOPE, until every magazine or film has a woman in her 40s with grey roots and wrinkles seriously stop spouting that crap, it’s insulting. When nobody in entertainment has Botox or fillers or hair extensions or facelifts, then fine, you can tell me ageing is beautiful. Until then it’s a lie!). I think living in the contradiction of knowing ageing is a privilege and that women are becoming more wise, powerful, and actually yes - deeply beautiful - with age, and holding that knowing in a world that tells women none of that matters, inject your face, tighten up, dye your roots, aim to look 25 with you’re 45, ew not laughter lines, ew not a face that moves, ew not like…looking older cos you’re older. EW! It’s hard to live inside both of those realities at once and stay sane.

The other part of it is the grief that comes up with yet another year passing is the ol’ bucket list getting longer and further away. Still not seen the Northern Lights or stood on the Bolivian Salt Flats at dusk. Still not making a living from music. (mmm, not making a living from anything, let’s be honest). Still carrying ‘baby weight’ (not baby weight, ice-cream weight), I swore I’d lose four years ago. Again, all VERY silly ‘problems’, I know. But they do sort of come to the surface around birthdays and January 1st.

Life with the kids has been… full (insert melting face emoji). Hectic, loud, triggering, often overwhelming. A fair bit of solo parenting lately, which always shifts (destroys) the balance of everything else. The constant juggling act of trying to make space for creative work inside of real life continues!

I also worked on a cover for MAD Records’ Run For Cover, which I might share in a future post. There’s that familiar tension there of wanting to be seen in the process of, but also wanting to hide something until it feels fully “ready”. I’m sure its probably all just fear pretending to be self-preservation though, eh?

Which brings me to something I’ve been realising too, if this is a newsletter about my music, I need to actually share more music in it?! Not just the thoughts around it, or the process, or the life that surrounds it, but my work itself. Must stop overthinking it all.

What I ‘achieved’ in April

• Achieved above-average mothering to the kids. I think/hope.

• Finished and delivered my library music album.

• Continued to drag myself to gym, not massively consistently, but, I went.

• Started producing some tracks for a new personal project

• Deleted instagram from my phone and started leaving it upstairs while I’m downstairs with my kids. Yes, this is an achievement.

What I didn’t follow through on

• Didn’t finish or release a song at all

• Still did not list myself as a musician on any musician-for-hire platforms (scared)

Lessons from April

• I categorically need to say ‘no’ more, even to myself. I have a really problem with what I think I can do in a day/week/month, and what I can actually do (around 1/3 of it)

• I need to walk more

May goals

1. Reach out to more production music houses and see if I can create some more tracks (eek!)

2. Record one of my new songs and RELEASE IT

3. Gym three times a week (consistency is key, right?!)

Art/Artists I’ve enjoyed this month

Katherine Priddy

Um, so what rock have I been hiding under where I only just found this woman? I have been spending a lot more time on Bandcamp lately (Spotify is just AI slop, major labels and payola these days, sorry) and on one of my days listening through various genres I found this artist. My gosh her recent album is amazing. The opening track alone, ‘Matches’, is worth a listen. The chilling final lyric in the chorus had me in goosebumps “They weren’t burning witches, it was women on those fires”.

REA

Also discovered on Bandcamp, I just find her voice so soothing and her music is beautiful. It’s so intimately recorded, and I love her use recording outside sounds, it feels like I’m in the same space with her.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

I know, I know, it’s a cliche. But I’ve never sat down and actually read the whole thing start to finish, despite having it on my bookshelf and knowing various quotes. And I wanted to do that, so I’ve been reading it and processing all sorts of thoughts about Sylvia’s life, her inner world, her artistry, her experience of marriage and motherhood….I think most women who are either mothers, artists, or both, will always feel drawn to her work.

How was April for you? What was your highlight, or lesson? What are your goals for May? I’d really love to know!

I still feel about 27, I feel a lot younger than my reflection tells me I am, and sometimes that feels like a very deep grief that you only feel when you’re going through it. But then I remember how lucky I am to have made it this far. Not just because many lives get taken too soon, but also because I have had my fair share of not wanting to be here.

There is a particular exhaustion from the cellular level grief of a childhood being “raised” by the unhealed traumas of everyone around you, as a yet-undiagnosed neurodiverse child, who seemed to somehow trigger literally every adult they met by simply existing. The response was verbal takedowns, emotional takedowns, outright violence and abandonment. The amount of work required to simply function in this world with all that going on inside you, this world that feels so deeply lonely, does push a person in their teens or early 20s, to just not want to do it anymore.

By 22 I had already been through so much that I didn’t even realise was far too much for one nervous system to carry. I’m now 20 years into trying to heal and I wish with everything that I am that I could talk to my younger self. Sometimes I think I do. Sometimes I think our ‘higher self’ is in fact our future self, nudging us.

So I’m taking a leaf out of The Creative Life’s book today (thanks for the inspiration, Jim!) and writing to 22 year old me, maybe in some quantum physics ways I don’t understand, these words land in her subconscious and help her keep going….

Hey there, you resilient little mofo!

It’s funny that you think you’re weak or weird or unworthy, when you’re so unbelievably strong and despite having been pushed, pulled, squeezed, moulded and beaten into a submissive shape that the people around you find tolerable, there’s still something about you that people want to know. You don’t see it yet because you’re still chasing after the wrong people. But my god, it’s going to be glorious when you discover you’re actually worth knowing.

And yes, I said resilient. Because look at you, surviving life so far and finally starting to actually live it, finishing a degree whilst your heart was ripped out of you in multiple ways, now making plans to move to London by yourself. You’ve not even begun processing it all yet, the ‘stuff’ you unconsciously word-vomit on people, like a weird test ‘ha ha, we’ve just met but here’s a bit of my trauma wrapped in a joke…uncomfortable, huh, you gonna run? Yeah, that figures, ok bye’.

Spoiler alert: that’s a coping mechanism, sweetie. Bigger spoiler alert: most of your life has all been one big coping mechanism and you’ve pretty much become a walking trauma response. You only know:

1. Fight (rare but ugly, from very justified triggers that you don’t even grasp yet, also usually when very drunk)

2. Flight (running away from places and people only works for so long, chica)

3. Fawn (horrifyingly dominant around authority figures and/or men)

4. Freeze (in almost every situation that requires you standing up for yourself, using your voice or choosing something for yourself)

Very few people actually know you yet, outside of this facade of self-protective responses. They don’t see the sad, damaged little girl that hides inside the loud, argumentative young woman who ‘doesn’t need anyone’, because she literally cannot risk exposing her soft gooey centre to anyone anymore. The soft centre that has been used as a punching bag too many times by far too many people who claimed to love you. Love doesn’t feel safe yet, but it will.

From age 13-18 you were basically peer-raised by frenemies who were all just broken little babies themselves, with issues equally as big as yours. They had no idea what they were doing, they were just louder about it and somehow convinced you that you were wrong in so many ways that you weren’t. You’ll learn in time that all the personality traits you had that you were told made you ‘lame’, ‘weird’, ‘too much’, ‘too sensitive’ were actually exactly what made you ten times cooler than any of those girls. They just didn’t understand their own insecurities and projected them onto you.

What made you cool wasn’t the clothes you wore or the slang you used or whether you could smoke marijuana for the first time without choking. It was that you were intelligent, intuitive, super-empathic, interested in a thousand different things and emotionally light years ahead of them. But being light years ahead of 14 year olds *feels like* being behind. While your moral compass balked at kissing a boy you knew someone else was ‘in love’ with, your ‘totes besties’ had no issues making out with boys you liked right in front of you and telling you you were immature if you got hurt. You weren’t immature, they were.

The fact you got straight As, cared so much about music and got the lead role in the school play was weird to your ‘friends’, but continuing to do those things developed you as the person you were always meant to be, outside of their validation. And when your supposed BFFs told you that you were just their ‘project’ - “like Ty in Clueless, we thought we could make you cool” - you’ll feel the stirrings of a deeper knowing that will say ‘These are not your friends, and you don’t need to ‘become’ anybody else to be loved’. Try to keep listening to that voice.

I wish I could instil in you the self-knowing and wisdom that is coming. You’ll always doubt yourself in some ways, which is (according to therapists you’ve worked with over the years (also, not a weakness by the way)) completely understandable. Listen, you were pretty much told or shown that you were a worthless piece of crap your whole life to date. Emotionally, verbally or physically abused by pretty much every single person who claimed to ever love you. Love is not going to feel ‘safe’, trust will not exist for a LONG time. But the one love that will start feeling safe - in fact, you’ve already tapped into it now, at 22 - is the love you’ll start having for yourself. Love that is an indeed a verb, a doing word.

This is the root of all of the good that will come for you. In a few months, you’re going to change your phone number, ex-communicating multiple people and closing a long and horrific chapter of your life where you utterly and completely lost every shred of who you were. You’re going to move to London and learn so many things the hard way. You’re going to have some real near misses. Your self-preservation and intuition is going to level up, because you’re finally, truly alone. But you’re learning, you’re growing. You’re starting to listen to yourself and enjoy your own company. You’re finally starting to hear your own voice in the choices you make.

You still have about another decade of investing in the wrong people, I’m sorry to say. Not because they’re ‘bad’ people, but because they’re not your people. You will find your people when you stop watering the dead plants. Crazy fact: when you stop trying to attract what you’re repelling (and deep down, what repels you, if you’re honest) you start becoming magnetic for what is meant for you, and trust me, by 42 you are abundant in the most unbelievable friends. Something that felt so impossible, so far away for so much of your life because you were ‘a lot’, will suddenly become one of the most beautiful parts of your life, a source of life changing support, genuine love and meaningful interactions.

You’ll finally realise you are, and always have been, incredibly easy to love. You were just always trying to get the wrong people to love you.

Right now, you’re facing the precipice of adulthood, leaving the security of three years with brilliant people at university (you’ll be at each other’s weddings and meet each other’s babies, even if you drift a little, they’ll always be special people to you). You have a few years yet where you feel incredibly lost, you’ll be totally broke and in debt as a result of some terrible choices you made before. You’ll struggle in London, you’ll often end up living off breakfast cereal for all meals of the day and walking everywhere (even the really scary parts, at night) while waiting for pay day.

You’ll leave London, feeling like a failure, but then things will turn around. And then they’ll get a lot worse again. And then they’ll turn around again. The common denominator in the turnaround will always be you listening to the deeper knowing that says ‘go this way’ and consciously choosing the path that feels right to you, even when others disagree, or can’t even see the path. The more you do this, the stronger your intuition will become. And that’s how you’ll start trusting yourself, finally.

Some headlines for you to look forward to:

• Giving birth (yeah, you had babies! You’re not sure right now, but this will change, and giving birth for the first time remains your top life moment to date)

• Holding your babies for the first time (obvs)

• Standing in a thunderstorm in Thailand (under a purple sky, literal Purple Rain!)

• Spending Christmas Day in Manhattan

• Spending New Years Eve in Mexico

• The deep, platonic love with your female friends

• Your marriage, not your wedding day (ELOPE! PLEASE JUST ELOPE!!!) but your marriage

• Your kids chatting or singing together on random mornings when they don’t know you’re listening

• Christmas morning with toddlers

• Building a home that your kids feel safe in

• Your relationship with your eldest daughter (healing so much)

• Your relationship with your youngest daughter (healing in so many other ways)

• Learning to produce and release your own music

• Playing multiple festivals stages (you conquered your stage fright!)

• Releasing a whole album of songs that apparently make people feel things and tell you the feel the things (hurrah, art matters!)

• Getting your life back - and even going running again - after years of chronic pain and back surgery

• Getting to write music that is used on TV (whaaaa?)

Cor blimey, you wouldn’t believe all that if I told you it right now. You’re so terrified and shut down. But you’re actually alright kid. You’re just a big old ‘feeler’ and whilst that means you feel things ‘too deeply’ it also means you feel things beautifully deeply. When you start slowing down and tuning in, you’ll realise that you get a high from just sitting alone in a forest, that you don’t need alcohol to dance all night because the music alone is enough, that witnessing a simple act of kindness fills you up with a strange aching joy that it hurts, that the burden of feeling all the the dark and heaviness of this world gives your the privilege of really feeling the lightness of it all, when you allow it. So do not waste it, lean in and live it, keep saying no to what makes your body contract, saying yes to what makes your body expand.

And know that no matter how shit it gets, it WILL ALWAYS PASS. xx

One of those nights resulted in these words. I found it in my phone notes a few days ago and thought, you know what, I’m going to share this. It’s possibly ugly and too raw, but you know what? That’s the point. Being a woman is not a gentle experience, why should we write like it is?

“No Different”

She didn’t sleep much last night 
Hormones and body temperature dysregulated
The familiar knowing as she sat up this morning
The rush to the toilet
The groaning, aching, gnawing pain

Tired and wired and bleeding 
She drags herself to the bus stop
Because she is no different 
She feels nauseous and unsteady as the bus hurtles along 
Trying to revise with a foggy brain and empty stomach 
Desperate to lie down and sleep
But determined to meet her expected grade 

She sits in the hall 
Painkillers wearing off
Back pain, pelvic pain, crippling cramps
Halfway through the second essay
She realises she’s bleeding through 
Thankful her trousers are dark
But it’s no excuse
She’s no different 

She cleans herself up in the toilet 
Then shuts the lid and slumps down
Closing her eyes for a few minutes
Tears of exhaustion rolling quietly down her cheeks
Trying to regulate the whirlwind inside her body 
Breathing deeply in preparation
For how much she’ll hold her breath for the rest of the day

This scenario repeats in other exams, 
In sports, social events, work meetings.
Block it, repress it, kill it
Show up the same as the men
You are just as capable
Don’t act weak
Don’t be different 

And when it meant more to him than you
Hold it together
Cry in the toilet
And when your boss is sexist or flirtatious 
And you don’t feel safe
Or a man claims your idea 
Or a woman ices you out
Hold it together 
Be like them
Don’t be emotional
Excuse yourself calmly 
Cry quietly in the toilet 

Until the two pink lines

Then it’s a different repression 
Hide the nausea
Vomit quietly 
Don’t talk about it
Show up the same 
(With no pain relief) 
Ignore those first flutters during a work call
Push through the fatigue 
No excuses, smash the ceiling
You’re not special 
No need to act different 

And then the tearing, searing life-changing pain...
Oh, now you’re different

Different enough to be the only one who makes milk
The one whose heartbeat calms theirs
Different enough to wake up just before they cry
Every time
Like magic
Because you’re magic
It’s all a miracle
What a gift to everyone
That you’re so different 

You somehow take on all the physical and mental exhaustion
And still give love from an infinite well 
They are all in awe
Of the difference 

Then it’s back to the rat race
Just like he did months ago 
(Hero, the provider)
But your empty arms ache (did his?)
You wonder if they’re crying 
And if they are being held
You’re leaking milk now instead of blood
But still repressing, blocking, ignoring
Show up the same
Don’t complain
No excuses
Women fought for this
(Did they fight for this?)
Deal with it in the toilet
Quietly
On your lunch break 
Just like you always have

March started with such high hopes, but it did also somewhat wear me down if I’m honest. I’ve had more than one major wobble over what exactly I am doing with my life/music/career. I feel like now I’m in my 40s I am meant to have ‘arrived’ and ‘conquered a ladder’ but I seem to still have both feet - and both arms - on the lower rungs of different ladders all at once.

My husband has been working away a bit over the past few weeks, so I’ve been solo parenting, which means very little time for anything except them now that they’re off school for Easter hols. When I’m in that ‘full time mum’ mode, literally 24/7 parenting by myself, I have to be honest, all musical hopes and dreams just feel utterly ridiculous. It’s like music is in a completely alternate reality, I can’t touch it, I can’t even see it. It’s like it falls behind a mist and all I can see is the raw immediate (screeeaaaaaming) reality of my kids needs.

So, I’ve fallen away a bit from what I want and need to do. And right now, as I write this, if I’m brutally honest….right now…I sort of wish I could just stop. All of it. Everything. I wish I could just say ‘ok, enough of this silliness, I’m too old, it’s not happening, and I’m too bloody tired to keep trying’.

But I also know that I can’t. And I have to regularly talk myself off this ledge. Because I’m not actually ‘trying’ to be anything, I’m just ‘being’ who I am. I’m not TRYING to be an artist or a musician. I am an artist and a musician. The only thing I’m TRYING to do is survive this crazy life, frankly.

Music wise, I’ve almost finished the album of library music I am working on, and of course I’ve hit the stage of the creative process where I’m convinced everything is awful, sounds awful, is terrible and I’m terrible and awful….I know many of you are familiar with that particular gremlin.

I’ve also started writing some of the songs for the musical I’m working on with my friend, which is a such a lovely project to be doing and gives me something very different as a creative outlet.

I desperately want to record and release my own new songs (I have one I reallllly want so share, I’m tempted to just share a demo…but thats scares me?). Hopefully I can start to move that forwards in April (how are we in April guys? Why is time speeding up?)

Anyway, bit of a non-post but am showing up because I said I would! For anyone else feeling wobbly, we must keep creating, we must make the music and art in our hearts for no other reason than to have made it. And we must try to share it too, even if it seems to immediately fall into the abyss, somebody somewhere will need it, someday! And in the end, if we didn’t rely on money to survive, simply finishing our art would be more than enough ‘reward’, wouldn’t it?

What I ‘achieved’ in March

• Kept my kids alive and vaguely happy, once again this is quite a thing to keep doing every day (lolllll)

• Almost finished my library music album (and am terrified to send to the music supervisor in case they say ‘ohh, this sucks, ok, bye’)

• Continued to go the gym reasonably regularly, it’s really helping my mental health so I’m keeping at it

• Went into a local bar and asked if I could play some songs sometime, they said yeah sure

• Did a few photoshoots (my day job) to keep things ticking over

• Recorded some vocals for a new cover song collaboration

What I didn’t follow through on

• Did not follow up on playing at the bar I mentioned above

• Still did not list myself as a musician on any musician-for-hire platforms

• Did not record any of my own songs. Boo.

• Still did not drown my damn phone

Lessons from March

• I’m actually trying to do a LOT alongside being a mum and a photographer, and I may need to let things be slow for a while

• Exercise is very VERY good for my brain

• I need more sleep

Art/Artists I’ve enjoyed this month

Victoria Canal

I absolutely fell in love with Victoria Canal when I heard her cover of Blackbirds cover chords that sounded like Everything in Its Right Place by Radiohead, and I absolutely love her new song ‘Dog’, super creative and hard hitting.

Lisa Marie Simmons

I love reading anything by Lisa Marie Simmons on here, not just because she’s an awesome creative (her album NoteSpeak is combination of spoken word/poetry and Jazz and I genuinely feel like I’m in a Jazz Club watching people perform when I listen to her tracks!) but also because she is a brilliant storyteller and is so generous with sharing her stories.

Jim Kroft aka The Creative Life

I recommend Jim’s substack, The Creative Life, for anyone creative, any artist, and actually any human! Just a great, encouraging human living a creative life.

April goals

1. Record one of my new songs and get back on that horse

2. Deadlift more than 70kg (I know, its not music related, but its a goal and I’ll let you know if I do it)

3. Go to bed before 10.00pm every night (WITHOUT DOOMSCROLLINGGG)

In the many insomniac moments that I have about life and how we all got here as a human race, one thought that keeps coming up: artists were never meant to be billionaires.

Millionaires, maybe, properly compensated, for sure (we all deserve that). But billionaires? Having a net worth of more than a thousand million? Earned from the extreme privilege of getting to live a fulfilling, creative life? Yeah, it feels like something has gone very, very wrong.

When artists become that wealthy, that far from reality, something must shift within them. The whole point of the art they’re making and why they’re making it must start to get blurry.

Art is form of human expression, it's our birth right and a means of connection. And yes, I do strongly believe it should be compensated, if pursued as more than a hobby. I think it’s frankly grotesque that so much of the art people make, particularly music, is seen as something that should be free and that artists are being forced into working multiple jobs to support their art as a ‘side hustle’.

(I also think it’s tragic that people would happily spend £4 on a coffee which will be gone in ten minutes, without flinching, but feel resistance to buy a song for £1 and only listen to music on their free Spotify plan.)

But, despite the hell being brought to the arts right now, I also don’t think art was ever meant to be empire-building. It wasn’t meant to scale infinitely for a handful of people into literal billions. Where they’ve lost sight of humanity to the point they’d post themselves eating diamonds in an airbrushed photoshoot while their fans in their comment sections beg them to care about something that affects their community deeply. “Worship me, pay me, but leave me alone, peasants”.

It’s all very ‘Hunger Games’, except the musicians should be in District 12 writing revolutionary songs about the Capitol. In reality they’re in the Capitol wearing designer gowns and crying in faces that don’t move while handing each other their twenty seventh Grammy…

Art is surely meant to exist to say things that are hard to say, to reflect what’s actually happening beneath the surface, to raise consciousness, to hold a mirror up and say “look”?

We used to celebrate artists who made music but also critiqued the status quo, even to the point of critiquing fellow artists and their wealth. Tupac was always loud about this stuff. He wasn’t polite about it, he was ferociously passionate. He talked about racism, poverty, violence, power, and hypocrisy in a way that made some people deeply uncomfortable. He made people uncomfortable who deserved to feel uncomfortable. He found the concept of someone having $30 Million utterly repugnant. I can’t imagine how he’d feel about the state of music today.

Kurt Cobain was also caught on camera looking visibly disgusted at finding out what Madonna was charging for concert tickets in the early 90s. He winces and says “who charges that money?”. That was the correct response. Madonna made $37 million in 1993 alone, which is the equivalent of $83 million today. A huge amount of money.

Joni Mitchell lamented ‘the man’ paving paradise to put up a parking lot, but I have a feeling many big artists today would own that parking lot, and the construction company that built it.

What all of these artists had in common wasn’t just talent and success, it was that they still had some proximity to real life. They still lived among, and cared about, real people. They still noticed injustice and corruption, and they talked about it loudly. And even as they accrued wealth, they didn’t fully detach from the world they were commenting on. In other words, they kept their souls.

Once artists move too far away from ordinary human experience, once their survival depends on maintaining an empire, it becomes much harder for them to tell the truth. Revolutions don’t usually start from the penthouse of a Tribeca block.

The artists with the most influence today have the most to lose. Their brands are massive, their teams are huge and their obscene income depends on staying widely acceptable.

And so the art gets safer. Vanilla. Vacuous. Numbing. Less about expanding consciousness and more about maintaining comfort, for both the artist and the audience.

Art isn’t supposed to just extract money endlessly. It’s supposed to nourish, question, provoke. When art becomes primarily a wealth-generating machine, it stops doing its most important job.

We don’t need artists to be gods - literal false idols - we desperately need them to be human.

We need artists who can still be willing to be wrong, when ‘wrong’ means challenging things that need challenging. We need artists who are willing to speak without running everything through a PR filter. Artists willing to be ‘cancelled’ and risk losing relevance, money, or approval in order to say something that actually matters.

The idea that the “best” artists are the ones with net worths of hundreds of millions feels like a horrific step backwards in humanity.

The truth is that meaningful art now lives in much smaller rooms, with artists who still have skin in the world they’re actually singing about. The sad thing about that is that artists making real music, telling real stories about the real world, are barely breaking even on their art. So they give up.

Art doesn’t need more powerhouses, it needs more integrity.

Artists don’t need billions, they need a living wage in order to make art that moves us, serves us and stands up against things that it should.

Artists should never have been able to become billionaires.

(and nor should anyone else, for that matter)

There’s a moment many of us hit somewhere in our late twenties or thirties, sometimes later, when the scaffolding we’ve built around ourselves to survive starts to creak. A moment where you realise the life you’re living somehow wasn’t consciously chosen.

And you built this accidental ‘not-life’ so slowly, in tiny bends and compromises over decades. A forced silence here, a swallowed truth there, saying yes when your body says no. A relationship that you stay in because “it’s not that bad.” A job you took ‘temporarily’ to pay the bills, but somehow built a whole life around. The friendships where you’re the available one, the listener, the emotional sponge but you rarely feel seen yourself.

You wake up one day and realise you’re lonely and lost. And you can’t find the reasons why by looking outside of yourself, because on the surface you’ve ‘ticked all the boxes’ and everything ‘looks ok’. The problem is that your internal world is in complete conflict with what you’ve created for yourself as a life. As you evolve, and grow (which, sidenote, appears to be returning to who you were as a young child, before this world got its claws into you), you realise with a quiet horror “I’ve just been pretending…for so long….of course my life doesn’t align with who I am..I have no idea who I am!”

This song came from me having that realisation.

“Girl, Stop Pretending” is the moment you look yourself in the mirror and admit you’ve wandered so far from the person you once imagined you’d grow into. And it’s knowing that now you’ve identified the problem, you have the choice to either keep pretending or start walking your own path, probably alone.

To be clear, this is not some heroic overnight transformation. It’s not a single decision, or one big act of bravery that shifts you back into your ‘true self’. When you spent years, decades even, bending yourself into shapes that made other people more comfortable, finding your true voice has to happen through trial and error, over and over again.

You have to reset boundaries again and again. You will fall into old habits again and again. You will probably still self-abandon sometimes. You will have to consciously choose yourself again and again and again. But that’s what helps us to grow (and we are meant to grow!)

Here’s an invitation back to yourself. xx

Girl, Stop Pretending

Lyrics

Girl, stop pretending
That you’re ok
Your heart needs mending
It’s not wrong to say so
Girl, stop pretending
This is your stuff
A lifetime of bending
Enough is enough

Chorus
It’s time to go it alone
Here’s where you grow
Here’s where you grow
Until you find
Your true way to be home
You need to know
You need to know

Verse 2
Girl, stop pretending
That you are fine
Overextending all of the time
Go reset the line
Girl, stop pretending
To be what you’re not
Maybe it served you once
But it’s safe now to stop

Chorus
It’s time to go it alone
Here’s where you grow
Here’s where you grow
Until you find
Your true way to be home
You need to know
You need to know

Verse 3
Girl, stop pretending
This was your choice
Your life depends on
You finding your voice now
Go make some noise
Make some noise
Make some noise
Go make some noise
Make some noise
Make some noise
Make some noise
Go make some noise
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl
Stop pretending, girl

If this one lands with you, I’d love to hear your story x

Well, hello there, how was February for you? I feel like January took 7 years and then February flew past me in about 7 minutes…?

I intended on posting this on the last day of the month. But here we are 2nd March, better late than never (does anyone else’s brain immediately go to Ghostbusters 2, when the Titanic arrives, whenever they hear that phrase? Or just me?)

This is the start of something I’m hoping to make monthly, a real-time round up of what building a creative life looks like as mother, over 40, trying to balance all the things, still kind of at the beginning but getting little wins here and there, sharing my progress, the road blocks and the lessons.

I’m hoping this may be of interest and I’m having the absolute audacity of calling this ‘notes from the studio’ as if I am some sort of pro in a studio (pls see above image for the reality). But you know what, I do have a home studio, and I do earn from my music, so maybe this is the level of ‘audacity’ required right now?

What I ‘achieved’ in February…

• Kept two small humans alive, fed, and (mostly) happy. As always, no small feat.

• Visited my elderly grandmother who lives about several hours away (five hour drive up there this time) It doesn’t even sound that far when I write it down, but with kids, schools, clubs, work commitments, chronic back pain etc it is so hard to travel long distances and I feel guilty constantly, so I’m glad I got to do that. Hoping to get up to her again soon.

• Joined a gym! For the first time in literally six years, I dragged my tired self into a gym and actually did a workout. I then did that again two days later, and then again three days after that…I’ve been going pretty regularly 2-3 times a week in February and hoping to keep it up as I really need those endorphins in my life.

• I have been lucky enough to get a brief from a music library to create an album of instrumental tracks for them, so I’ve been prioritising that lately. I have two more months to finish them but need to get 10 tracks together so it’s got to be the priority for a while. I’m enjoying it and it’s quite stretchy, which is the right place for me right now.

• I opened up about a struggle I had with music and vulnerability in a post on Substack and was stunned by the response. It led to 35 new subscribers and selling five albums to people who read my post and then actively listened to my songs and decided they were worth owning and I was worth supporting (sob!). I cannot tell you how much that meant to me. And is evidence that a) people DO still buy music (which I know, because I bought loads of music this month myself!) And b) sharing your story does matter (but not oversharing, as I mentioned in the post :-))

• I also started working on producing a song for another music library pitch, a co-write with a friend who is a brilliant songwriter, again very stretchy for me as not a genre I’m used to but its going pretty well and is fun.

What I didn’t follow through on in February…

• I didn’t record any of my own stuff. I have many songs that I desperately want to record and share. But the reality is that if I want to actually have a career in music, begging strangers to stream songs I made is a) not my comfort zone and b) not profitable at this point. The area I’ve actually made solid income from music is writing music for TV, so that’s where I will be building for the foreseeable. BUT! I do really need and want to share my own songs, so I will need to figure out a strategy for that around writing/composing for others. Hmm.

• Banning my phone from my evenings/bedroom. Sigh. This is an ongoing battle, I honestly do think I’m far too dependent on this stupid little black mirror in my pocket. Every month I’m determined to lock it up downstairs and regain my ability to read a book at night to fall asleep, but every night there I am replying to WhatsApp messages at 11pm and scrolling funny/devastating/horrific content and then expecting my nervous system to be like ‘yeah cool, totally ready to sleep now’. Must do better (as many a teacher told me in my younger years).

• I didn’t do anything to grow or expand myself as a music ‘entrepreneur’. I didn’t reach out to any other music libraries, I didn’t register on Soundbetter or Fiverr despite having that on my to-do list since about last July. I really struggle to believe that I can be seen as a serious ‘professional’ and that I’m somehow still just blagging this whole thing. Even though I’ve been paid to compose music which has then been licensed to multiple TV documentaries and paid for again…I still feel that was just a fluke and I’m still just a mum pretending to be a musician/producer.

Lessons from February

1. I am not a robot. I cannot just press on and press on and push and not expect a consequence of burnout. I require boundaries and rest. And sleep. And hydration.

2. As already mentioned, my phone is a problem. It really is. It’s an avoidance tool, a distraction tool and it makes me a lesser mother and a lesser artist. Am weighing up a ‘dumb phone’ again which sucks a bit because my phone is also my camera, but I do have actual cameras and maybe I just need to carry a camera again and have a phone that is a phone. And then have a pen and paper on me for song ideas rather than relying on voice notes. The pull to analog is strong!

Art and Artists I’ve enjoyed this month

🎧 Saya Gray

Ever since my friend, Hattie (a very talented artist/producer) recommended Saya Gray’s album to me I’ve had it on repeat. I bought it on Bandcamp, I recommend it to anyone I can. This album is exquisite. She is an Artist’s Artist. She is the human creativity that cannot be replicated by AI. I aspire to this level of art! Hard recommend.

🎧 Ratbag – “Rats in the Wall”

I also discovered ‘Ratbag’ this month via autoplay recommendations, I just really love this song, so sharing if anyone else needs a new cathartic track!

🎧 Ren – “Starry Night”

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that Ren is one of my biggest inspirations. He is everything I believe an artist should be, and I am endlessly blown away by him. Again, another ‘Artist’s Artist’ he shows us how the unapologetic truth and believing in your art is an incredible game plan, but you have to be willing to put it all on the table. I don’t know if Ren will ever win a Grammy or be played on Radio 1. But I don’t think he even cares - he had a number one album without a label and has over 4000 Patreons, millions of monthly listeners and gets to speak the truth to people who adore him for it. And that is very f*cking cool, IMO.

📚 Steal Like An Artist - Austin Kleon

I had a long drive this week and listened to this audiobook. I didn’t love the title but it’s actually not what it sounds like, it’s about conscious inspiration. Seeking out art that inspires your own, sharing it, acknowledging it and incorporating it. Consciously and with respect of the process. Influence isn’t theft, it’s an ongoing expansion of your palette. An easy listen to fire up your creative side.

🎸 Heidi’s Guitar Stuff

I love seeing anyone show up in the process as it unfolds, in the learning and improving stages, being brave by being seen trying. I desperately want to get better at being seen trying in a world that demands perfect finished products so has been a huge inspiration to me this month, both in how she shows up on her Substack with her music but also on her YouTube channel, which to me is what YouTube was always meant to be, real people sharing real journeys. It reminds me of the YouTube I fell in love within 2008 before everyone started trying to get brand endorsements and ‘go viral’. Heidi is giving me the courage to maybe start showing up again on YouTube (or substack?) the way I used to…

March goals (outside of ‘work’ work)

1. Flush my phone down the toilet (ha ha, but seriously, intervention is needed!)

2. Record one of my own songs again

3. Register myself as a pianist/producer (?!) on a musician for hire website

4. Be. Seen. Trying.

I'd love to hear what art you’ve been enjoying in February, anything that stuck out for you or inspired you, and what intentions you’re setting for March? I think even writing this stuff down/ saying it out loud helps with clarity so share away!

I wrote this about three years ago, in the depths of ‘small-kid-motherhood’ when everything I wanted to do felt incredibly far away. Progress was excruciatingly slow and I was second guessing everything I thought I ‘should’ do next.

Time became so precious that every choice felt like a life or death decision. A ‘wasted’ day felt like a wasted life. As a result of that weight, I often found myself frozen in procrastination.

I would often write into my phone notes at 3am with a small child in my arms. I find that when I vomit up thoughts and feelings like this, I often discover little truths that I’m struggling to admit even to myself.

By trying to calculate every possible way things could go wrong, or all the reasons things probably wouldn’t work out, I simply wasn’t moving at all. I wasn’t taking any action towards anything, I was making excuses to not risk failing, and the irony was that it was only from that energy that my life was in fact being wasted. I was the poster child for ‘getting in my own way’.

Any and all actions taken in pursuit of what your soul nudges you to do, is ALWAYS better than not trying at all.

As always, sharing in case it resonates :-) x

yes I am tired
yes I am busy
yes I struggle to find time
that’s all true 

and sure I can blame motherhood
marriage 
housework 
the day job 
the world pain
and the never ending mental load 
but deep down I also blame myself 

because what’s also true 
is I stay up late 
I procrastinate 
and I waste precious hours 
distracting myself
in a catatonic state 
 
and sure, it could be necessary 
‘self regulation’
to try and quieten the chaos inside
but it could also be
(a little bit, maybe)
self preservation 
so that I never really go all in
with both feet 
and all that risk

and while it’s true that it really is hard 
it’s also true that I’m afraid I don’t have the strength
and it’s me who keeps my own dreams
at arms length 

I’m afraid that if I really give my all
and still nothing happens
I might never recover
from the grief

people say it’s not about the destination
it’s the 'journey' that matters
but I think perhaps 
I’ve become a little stuck

a journey does require movement 

When I released an album of songs in June, I included one that terrified me. It terrified me because I told the truth. And I told myself sharing it was an important part of my growth as an artist. I sang about carrying generations of pain in my nervous system while trying to be a safe place for my own children’s nervous systems. About the invisible exhaustion of trying to stop inherited trauma from travelling any further down the line.

It was actually a song of empathy for mothers, and it was even written with empathy for those that hurt me. But it also called out the pain I endured at the hands of unhealed adults as a child.

I was literally shaking as I shared it. Because when you grow up learning that using your voice is dangerous, your body doesn’t forget that fear. You can go to therapy, do the work, you can forgive, you can even have compassion for those that hurt you. But the body always remembers. And I really didn’t feel safe sharing it. (Funny how intuition works).

I had several women reach out to me saying they were in tears when they heard my song. One woman said she listened to it every morning in her car to process her own feelings as a mother trying to heal and hold space at the same time. I knew this song mattered because it made other women feel seen.

But alas, it also triggered people. The truth has a way of doing that.

Several months later, when I thought I was safe, I found myself justifying the ‘audacity’ I had in sharing that small part of my story, by having to recount (and re-live) my worst traumas to someone who was committed to stonewalling and gaslighting me within an inch of my sanity. It got to the point that the room was spinning, the floor had turned to jelly and I nearly vomited. I found myself hiding in a toilet and crying and trembling like I did so many times in my youth. There was more, but I won’t go into it. If you’ve been through EMDR for childhood trauma you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The result of this ‘interaction’ was that I was left catatonic for days, which I simply cannot afford as a mother.

I told myself I needed to regroup, address the problem and protect myself going forwards. So, I sat with it a while and eventually I removed the song from my album. Not because this person was right, but because I felt so violated by them that my own song now felt tainted to me, and I wasn’t going to allow anyone the opportunity to do that again.

I realised recently that I didn’t just ‘regroup’. I shrank. I disappeared from my own creative life. I started feeling unsafe sharing anything at all. And that’s not ok.

I mean, I literally made an entire album about finally finding my voice and not living in my own shadow! And whilst I got sucker-punched for that, that doesn’t mean I have to regress all the way back to the scared little girl who can’t even speak up in class without her voice quivering and eyes welling with tears, because its not safe to be seen in any way.

But, what I’ve also realised from this experience is that I am not obligated to literally re-traumatise myself in order to prove I’m authentic.

Yes, I wanted to share that song because of songs that meant so much to me. Perfect, by Alanis Morissette, Because of You by Kelly Clarkson, Smoke by Natalie Imbruglia, Runs in the Family by Amanda Palmer. I want to create that kind of art, and I do, I have countless songs that are honest, confessional, bleeding onto the pages. I just don’t think I’m quite built from the right stuff to gut myself in the name of art and then also be stomped all over for it too. And I think that’s ok, I don’t think that makes me less of an artist, I think it might just mean I’m more discerning now about what I share.

This was supposed to be the year I finally took music seriously, and I’m starting to understand that taking it seriously doesn’t mean I have to share every broken piece of my soul. It means being honest and authentic in a way that is sustainable and consistent, which means creating work that I can stand behind without it costing me my nervous system every time.

To clear, I definitely don’t want to ‘play it safe’ with my music, but I’m learning that there is a difference between taking risks with your creative output and taking risks with your overall well-being. I think that’s the lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way through this experience.

So yes, me shrinking was a safety mechanism, but staying small and hidden would be a choice made from fear, so this is my reclaiming a little bit of myself and my voice.

Onwards xx

And also, because as mentioned, ‘serious artist in 2026’ the rest of that album is here for anyone who might be intrigued to listen to it, my tagline thus far to encourage listeners is “I promise its not shit” and I stand by that :-)

I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of our family TV (with four channels - remember those days?) aged seven or eight watching the animated film of Animal Farm. I didn’t understand all of the dialogue, but I could feel what was happening enough. I could feel that the animals were treated badly by the farmer, I could feel how things were becoming unfair under the rule of the pigs, I felt a sense of dread as the ‘rules changed’ from “all animals are equal” to “but some animals are more equal than others” and I am still haunted to this day by Boxer’s death. I felt angry and sad and something else burning in my little chest - injustice.

My parents exposed to me a broad range of art - and artists - that would shape me in ways I’m only just realising well into adulthood. Maybe too much and maybe too young. Maybe, at times, inappropriate through 2026 eyes. But nevertheless they instilled concepts and a world view in me via the art they exposed me to. My mother read to us, not just comforting bedtime stories as small children, but books she felt we should hear as we got older too. Everything from Little Women to Mister God, This is Anna through to Jane Eyre and A Tale of Two Cities. I grieved for Beth, I was intrigued by Anna, I raged for Jane, I rallied behind “The Jacques”. She made us watch films like In the Heat of the Night and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe so we understood more deeply the racism, sexism and countless prejudices that plagued humankind. The injustice.

Meanwhile, music stirred my soul in other ways. I remember listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” at barely nine years old in the car with my father. I still remember my mind being blown by certain lyrics, and somehow I could feel this man was trapped in isolation and anguish for so many complex reasons. I understood the concept of building an emotional wall and how that would push people away. And of course, the end of the album “is this where….” And the beginning “…we came in”. It’s all just an endless cycle…..yeah, I definitely had an existential crisis when I was nine (the first of many).

I also remember hearing the song Biko by Peter Gabriel for the first time around age 11 or 12 and being frozen while listening to it, demanding my mother explain it to me, then upon understanding, wanting to be sick but also wanting to hear it again. And again. To bear witness. To feel it. I felt the same way about Mothers Pride by George Michael, Zombie by the Cranberries. Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2. The injustice. The rage. The grief. The humanity.

War, cruelty, persecution, inequality and injustice being outright, unobjectively wrong was sewn deep into the very fabric of my soul from such a young age. I think in no small part because of the art that I was raised with.

As a result of my childhood I do find I am still drawn to music, books and films that inform on injustice or corruption, that rage against the increasing insanity of the western world. I am naturally drawn towards the truth, however ugly and uncomfortable. I am inquisitive by nature (I even have a degree in journalism) and love to deep dive into all sorts of things, but I know that trawling through medical journals, long political articles, historical texts/articles and declassified CIA files (honestly, they’re fascinating) isn’t for everyone. What artists can do is take the undeniable truth, or a question, or a different angle to a common narrative, and turn it into something that is more palateable and consumable to a wider audience. That is the magic of art. And it is desperately needed.

How many people had no idea about PFOAs and Teflon and the terrifying corruption between major corporations and government agencies before they saw Dark Waters? How many devout, indoctrinated Catholics have been forced to wake up from films like Philomena or Spotlight? How many people genuinely didn’t understand the 2008 crash before they watched The Big Short?

And does that art, those books, those songs, those films, shape how we then view and behave in the world? I think it does. I think having consumed the stories of other people’s pain and suffering and injustice, through fact and fiction, through various art forms, gives us a deep sense of connection with our fellow human. We recognise our feelings in their words and realise the world is not so big, and actually we are not so small and isolated after all. We find ourselves in their words, even if they lived a hundred, or a thousand, years ago, in a different culture, and we can’t help but love them. It’s not that hard then, to see someone suffering today, in a different country or culture, and feel connected to them and feel a genuine, human love for them.

I do believe that some people are born innately more sensitive and empathetic than others, but I also believe that empathy and compassion are honed through our lived experiences and a think part of that comes from the art we consume.

I meet a lot people who have no idea about most of the above books or films or songs. They were simply never exposed to that kind of art by their parents or their peers or their education system, and have never pulled on any of the corresponding threads as a result. I see a connection between people who keep their entertainment choices ‘light’ and the way they view life and the world. These people tend to carry a very ‘oh god, why would you watch/read/listen to that?’ attitude when it comes to things like watching documentaries that uncover corruption, or reading books about real people’s trauma, or listening to songs about pain and despair: ‘it’s so depressing’.

I’ve noticed these same people also don’t like looking at things in real life that ‘depress them’ either. It’s unpleasant and uncomfortable, so would they choose to do that? More often than not, these same people find it difficult to challenge any of their world views as a result. They are very much ‘this is who I am and what I think, and life works for me’ *shrug* kind of way, and they don’t think it’s polite to talk about anything ‘awkward’ like religion or politics or listen to ‘depressing music’ about war or corruption. They do as they’re told, pay their bills, don’t actively hurt anyone, buy nice things for their nice homes, have nice holidays and just ‘live and let live’.

I do sort of envy them in a way.

Because my brain says ‘but, ‘live and let live’ only works if all people are actually, like, able to live...?’

The reason I ‘choose to listen to that type of thing’ is that I just don’t know any differently. I was born and raised to look at the ugly truth of this world, to listen to the ugly truth and to sit with it.

It is of little surprise to me that the people that over the past few years have been the most willing to listen, the most willing to question, the most willing to engage, the most willing to challenge their own belief systems and the most willing to speak up, are also people who I know have also chosen to listen to songs, watch films/documentaries and read books about corruption, war, injustice, inequality, trauma, pain, shame.

Because, yes, of course it hurts to look, but it hurts us more not to. It feels like we are consciously abandoning our fellow humans by not listening, not looking, not learning.

In times like these, it is so easy to dismiss art and the pursuit of its creation, as frivolous, self-absorbed even. I’ve found it hard to talk about music I’m making whilst scrolling horrific, real-time war footage. Of course I have. And rightly so.

And - because it is and, not but - and…we still need artists. Because there are so many people walking this planet right now who do not, and will not, see the injustice. They don’t feel the indescribable complex endless beauty-intertwined-grief of this fragile and fleeting life we all live. They don’t feel connected to people in other countries that don’t look how they look or believe what they believe. So it’s easy to just not look, not care, not engage. Not feel. And some may say ‘well, why should they!’ and my heart will continue to respond ‘because humanity’.

Art, real art, with intention and meaning and integrity, makes us feel things. It breaks down barriers between absolutely everything and connects us via our basic humanity.

I cannot imagine how many millions of people have stood next to someone at a concert, or sat next to them in a cinema, or stood quietly in shared reverance in a gallery or museum who could have wildly different views on all kinds of things, who may in fact ‘on paper’ be sworn adversaries. But art in all its forms transcends the beliefs, opinions and ‘justifications’ that tear families, communities - countries - into pieces.

There is a strange culture on YouTube of ‘reaction' videos, which, for the most part, I can’t get my head around, except for one strand: people discovering meaningful and moving music. There is something so beautiful and human about taking this bizarre, clickbait-y activity and watching people be genuinely, visibly moved. I’ve watched people forget they’re filming themselves for entertainment and burst into tears at Dolores O’Riordans anguished vocals on Zombie or exclaim that David Gilmour’s solos are hitting their souls, or - more recently - that their faith in humanity/creativity has been restored by Ren (me too, guys, me too).

Because art that moves us, awakens us, reminds us, and connects us is pure humanity. And that matters.

It’s January 1st and I have no intention of speeding up, ‘smashing the new year’ or pushing myself against the obvious nature of winter: Rest. Heal. Recharge.

I used to. I used to set resolutions, think I’d be a different person on January 1st somehow, and that my life was going to change because of that “New Year energy”. That ‘energy’ inevitably collapses after a few days you know why? It ain’t a new year folks! Not in natures terms anyway. Until Roman times, we generally all agreed with the wisdom of nature and saw March as the new year, because it was when life began again. And whilst there was dabbling with calendars and shifting month names around under the Romans (file under ‘Sept, Oct, Nov etc not falling on the 7th, 8th, 9th months they were meant to) it wasn’t until the Gregorian calendar in the late 1600s that anyone began really dedicating January 1st to the ‘new year’ and in the UK we didn’t adopt that new way of living until 1752. 

For so many thousands of years, we moved with the seasons and saw winter as a time to rest and recover. And then just a few hundred years ago we shifted that, and somewhere along the way diet culture and hustle culture got their claws into it and just like the insanity of the December ‘push’, January also became about going against ourselves and encouraging further burnout.

No more.

This is your permission slip to pause, breathe, to slow down and be in sync with the earths natural rhythms, and not some man made calendar that never served us.

Happy January to you. :-) x

and a little poem to help you fall into the natural rhythm of January:

the earth knows how to rest 

the earth knows how to rest 
she knows when to sleep
and how reset
as the days get shorter and the evenings close in
she knows how to sink back into her own skin
she knows how to curl up and let things be slow
she won’t try to go 
against her own flow
she doesnt force anything 
or try to keep up
she surrenders to winter
she knows how to stop

she whispers to trees
to let go of their leaves 
she gives busy waters permission to freeze
she shelters the animals  
who need their long sleep
and tucks in the ground
with a clean white sheet 
she closes her eyes 
and quietens her breathing
she falls into slumber 
serenely releasing 

photo credit: Pixabay

Let’s be clear, most mothers are already burned out long before December arrives. Burned out from trying to heal what we inherited without passing it on. We apologise to our children (as we should) while our own inner child is still waiting for apologies, for nurturing and space holding that will never come. And so we constantly re-parent, repair, regulate, reflect…but we’re quietly collapsing on a daily basis.

And this is just the baseline. This is before we even leave the house.

The rising word-vomit in my throat right now is that most of us no longer believe in the way we live. And denying that is eating our nervous systems alive.

I hear a lot of women (and some men, tbh) ‘joking’ after another cortisol surging school run: “phew, ok, so when are we starting that commune?” But it isn’t humour, not really. Underneath the joking is a collective grief for the village we never got to experience and we desperately needed, and now our ‘coping’ is starting to be coping-not-so-much.

The following is not an original sentence, but needs repeating loudly and constantly: we were not designed to raise children in isolation, inside nuclear households, under constant (ever worsening) financial pressure, while pretending this is normal or remotely healthy. We were not meant to outsource our community, our bodies rhythms, our life’s meaning, taking care of each other to systems that literally profit from our depletion.

And yet, even as we are increasingly aware of this, in real time, every morning, we get up, and we uphold the system we don’t even want to be part of. We drag our exhausted children into classrooms for an education we increasingly do not believe in. Not because we don’t value teachers or an education, but because right now, in the reality of 2025 and what the future ‘may or may not be’ we cannot in good faith believe that it’s giving them ‘an incredible start in life’. If we’re honest (and more of us are choosing to be) school has simply become childcare and social compliance, because stepping outside of it risks ostracism, judgement, and fear. And mothers know this. I think some teachers even know this.

And…we keep sending our kids anyway. And every day, we betray ourselves and our children just a little bit more.

Pouring your life force into a system you don’t even believe in doesn’t just tire you out more, it utterly decimates your nervous system. And this goes for our kids as well.

There are multiple studies proving teenagers should not start school at 8am. Their biological clocks shift. They perform better, regulate better, learn better starting at 9:30 or even 10am. We know this. And yet I wake my shattered daughter at 6:50am on pitch black, freezing cold mornings, and send her out to drag herself through sleep-deprived ‘learning’, knowing full well that the jobs she is supposedly “working hard for” may not even exist when she leaves school.

(Seriously, what are we doing?)

The hamster wheel has never been more visible. We are now running on it while our limbs collapse, we’re crashing into each other while we vomit and bleed and cry… and still we run.

The conflict between what my body deeply, intuitively knows and what I am forced to participate in is making me ill.

Knowing that a handful of billionaires with no perceivable souls literally control everything is making me ill.

Sending my bright, sensitive children into systems designed for compliance, knowing there may be no point in any of it… is making me ill.

And then comes Christmas….!

Christmas is not gentle.

It is not peaceful.

It is a grotesque, glittering display of overconsumption.

It’s the ‘Met Gala’ for the everyday human. Obscene consumerism. Endless, meaningless stuff.

I buy things I cannot afford, for my children who need nothing, while my guilt-riddled brain flashes images of starving children, dying children, displaced children to me. The Hunger Games level insanity of it all is impossible for me to unsee.

And it isn’t just the buying either, it's the noise. The incessant school emails and activities. The ridiculous, ever increasing ‘traditions’ (sidenote: where the hell did ‘elf on the shelf even come from? I will neverrrrr participate). The relentless, manic demand for ‘cheer’ while we all just want to scream.

Every cell in my body is screaming ‘I just want to hibernate!’

But no, we need more, more, more. More excess. More events. More ‘gifts’. More!!

So we sit, wrapping unnecessary presents to place under a sacrificed tree to celebrate the birth of a man most likely born in March or April anyway….allegedly to celebrate good will on earth during a time of hell on earth…and in the end its all been hijacked by blind consumerism either way?

So yeah, no wonder vaguely conscious mothers collapse at Christmas. It simply removes the last scraps of energy we have for denial.

If you are falling apart this season, it is not because you are failing at being ‘fun’ for your kids. It is because your nervous system is telling you the truth while you’re forced to act against it: this is insanity.

You are trying to live consciously and humanely inside a social system that rewards dissociation, narcissism, compliance, and consumption.

And yet….! (because I don’t want this to just be horribly negative…)

Buried inside the utter madness of it all there IS something good. A small, reclaiming of time.

For a few weeks now, we get our children back. Mornings without alarms. Bodies allowed to wake when they’re ready, no rushing around. No ‘productivity’ targets for anyone. We can actually be with our kids without the chaos. If we’re able to push back against the wider expectations over the Christmas season and choose ourselves, choose quiet and stillness, we can actually give ourselves what our bodies have been craving all year……we can rest.

So, (perhaps ironically) once Christmas is over, we might actually get to feel some peace?

However, I am now getting really tired of being afraid. Something that comes with age, as I used to read over and over again in interviews with famous ‘older’ people (as in, over 30) in Cosmo as a skeptical 19 year old, is you simply start to give less fucks. And what I am realising now that I am indeed older (almost middle-aged old, *gasp*) is that reaching that level of not giving a fuck isn’t borne of some deep self-love, some sudden esteem, a sense of unshakeable confidence. It’s just outright exhaustion. We’re exhausted with being afraid of what people think.

Have you ever been physically depleted/exhausted while also in a frightening or worrying situation? I think of my honeymoon, having taken two flights (one international, one domestic) and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, the car ride was so bumpy, and we drove so close to cliff edges next to sheer drops, I was (irrationally) terrified we’d go over the edge and I had no control over the situation at all. But I slept. I fell asleep. The fatigue was simply stronger than the fear.

And I think that’s where I’m at now. I’m so continually afraid, afraid of being judged, afraid of being ignored, afraid I’m too late, afraid I’m too old or too wobbly around my midriff, afraid what the mums in the playground might say about me, what the people who know me from twenty years ago might think if they somehow stumble on me ‘trying’ (ew, not ‘trying!’), afraid if I go all in on music and fail I might never get over it, afraid that I am actually just not good enough so why bother, afraid that even if I am good enough I still actually have no chance of finding financial safety with music anyway, afraid that I don’t know who I am if I give up on music. Fear. Fear. Fear. Hesitation. Delay. Exhaustion. I’m just getting too tired of holding all these fears inside my nervous system like a giant brake pad on my life.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes (my hero) has a great quote in her masterpiece Women Who Run With the Wolves:

There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.

That’s me. I am there. I am the one who is pissed off, pooped out with my dreams lying in tatters. My heart is broken, constantly. By the ways of the world, by injustice and corruption, and by things in my own small life.

But I will not become bitter. I can feel the choice, it’s a sharp burning choice in my chest. The choice between fear and courage. The choice between defeat and getting back up. Because alongside my exhausting fear I am also the most stubborn, defiant dreamer at my core. Deep down, under the fear and exhaustion, I believe joy and happiness and fulfilment in our fleeting time on earth is worth fighting for. I just need to pick my battles now, choose what is worth fighting for to stay alive, to feel free and creative and not become bitter.

I will get continually knocked down by life. As will you. Anyone born working class is born into struggle, it’s as simple as that. We are going to be tired. Let’s not waste our energy on being afraid too.

I started making it in 2021. It’s taken four long (agonising, at times) years to get this piece of art into the world.

Again, I will not reduce or caveat this. It’s so easy for artists to apologise for celebrating themselves, to loudly acknowledge that they know how small or irrelevant (or selfish, why selfish?) it is to create something nobody has asked for. Well, guess what, dear fellow unknown artist: nobody is ever going to ask you to make your art. You have to believe in it and create it and bring it to life and then share it and just hope that people will want it after it exists (and simultaneously release any expectation of anyone ever wanting it). That’s not selfish, that’s courageous. It’s courageous to create like that.

It would have been so easy over the last four years to just stop, throw in the towel, accept that I’m too old, have too many responsibilities, this is far too hard, it’s taking far too long and ultimately nobody cares. To simply give up.

Let’s count some of the ways I could’ve given up if I’d wanted an excuse to give up:

1. The very moment I started and realised the gap between what I could do (play piano and guitar) and what I wanted to do (self-produce entire songs with strings and drums and synths and flourishes) was massive and the learning curve was going to be huge

2. Every day that started with 3-4 hours of broken sleep, two kids underfoot and a sense of invisibility and worthlessness (most days between 2021-2024 FYI)

3. The times that I was so fatigued I couldn’t actually sing, and then discovered I was severely deficient in both iron and B12 and was quite literally running on fumes and adrenal burnout

4. When I woke up with severe back pain in June last year that then rendered me bed-bound on and off for weeks and in pain and unable to even sit at my desk or piano for months

5. When our mortgage went up and my photography income wasn’t enough anymore so I also took on a minimum wage job four days a week (whilst in chronic pain still, lying on the floor of the office whenever I was able to)

6. WhenI lost two grandparents in 14 months and everything got thrown into a lens of ‘what is the point of anything’ each time

7. Whenever I looked at the news, or social media, and saw how much evil and pain and suffering people are struggling through and told myself my ‘stupid little songs’ were idiotic and self-absorbed

8. When my laptop just randomly decided to crash and burn last July with three ‘in progress’ tracks on that weren’t backed up and it really felt like a final kick from the universe to just STOP TRYING TO MAKE THIS THING

9. Every time I would share a song or a piece of content that hardly anyone would engage with and I’d feel stupid and ‘cringe’…

And so on, and so forth. There are always endless reasons to give up. Making music with no label, no support, no real fanbase in and of itself is a ludicrous thing to pursue, especially when you look at it through the lens of capitalism (ie, something only has value if it makes profit and then makes more profit every year).

Do I expect anything to happen as a result of this creation? Absolutely not. I know how the music world works and I’m nowhere near the playing field, let alone playing the game!

Do I feel an immense, almost immeasurable sense of achievement, of self-worth, of self- TRUST that I bloody did this thing I set out to do, regardless of the time it took? Absolutely YES.

I know that people are drowning right now in work, in grief, in world pain, in family responsibilities (whether that’s parenting or caring for sick relatives or elderly relatives, or just the general struggle of being in a family) with that tiny voice pulling them to do something for themselves, and then crushing that voice and saying it will be too hard, it will take too long…yes, it will, it will be so very hard, and it will take much longer than the highlight reels of wealthy 20-year olds would have you believe.

But if you do not give up, if you allow yourself to pause, to return, to regroup but not give up, you get to feel something that is so unbelievably expansive, so much freedom. Creating something like this transcends productivity or earnings. I made an album! I made a meaningful, beautiful album of songs that nobody can ever take away from me. Eight year old me would be so very proud. I have also learned so much about myself along the way, I’ve become a far more confident artist, I have found my voice now, and guess what, the gap between wanting to produce and being a producer is diminished, because I AM a producer, I have, and can, produce music.

The last four years would have passed regardless, and if I’d not tried, or given up, I’d instead be sat here wondering what I could have done if I’d just not given up.

So I implore you, if you have a book inside you, a series of paintings, an album of songs or instrumentals, an exhibition of photographs, a natural flair for floristry or interior design…whatever your creative ‘pull’ is….do not give up. Do it slowly, do it clumsily, experience the range of emotions that something like this brings. Rest, breathe, restart. Don’t compare yourself to ANYONE. But pursue it, keep chipping away until you’ve fulfilled that promise to yourself.

Not for the lie of wealth and fame, but for the truth of making art from your soul. xx

You can find my album, The Light, on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp (below).