Strumming On Your Old Guitar
Lately I've started playing guitar again. Like most things in my life it just hits me like a wave and it didn't take much trying it just started when I decided it ought to. I'm not good but I'm playing daily and learning some of the Lorna covers. I'm playing my mother's 3/4 Guild guitar - she got it in high school I think - maybe college. As I've been playing it's sort of reconnected a nerve to my past and forced me to revisit the person I used to be. I kind of abandoned myself in Chicago in some ways. There wasn't a super solid girl to leave behind there but there was most definitely something lost. Like I said before about the waves once I came back to KC I holed up and cried my tears and boiled with shame and then one day I just hit the ground running and The Grisly Hand began.
I have been repeating "Venture to impress yourself" lately. Words of wisdom from Amanda Seales - from a longer form IG video in which she mused on why we are afraid to change. She hit the nail on the head in saying we are scared we can't do it. I think I'm ashamed to admit how afraid I've been for so so long. Afraid to be second or 50th or 10000000th best at something. Afraid to fail. Afraid to be judged. Afraid to be vulnerable.
Selling my Martin DM guitar in Chicago was sort of the crowning experience of just absolutely failing myself and everyone around me at that time. I remember the patient man in the store saying, "It will go to someone who will really love it" or something like that and breathing thank you as I hustled myself out into the cold air where I couldn't contain my heaving cries. I doubled over in front of the store and felt so empty. Like I'd betrayed myself on the deepest level. That guitar was supposed to mean something for me. That guitar was a gift from my mother in a time when our lives were very fraught and cloudy.
The pain and the shame and the trauma of what happened in Chicago is something I say I got past but like so much I'm not sure I got past it so much as found new projects. I want to talk more about this time in my life and explore it more but for now I'm leaving this here as a bookmark for my own mind. I think I feel - on top of everything else - a sense of shame for processing this or approaching it to process it ten years after the fact. But that one woman still hates me 10 years after the fact so ya know - things take time.
I have been repeating "Venture to impress yourself" lately. Words of wisdom from Amanda Seales - from a longer form IG video in which she mused on why we are afraid to change. She hit the nail on the head in saying we are scared we can't do it. I think I'm ashamed to admit how afraid I've been for so so long. Afraid to be second or 50th or 10000000th best at something. Afraid to fail. Afraid to be judged. Afraid to be vulnerable.
Selling my Martin DM guitar in Chicago was sort of the crowning experience of just absolutely failing myself and everyone around me at that time. I remember the patient man in the store saying, "It will go to someone who will really love it" or something like that and breathing thank you as I hustled myself out into the cold air where I couldn't contain my heaving cries. I doubled over in front of the store and felt so empty. Like I'd betrayed myself on the deepest level. That guitar was supposed to mean something for me. That guitar was a gift from my mother in a time when our lives were very fraught and cloudy.
The pain and the shame and the trauma of what happened in Chicago is something I say I got past but like so much I'm not sure I got past it so much as found new projects. I want to talk more about this time in my life and explore it more but for now I'm leaving this here as a bookmark for my own mind. I think I feel - on top of everything else - a sense of shame for processing this or approaching it to process it ten years after the fact. But that one woman still hates me 10 years after the fact so ya know - things take time.
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