all i have

It is so hard to find words these days. I sat down to write this piece days ago and the page stayed blank. I tried again the next day, and the day after. Nothing. It’s a strange thing, I said to a friend today, to have any kind of audience during this time. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you want to hear. I don’t know what will help, if anything even will. It’s too easy for anything I put out into the world to feel gratuitous, when it feels like our existences have been stripped down to the bare essentials of being.

I left New York about a week ago. As of writing this, I’ve been in my hometown in true quarantine (not leaving the space I’m in, not even for groceries) for nine days. Time seems to shift and lose footing when your world shrinks to the two or three rooms you move between, to the stretch of sky you can see from your window. (Thank all the gods that I have a window.) In New York, though my anxiety kept me mostly housebound, I knew I had at least the illusion of freedom, the lure of a walk down the block and a spill of sun. Here, at least for another week, all I can do is open the blinds each morning. So I pace and eat and try to work and try to sleep. I am lucky to have a good companion, and family to look out for me. I am lucky for a lot of things, which feels like a strange thing to think in the midst of so much terror.

Today I sat down again to try writing something for you. The first thing I wrote was, “my fingers always smell like bleach.” The smallest, most tangible thing. The first thing I could think of. And then I started to pull out the threads around it. And before I knew it, there was something: my first poem in goodness knows how long.

So here they are. Here are all the words I have for now. I hope they give you even a sliver of recognition, of light.

---

But, the bluejays

stale peach

crackles plastic, wafts

from the crook of his neck

my molars gummed with regret 

and all i should have taken when I left 

he says i smell like a swimming pool

my fingertips perfumed 

dipped in bleach, clean

is the only comfort

the highest priest

-ess i know lives not in my deck of cards

but perched in a third-floor nest,

where even my father (her youngest) 

cannot (should not) reach

the magnolia tree, she told me,

is blazing blush before her eyes

Hero, she names it

i nearly say Habit

but maybe there is something noble

in staining a world still white with

fear 

is the simplest poison, i think

sometimes my heart will stop with it

colorless drain, not even 

the bitter bite of almond

to know what killed us

would be the easy horror

a long way off, a highway sign

date and time-stamped 

at close of business, i watch

sun fall and numbers rise 

lids imprinted with headlines

but if, like slates, i could wash 

my eyes, i would too forget each night 

(teasing bluejays, his lips

against my knuckle pleats—)

all the goodness i gave up

to be blind.

nostalgia for right now

Oh, friends.

The world looks so different than it did two weeks ago. (Quite literally: if it won’t upset you, take a look at this collection of photos showing just how abruptly the world has ground to a halt.)

Let’s say what is true: things are hard. Things are scary, both in the concrete, news-headline sort of way, and in the creeping, look-over-your-shoulder kind of way. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what I wrote a little while ago about unknown factors — how too many of them can send us spiraling, because we can’t find something to stand on. And honestly, the uncertainty of this time is getting to me. My anxiety operates at fever pitch most days, the physicality of which includes headaches, bad sleep, and a tight, sore chest that makes it hard to breathe (not a great sensation to have right now!). I cry often; I get irritable, not unlike a cranky child. I thought my one saving grace would be that I’m a natural hermit, so staying home wouldn’t be too hard a transition. It wasn’t — until the other day, when a friend in a less populated area posted a picture of a magnolia tree. Every year on a main avenue in my hometown of Boston, the magnolias burst into being: fragile ivories & shy pinks, their scent intoxicating, their petals peppering the sidewalks. All at once, looking at that sweet familiar tree, it hit me: the heartache, the longing, the frustration. It’s too easy to think of other times right now, times when I took my work, my freedom, my health for granted.

The other thing I think a lot about is what will come after. After the threat has been tamped down, after the numbers start to decline and people start to recover and fear starts to ebb. Because here’s the thing: this pause button on the world feels permanent, but it isn’t. There will be an after. But what does “after” even look like? It seems impossible to visualize.

Fortunately, I came across a “future self journal” by Berlin-based Flora Amalie this week.

“I am on Admiralbrücke with a group of friends,” she writes. “It’s sunny and warm and we’ve been crying and hugging and laughing over our reunion, with each other, and with the world.

Everyone is smiling at each other. Strangers are hugging.

The city hasn’t felt a genuine sense of love and solidarity and relief like this in decades, and you can feel the energy everywhere. The air is buzzing with it!

We stand in line for pizza at Il Casolare, but no one is complaining about the service or the wait today.
We buy späti beers and we have a picnic right there in the street.

A band is playing next to us. There are groups of people everywhere.

Things aren’t just back to normal. They’re better.”

I don’t live in Berlin, but something about this scene feels so familiar. It carries that same bittersweet honey-gold as the memories I’ve been sifting through lately. I like this idea of nostalgia in reverse, a glimmer of hope, a momentary stillness in my gut knowing that there will be a time when I am grateful for the simplest of everyday balms. A walk under sunlit blue, a sweet friend’s face across a coffeeshop table.

But I am a nostalgic down to my blood and bones, and I recognize this isn’t for everyone. Maybe thinking of a future you can’t yet have stings too much. So let’s not think about what and who and where we miss, in the past or the future.

Instead, consider this exact moment, wherever you are. Consider its sights and sensations. Its anchors and its anxieties both. Is it possible to be nostalgic for right here and now? We could find out. We have nothing but moments, tumbling down the hours, one after the other.

I’ll start. I’m sitting up in bed as I write to you. My curtains are open, and the sunlight slicing through the adjacent buildings catches on the chunk of amethyst that sits on my windowsill. I can hear, not-so-faintly, the rolling beat of the music my upstairs neighbors have been blasting on and off for days in this quarantine; sometimes I even catch one of their voices, sweetly off-key, singing along. Construction workers dip in and out of my peripherals across the way, and I wonder briefly how it is they haven’t been sent home, and whether they can afford to be. There is a half-empty mug on my nightstand and the steam rises from it like gauze; the taste of peach is still under my tongue from the last sip. My chest is tight and sore again, I’ve been breathless since I woke up. A harsh voice rises from the building’s front hall: it’s my neighbor, an elderly woman who keeps our packages when we’re not home, yelling to someone presumably across the street to have a good day and be safe.

Gratitude is a tricky word. It can feel overused and buzzy, something embossed in gold on a journal rather than the ineffable thing it is. And it can feel hard to feel grateful right now. Things change so quickly, we’ve seen that this month; as this quarantine draws on I will have rent and loneliness and chronic pain and fear to deal with. There will be moments when everything feels pointless and interminable.

But right this second, I am home. I am healthy. I am surviving. Right this second, with no access to the past and no knowledge of the future, I am grateful. I am grateful that I have a present at all.

---

Finally, a few of my favorite things. . .

If you are looking for something distracting, even a little escapist, that is where I thrive. A few shining things you might enjoy in this strange timeless limbo:

HONEYCHILD. A trio of songs made famous by the Ink Spots, remade by me. Something soft and sweet and uncomplicated in these mad times. These songs aren't mine, but they are me—the secret romantic, the tender yearning wallflower, the sweet honeychild.main vocals, guitar: Paola Bennet background vocals: Giselle Bellas, Ann Marie Nacchio, Adam Tilzer trumpet: Jesse Blum recorded by Adam Tilzer mastered by Zampol Productions

• MUSIC

  On Friday I released Honeychild, an EP consisting of three songs first performed by the Ink Spots. Their music has long been a resting place for me, and our current moment seems like we might all need a little soothing. The EP is out on all listening platforms for your pleasure. Make these songs your lullabies if you wish, send them to a quarantined sweetheart. I hope they bring you some softness in this strange time.

• LITERATURE

The titular character of Mr. Fox is an author who can’t seem to stop killing the heroines of the books he writes. His muse, Mary Foxe, is tired of being murdered, and willfully tramples the lines between story and reality to get her revenge.

This book turns itself inside out and upside down. I love it because it stretches the limits of storytelling, breaking the fourth wall constantly. You start to root for one character, only to have the rug pulled out from under you when you realize you’ve only been getting one perspective, one voice. As to whether Mary lives, or dies yet again... you’ll just have to read to find out.

• FILM

  I did tell you I was a nostalgic. I know Groundhog Day can provoke divisive opinions, but in this current climate there’s something to be said for watching a movie whose premise is a man living the same day over and over again. (I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to forget the days of the week.) And there’s something charming about watching Bill Murray’s cynical weatherman Phil slowly transform: he gains compassion, he accepts his flaws and works on the ones that harm others. Maybe a tall order when most days I feel like I’m just trying to get to tomorrow, but it’s a nice thought: That even when we feel stuck, not everything is. We still control ourselves, the way we spend our hours, the way we choose to be with and think about other people.

---

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Wash your hands. Call your loved ones. I hope that you can find a moment today, even fleeting, where you feel like what you have right now is enough.

half truths & whole stories

It is sunny every day this far south, not a whisper of the Biblical flood that drowned the city so many years ago. The name of the neighborhood you are staying in is French and it makes you feel at home. You are not home but you love it — the brilliant shutterboard, the palms and jasmine, the sun, the sun. You did it again, didn't you, that thing you do when you can't stand your life — got on a plane as soon as you could afford it, escaped the things that weigh. 

You did not escape everything. There are pills to take when you wake, with the delicious things you stand in line for. There are stretches for your fighting body every morning and evening, in the unfamiliar bed with the unfamiliar light streaming in. There is the ache at the base of your spine that never goes away, that grows like a threat as the streetlamps come on. There are tests and appointments on the calendar that you keep trying to put out of your head — just one more day, please, you beg, just let me have this. You are trying so hard to keep from falling back into the dark, the recurring nightmare. For you, escaping is a constant. Running away is never one-and-done, never over.

But for now, you are still in the dream. So you eat the things you want, and you turn and let him take the picture, and you try to remember you are allowed to be happy. You deserve it, even. Maybe now more than ever.

---

At first, New Orleans felt like just that: a dream. I could wear a jacket and an open collar without flinching at the wind. I ate like I was never going to see food again, things I had never tried, things I had been missing. I walked and walked and when the familiar ache in my body crept up, I could reasonably ignore it. 

The second day, I came back from a morning out and about and my body rebelled in scary ways against my indulgences. It hurt. It was graphic enough that I had to document it, for whichever doctor I would inevitably visit. I spent an hour howling in the fetal position, making tearstains on the quilted blue bedcover, debating whether to go to an urgent care.

This happened about fifteen minutes after this photo was taken and posted to social media. Some part of me had been triumphant: it felt good to share something that so radiated my joy. Look, it felt like saying, I am well, I am happy, I can travel again, I am not just the girl who talks about being in pain. 

At the same moment that my phone was chirping with notifications on the photo — comments with heart-eyes and “so cute!”s — my boyfriend was stroking my hair while my gut twisted and sobs wracked my ribcage. On top of being urgently and physically ill, I somehow felt like a liar.

Soaking up New Orleans sun, with no idea of the pain & panic that would shortly arrive.

---

It wouldn’t be the only moment like that on the trip. One night on Frenchmen Street, trying to differentiate the music wafting from every open bar door as we waded through knots of people, my boyfriend’s eyes went glassy. “Can we go somewhere else?” he asked, his voice pulled taut. I recognized what was happening, the sensory overload that was pressing down on him. We ducked into one of the quieter bars, but after a mediocre cocktail, the pressure on him seemed to worsen. So we walked through the dark, back to where we were staying. It was there, cups of tea in hand, sitting and talking, that the noise finally faded — and with it, our plans to catch any of the shows on Frenchmen.

These are the things we try to forget. Things that go unphotographed and unmentioned. We want to live in the good photos, the sunshine smiles and sweeping landscapes and mouthwatering spreads. And I think we were editing ourselves and our memories long before devices came along. We smooth our stories over, ironing out the creases like they were never there: The heart-buzzing concert, but not getting terrifyingly lost on the way there; the gorgeous new city, but not the men yelling sickening things from a passing motorcycle. Imagine, too, how much stronger the will to forget becomes when we experience something truly traumatic. 

It makes me think of the way a pearl is made. It starts when some kind of irritant gets into the oyster shell, and in self-defense the oyster coats it with layer after layer of nacre. It goes on like this until the threat gleams, looks nothing like the intruder it was. 

I have felt a pinprick of guilt in telling these pearly half-truths. I tell myself it’s a protective instinct, my memory shielding me from reliving my worst moments. I tell myself a lie of omission hurts no one, not even me. 

But now that feels like a half-truth, too.

---

When I came back from New Orleans and friends asked how the trip was, I noticed something. I told them about the fantastic food, the dreamlike streets, the buskers who outshone most musicians in an intuitive sort of way. And I also told them about that scary hour in the fetal position, and my boyfriend’s anxiety kicking in on a cramped and raucous Saturday night — the moments themselves, and the things we had to miss out on because of them. I told them everything because it felt like the only way to tell it. Story is my most primal language, I’ve realized, to leave holes in what happened — to do the story injustice — is to do myself harm.

I am not proposing we live-stream our dark moments, or wallow in things that can’t be changed. But I also can’t protect myself from everything. If being in pain more days than not has taught me anything, it’s that the thrilling moments and the agonizing ones not only coexist, but also often follow each other in quick succession. 

Think back to that oyster shell. Not only does it harbor the pearl, it also created it. To deny the existence of the one dulls the glow of the other.

Smooth luster and sharp edges. And. Not or.

known factors

I nearly failed algebra in high school. The teacher was constantly confiscating things from me: novels, twice the same notebook filled with dreamy scribblings rather than equations. I could not wrap my head around the abstraction of it all, the mysterious symbols that had no quantity. Solve for X, the unknown factor. I hated not knowing. And that has stayed true, more than a decade later.

I think most people mistake my relative quiet for patience. Patience, I think, is what you have with a known factor. Being familiar with the endpoint, or even with the length of the delay, makes it bearable: I am patient as I pry tape off wrapping paper and fold it into a neat square before turning to the gift inside. I am patient every year at Christmas, when I make a cake that takes three hours from start to finish. But it is something else to be waiting, to stand by and hope, sometimes blindly, for an unknown factor to become known.

View fullsize

Hello from physical therapy this week! Don’t be fooled: it hurt.

Unknown factors fall like strange litter around me these days. Whether I can get through the day without collapsing in pain; blood test results hang somewhere in the ether. The waiting has eaten into my patience, so that even knowing when something is coming — like a long-planned trip, just a few days from now — throws me into restlessness. Nothing feels soon enough.

This is what I told my father on the phone the other night. “When you get there, this will feel like the shortest part,” he reassured me. “It’s the waiting that makes it go on forever. It’s the part that is out of your control.”

Funny, him using that word. Control is something that comes up a lot in therapy, when I talk about the waiting. “I’ve noticed something, that you need the why,” said my therapist recently. “You need a reason. Maybe it helps you feel in control.” She isn’t wrong. I don’t do well with change, because it makes me feel unanchored, like I’ve lost grip on my own reality. My anxiety disorder makes me imagine a hundred and one variations of the same scenario, of the same decision, so that I can feel prepared.

I saw shadows of that threading through Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists when I read it not long ago, and it has not left me since. The premise: on New York’s Lower East Side in 1969, the Gold siblings go to a fortune teller rumored to know the exact day a person will die — and, predictably, none of them emerge from her predictions untouched. Over the course of several decades, the Golds live out their respective stories, and the prophecies they carry are never far behind. Whether each of them would have made the same choices before that day in the fortune-teller’s apartment, whether those choices gave them or stole their power over their own lives — these things are as vague as February fog.

It’s the kind of book I love to read, a delicate tightrope walk between reality and the shimmering unknown. When I was younger, I loved the idea that something out of the ordinary, not quite human, was as close at hand as the next street corner. I wondered, reading Immortalists, what I would’ve done, what kind of life I would live if I had a solid end date imprinted in my head. But I know myself too well to want this particular fiction to turn real. My therapist is right: I would want the why, the reason my date was what it was. Short of that, I would go crazy trying to trace my way there, trying to solve for X in that particular equation. There is too much I’m waiting for already, too much I don’t know. And at some point you have to ask: what else is there, when there is so much left to the unknown?

Another known: sunsets, even city ones, are a balm to the soul.

Well. All that’s left, really, are the known factors.

Known: a long hot bath in candlelight soothes both my battered body and my overwrought nerves.

Known: Books are the best kind of escapism.

Known: I am going to be in pain more days than not.

None of this cancels out the waiting. Sometimes it is downright agonizing; sometimes the days on the calendar seem to move so slowly they are going backwards.

But I am doing everything I can — keeping every appointment, doing every exercise, seizing every possible hour of sleep.

I don’t know how long the waiting will last. All it takes is knowing how to make it a little more bearable.

moon song, in three parts

First: a memory.

When I was little, my grandmother and I overnighted in a cabin by the water. She pulled me from the book I was lost in, outside, and pointed a knobbly finger at the moon hanging in state. “There she is. Mother Moon. We’re her children, you and I.”

Part of me wanted to roll my eyes; she was always saying things like that. We were both born in July, under the moon-ruled sign of Cancer, and she found every chance to remind me. But another part of me stirred as we stood there in the mist. The moonlight twisted down from the dark, a filigreed thread beckoning. Suddenly my loyalty seemed decided: I felt a sleepy and deep-rooted kind of wonder, the kind that only seems to exist in childhood and in dreams you can’t remember. (Aren’t they a little bit the same thing?)

Second: a moment.

Mother Moon was full again this past Saturday. As I stood outside with my camera pointed toward the heavens, I heard two of my neighbors approach my building. They paused, and I knew they were trying to work out what I was doing. And then one of them spoke. “Mira la luna,” he said softly, voice suffused with awe. Look at the moon.

They did not speak again for several minutes. In the cold and the dark, the three of us standing there, I felt that same silent wonder bind us together. 

Third: a match.

Call it influence or inevitability, but I know more about my astrology these days than my grandmother does. For now, consider these three dualities, three flashes of the mirror: 

• My sun sign, Cancer, is ruled by the moon.

• My moon sign, Leo, is ruled by the sun.

• This February full moon was in Leo, sign of the sun.

For so long, I thought I was all Moon-daughter: I have a love for solitude, for other people’s secrets, and the hours after midnight when the city goes quiet. But the older I got, the more loves I accumulated that smacked of Sun: the long light of honey-summer, picking out the perfect birthday card, how alive I feel at the center of a warm-lit room with warm-spirit friends.

These are the light, sweet things. But what seemed to me contradictions began to emerge everywhere, and I fought them a long time. Haven’t you ever? Been told you can only be, have, do one thing? Felt it tug at some seam in you, only to ignore the rippage and file quietly into the line you choose —— because you have been made to choose between?

There is something my therapist calls a double dip: two emotions, seemingly contradictory, felt at the same time. I am learning double dips exist everywhere, not just in my head. I am learning I can be both.

I can harness both the monastic discipline of recording, and the brilliant chaos of the stage. I can create in whatever form I like, under my own name. Wild in joy, knocked windless by pain, in the same body, in the same day. Muted moon. Steady sun.

When I think of it as a fight, I lose automatically. I have always been both —— and by all the stars in the sky, I am the better for it. 

Name the DEMONS // World Mental Health Day

photo by Christine Florence

Three years ago today, I released Icarus for the first time as a single. Today, on World Mental Health Day, I’m releasing DEMONS, a duo of stripped-down versions of Icarus and Antidote (from The Shoebox EP). But before you hear them, I have to tell you a little story. I have to tell you why these things go together. 

Four years ago, I had just begun living in New York. People back home were excited for me, and I tried to reflect that back to them. But honestly, I hated it. The city felt massive, anonymous, and cruel. As winter set in and the days darkened, I stayed in more and more. I stopped calling people back. I fell behind at university. I didn’t know what was happening to me, so I tried writing about it. Icarus came tumbling out in a few nights: it felt somehow fitting to write about flight and the skies to get out of feeling so low. And while it didn’t solve everything, a bit of the weight seemed to lift. When the new year rolled in, I moved, met some of my now-closest friends, and tried to put that strange winter behind me.  

A year and a half later, I left to study abroad in Paris, France for six months. Being half French and (for a change) utterly in love with the city I was in, it felt like coming home. But little things kept tripping me up: coin denominations, cultural habits. Meeting new people was exhausting, and I missed my friends and family thousands of miles away. The little things got bigger and bigger. All I could think was, “You can’t do anything right. Nobody likes you. You don’t even deserve to be here.” I spent many, many nights with that voice chasing round my head. I didn’t know how to make it stop. All I could think to do was pick up my guitar and try to scratch the voice out on the strings—because that's what I had done before. And that’s how Antidote was born, on the bare wood floor of my tiny studio. In my head these songs are like siblings, wrapped in pretty imagery—mythology and masks, a heart gone dark, poisons and cures. 

Neither of them feel pretty now that I know what really birthed them: Icarus was written during my first depressive episode. Antidote was written in the middle of another episode, and at the onset of an anxiety disorder. I manage the anxiety daily, and the episodes still recur—often (though not always) in the winter, like echoes of those two years. Altogether, I've seen half a dozen doctors, called a Paris hospital at 3am, and gone to the emergency room for symptoms of anxiety and depression that manifest physically. I've blown off friends and opportunities more times than I would like, because I'm so terrified of doing, saying, being the wrong thing. 

Some good has come of all this. The good was YOU. When I released Antidote, I thought it was one of the most personal songs I’d ever written. I even thought it was too specific, too knotted up in those long wintry Paris nights to make sense to anyone else. So imagine my surprise when many of you reached out to me and told me you understood Antidote—that it put words to something you’d been struggling with for a long time. Even now, it staggers me, that something I wrote to exorcise my own demons is helping you with yours. And you, in turn, helped me put names to those demons, to ask for help with what I’d ignored for so long. I can’t be sure, but maybe if I had listened sooner to the doctors who suggested mental illness was a possibility, if I had felt less ashamed of what I was going through, it wouldn’t have taken so long to learn to manage it. (And believe me, I’m still learning.) I'm hoping that the stripped tracks on DEMONS will help you better understand the places they came from, and maybe even help you take that step toward help if you feel like you're struggling. 

No one wants to admit they need help. I’ve even wrestled with myself about whether or not to write this—whether my experience even matters, compared to what others have been through. (There is a reason I call myself the "poison." There is a reason I was “too scared to say that I’m tired.”) But then I remind myself that every experience is valid, and important, and someone out there might recognize themselves in it and take heart. Having been through it, I would never wish that kind of silent suffering on anyone. So let’s take the shame out of it. Let’s talk about it. 

If we can’t cast the demons out, at least we’ll know their names.

Hello! + Mic Week

Welcome! I've wanted to have a space like this for a while; writing comes fairly naturally to me, and I feel — hope — this will be somewhere I can share thoughts with you that social media captions can't quite sum up. So let's catch up . . .

It's been a little over six months since I released The Shoebox EP. In those six months, I've written and scrapped a dozen new songs. I've headlined two live shows. I've felt restless, unsatisfied, hesitant. This summer, circumstances have aligned so that I have some downtime — a chance at respite, at recentering. So I set myself a challenge this past week:

Play one open mic every day.

I've always said that performing for an audience isn’t my forte; just doesn’t come naturally to me. I also tend to make music in a bubble much of the time, forgetting there are other, unique, talented musicians just outside the door. This challenge was twofold: An inner goal of strengthening my performances, and an outer one of starting to form a musical community for myself.

Unsurprisingly, this week has gone by at warp speed. Some places were packed, others sparse; some whooped and hollered, others clapped politely. Some nights I played almost first, some in the middle, and once I stayed four hours to be able to play one song. I also set myself the additional challenge of playing different sets of songs every night.

I didn't think one mic a day would be too daunting, but it turns out, it's not just going to the mic. It's building time for practicing my own music back into my day (I hadn't for months). It's preparing more songs than I need, so that I can play a set that fits the feel of the venue. It's getting to the mic (sometimes an hour away) good and early to get a slot — or sometimes getting there, and having to turn around because the lineup is full. In the case of this particular week, it's getting someone to film my set to keep myself accountable — sometimes, complete strangers. Turns out, a mic a day takes all day, not just those couple hours at the bar.

There have been some rude awakenings: Because I was writing and practicing during the day, then traveling, then performing at night (sometimes well into the small hours), I've become weirdly nocturnal. Most mics also have a cover or bar item minimum, or both — and while I do see these mics as an investment in my community and musical future, they are a financial commitment. I've (re)learnt many lessons: to show up on time (or else risk not getting a slot, which happened Sunday); to practice my material offstage, and regularly; to stick it out and pay my dues as a musician (yes, even by staying four hours). Most of all, to follow through, even if — actually, especially if — I don't "feel like it." (Bonus: Friday night open mics seem to be mythical creatures, not unlike unicorns.)

But here's the thing. I do feel more comfortable now getting up onstage, playing trickier songs, even bantering a little with the crowd. It's not a transformation; I still fumble with fingerings, and my heart still races before my name is called. But by making performing just a part of my day (night?), it feels like I've taken some of the fear out of it. 

There's an even bigger thing to take away from this week: I got to hear and see delightful, heart-wrenching, sometimes downright weird art every night. I met some thoughtful, talented people, and could hear reactions to my art in real time. I am so lucky to have a supportive audience online, no question: This week in particular, though, was about bringing faces to my music — getting real people in a room in this city to hear what I’m doing.

It made it feel real. 

So here's what I'm not going to do: go to an open mic every day. (Sorry. I need to protect my sleep and my bank account.) What I am going to do is carve out time going forward for the things that I have enjoyed from this week: performance, practice, and people.

And on that note, I hope to see you, real people in a room somewhere in this city, very soon. xx P