I had a heart to heart talk with my post-op nurse Bille about burnout, and how much it can affect you as a person who cares for others. I want to write more about this specifically because it is so important to recognize. If we want to heal this health care system, the issue of burnout in the health care worker needs to be addressed.

I was getting a lot of stuff; I was getting it really organically, just downloading it on a walk through our neighborhood and in the shower, writing it down and making it; This was such an exciting time for me. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Because it really reflects that period of my life where I've figured out how I wanted to make music, not just as a fiddler in people's bands, but as my own artist.

Standing nervously backstage waiting to go on, I felt the mix of excitement to do my thing as well as the nervous energy in me. Will I totally suck, do I even know how to play music? It is always right there. Always.

oung memoirs need to be as honest as possible for the author to survive them. It's an all consuming responsibility to tell the truth and hold very little back. I have to face my characters every day and I’m willing to walk that wire and find this balance. Brandi Carlile, Broken Horses

💡 The opposite of distraction is not focus; it is traction 👉 to get traction, you have to learn how not to get distracted 👉 make time for traction 👉 planning with your calendar vs planning with a to-do list. And do not ❌ plan tasks from to-do lists: these are never right because you need to dedicate time to completing them.

As the song progressed, I felt myself become more aligned in my body, and some of the repetitive thoughts I was having, about women being turned away that very moment, and what will happen to women who may need to terminate a pregnancy for a huge number of reasons, and on and on, and I replaced that anxiety with action. The action of sending peace to those places and to all of us, for so many women I know have been faced with impossible decisions, and I think we always assumed it would be still up to us. I am still angry. I am still frustrated. But I learned again music has the power to modulate pain into peace.

there is something ingrained in me about how much I'm 'supposed to work' every week and then I come home and do my other job - being a creative - or is that 'for fun?' In the culture of addictive processes we find ourselves telling each other that it's good for us to be jammed up all the time, but I don't think it's healthy! There is so much talk around 'self-care' and 'work life balance' but damnit they just become buzzwords that we end up resisting in lieu of proving to ourselves we need to be superheroes instead of mastering resting.

I know it’s fairly typical in November to reflect on ‘gratefulness,’ but for me this year it is imperative. I’ve taken a deep deep dive into the realm of healing and I’m still soaking in its warm salty bath and breathing its breezy and pleasant air. In fact it’s so great here I’d like to stay! Maybe there is a way.

OH PLANS!!! I’m still making them, just more and more cautiously and less frequently. This week I felt depressed for a few minutes because I didn’t have anything to do requiring advanced amounts of my brain or talent of any sort. I wanted to rejoice that I’m now planning ‘resting,’ and I’m finding it but not without some despair. I want to be useful. “What am I doing with my time?” I am called to be of service in my life, yet right now I must serve me. It is a mysterious ride to be on, and I feel like I’m going around and around with i

2 weeks prior to starting chemo when I was hearing my diagnosis for the first time, I had a conversation with myself about my drinking. Though I drank less than I used to, it seemed to be the right time to choose to be alcohol-free for the duration of my treatment. After all, booze has shown to increase estrogen in the bloodstream and HELLO I have an estrogen receptor positive cancer. Truly sounds like a no-brainer to me!

What I want to be clear about here is that I didn’t ‘fail’ at keeping cancer away. My first thoughts with this new experience were of that ilk. I believe the trauma of the first experience I had with cancer made me feel ashamed that I got it again. Actually, I was ashamed that I got it at all. Everyone will say ‘but it’s not your fault’ and I would say that to anyone in the world but myself. So that is the source of where I begin. How DO I talk to myself?

Anna Marie Henderson and I wrote this song a year ago just when we were figuring out how to thrive in a pandemic. We had been sitting and talking about how it was all going and she told me the story of one of her patients who was very ill and asked her to ‘stop for a minute and hold her hand.’ There is one room on our unit where you can see a small tree growing outside the window and when she was sitting and holding her hand, she saw raindrops falling ‘like teardrops from a branch’ and as time passed the patient was comforted and more relaxed.

We also talked about what is like to work a 12 hour shift in such an intense environment. We work in the Palliative and Hospice care environment and we see so many different types of patients in all age ranges that are getting close to the end of their lives. We spend our days comforting not only the patients but also their family and friends and Anna and I both find it to be very meaningful work that we are blessed to do. We talked about how we come home, sometimes depleted and we turn to our significant others to ‘stop for a minute and hold our hands’ (or our broken bodies from the stress of the day!)

What I love about this song is that it’s a reminder that we are all her and present to care for each other, no matter what the role is. Sometimes in that ‘pause’ is where we realize where we need to take a breath and re-center our focus on what is going on, and it benefits not only the patient, but ourselves and our co-workers as well.

To me this is a morning ‘mourning’ song. Anticipation of a new day, and the uncertainties it brings. I’m wide awake at 5AM; maybe not quite ready to take on a difficult day. When I pull into the parking garage and take my key out of the ignition and put my mask on, I enter a realm where I must be centered and ready to take care of others in vulnerable states. I must have a steady hand and a caring heart. I must be ready to find answers to questions and learn new things in any moment. I must be ready to think on my feet, and improvise when I don’t know what to say. I pray to a spiritual being to give me strength, to be still and to help me through the day because ‘this is how the day is gonna go.’

As I was preparing to move this week I was overcome with some sadness of leaving my house. It’s been a safe haven for me for the last 6 years, I’ve grown, healed, fallen in love, became a dog mom and gotten married there. I was very comfortable! But I also agreed we needed a little more space and that is was time to evolve. The first night being here I was relaxing on the couch after a fairly stressful week and I turned on planet earth to decompress. I watched this pod of crabs migrating. They gathered together to go through the process of shedding their shells, as they had grown out of them. And surprise surprise, it turns out they had another shell growing beneath the one that had to go, but it was vulnerable for those first few days so they needed each other for protection before resuming their loner crab existence. It turns out that I related to this metaphor quite literally. I’ve always been drawn to the crab, being a Cancerian, the ‘crab’ is our symbol, and at times, retreating into my shell has been my way to protect myself. And though I’d like to have retreated this week, I instead needed to grow and shed my shell.

It is a song that I love because it digs hard into what it feels like to ‘not belong’ and the wretched place of being in comparison with someone else. It reminds me of when I wasn’t cool in junior high, and also now, when I wonder where I fit in. I think in general I resist ‘fitting in’ because I know it doesn’t serve me well to give myself over to someone else’s standards.

Right now this song is an anthem to me. ‘There’s only one thing you have to change: everything’ Pow! Right in the kisser there, Tim! Damn! And right now, it feels everything has changed. The way I look at my old self is even different. And now, slowly starting to reconnect with everyone we haven’t seen in a year, and what about how to go about resuming being a working musician? There’s a lot I didn’t actually miss about that. Don’t get me wrong, I totally still love to play music. But there was a toxicity that was happening and growing within me and I resented some of the stuff ‘you need to do’ as a musician to be considered a ‘contender.’