2019 Wrap Up Coming ASAP - For Now, Here's Some Love
I remember not too long ago someone criticizing people who make comments like, “This song literally saved my life” hinting as if it alluded to a larger more serious mental issue. I see this as a great deal of shortsightedness in terms of how powerful, quickly, and deeply transformative the effect the ongoing practice that is the act of loving unconditionally can have on a person. Although we’re approaching 10 years of operating as a site, as I’ve played in my digital sandbox that is Some Kind of Awesome over the course of the past 2 years, I have increasingly found myself reclaiming bits and pieces of my heart that I thought had been destroyed but actually had just been caked under layers of shame that I took on from people I came in contact with throughout my life. For a little while there I’ll admit I sort of lost my way. Trauma has a weird way of intensifying your deepest and darkest of insecurities to a point where operating in the world like a normal human person is really fucking disorienting.
I am so very grateful that my music fandom acted like a failsafe beacon and helped me find my way back home to myself. I literally do not know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to scour random corners of the internet in search of ways to continue to attempt to properly demonstrate everything going on simultaneously inside of me and share those moments with other people along the way. Every micro connection over a song or album with someone gradually ate away at the fear and shame that weighed so heavily on me some days it felt like it was going to crush me. The love filled me up so much that it spilled over everywhere. The artists whose songs were delighting me, my loved ones who I was afraid of then balking at the intensity that I wanted to love them, and most importantly myself.
The most powerful thing I’ve learned in this whole experience has been that if someone doesn’t respond positively to you as long as you’re coming from a place of thoughtful sincerity that it most likely has less to do with anything you’ve done and more with something going on with them, a lesson I know very intimately because until this experience I have found myself on the rejecting side of the equation more than I’d like to admit. When that lesson alone finally clicked I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt so free in my life. Sure, occasionally some of the fear and shame attempts to creep back in. I don’t know if anyone is truly every free of that. Love after all, as they say, is a practice. The thing that people don't often explain is that we all get to practice differently to get towards the same result. There's not a single formula for reclaiming love. You just have to commit to practicing as much and as often as possible.
As I look forward to 2020, I hope to make it clear that SKOA is a practice space for love and the multitude of degrees of intensity that we all feel for the music that lights us up and allows us to best express ourselves.
To the future friends on the internet that unknowingly kept me going, the bands who pushed themselves creatively, and the loved ones who were my mirror, patiently waiting for me to see what they saw….thank you.
More importantly, I love you.
So much that of course I cried a few times getting this all out because I am so grateful that the awful things I projected on everyone when I hid under my blanket of shame never actually came true.
On that note, since I am living that ✨LOVE-FILLED + SHAME-FREE LYFEEEE✨ my impending year end wrap up will probably be up by the beginning of next week and I will be spending the rest of 2019 figuring out how to get back to playing in my favorite sandbox on the daily. 💖
