I recently did what a lot of us do as we pass from one year to another and looked at my Spotify Unwrapped. [For those of you not familiar, this is where Spotify give you a very well-dressed run down of your listening habits from the past year]. To my surprise, Lounge Kittens was my number one listened to artist.
How unbelievably egotistical I hear you cry! To be almost 4 years away from the last time they sang together as a band and still be bashing out her own tunes on Spotify, is she trying to beef up their earnings!?! (lol). To the untrained eye it might seem like arrogance incarnate but to me, it’s the most beautiful representation of healing.
I can imagine that to a lot of people, it seems absolutely inconceivable that artists would listen to their own work. It’s not, I know lots of us do it. For me, it’s the simple reason that it’s my favourite thing to sing along to. Why wouldn’t it be? I know all the parts and the words. And I know how to sing it good. At least… I used to. And it makes me laugh. It makes me feel close to The Other Two and remember all the good times.
But it hasn’t been all good times since the last time we stood on a stage and sang those songs and somewhere along the line, I stopped singing. I stopped singing and I didn’t notice it at first because shortly after the last time my voice was amplified over a room full of fans, we stopped being allowed to have live music, thanks to the pandemic. Not only was my outlet silenced in 2020 but so were so many others. It was a particularly scary time, which pushed my sadness and anxiety over not being ‘The Pink One from The Lounge Kittens’ anymore into a new and strange perspective. We had bigger things to worry about, like not being allowed to see our families in case we accidentally killed everyone with an invisible virus.
I wasn’t singing, but I was writing. I had time to write and writing is often as powerful an outlet for me in terms of the release it gives my brain as singing can be. I churned out blog posts and musings and diarised my feelings alongside all the weird goings on in the strange new world we were all inhabiting.
And then my friend went missing in the US Virgin Islands on 8 March 2021. In the midst of this completely unimaginable scenario of lockdowns and furlough, this additional entirely unimaginable thing started to unfold as we gathered fragments of information about what may have happened to our friend.
And I stopped writing.
It’s taken a lot of therapy to realise that when I experience times of extreme trauma, I get very, very quiet. I do not sing. I do not write. I do not produce. I cannot create.
The reason for this silent purgatory seems to be a combination of an over-bearing sense of guilt over the selfishness of expressing myself when others are no longer able to and something subconscious that instructs me to remain as quiet as possible so as not to attract any more negative attention. My fight or flight response clearly decides that if I make myself as quiet as possible, I might be able to avoid further harm. Looking back, I realise that it’s always been this way.
I was quiet for a long time.
I acknowledged what was happening but I knew I couldn’t force myself into anything. I had to keep my head down and wait and hope for the return of my creative energy.
Towards the end of 2023, however, I caught myself singing in the shower. Then I noticed myself singing along to snippets of songs in the car. Eventually, I challenged myself to put on my TLK playlist in the car (my absolute favourite place to sing) to tentatively see what I could still remember and what might squeak out of my face. It started off so slowly (and quietly) but gradually, it came back and I relished how many Christmas songs I was blasting out in the shower and in the car this festive season. Yes, I am one of those rare people who loves Christmas music.
It was scary to make the connection and to talk it through with my therapist and my loved ones. But it was as much healing as it was daunting. There is still a lot of guilt attached to any happiness felt whilst our friend is still missing and people are still struggling. That’s a story for another time. For now, I am taking the win (she would tell me to). I’m holding onto the potential vanity of being my own #1 fan and I’m going to try to keep singing.
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