Play your own special music 🎶

No one else can play your tune!

Hello friends

Last week I reflected on the delights of spring, and the gifts that nature brings to us every day if only we take the time to notice them.

This week, I know summer is here, because the UK music festival season has begun! At the weekend, my son and I went to Devauden festival, a small community festival in South Wales.

A beautiful location for a music festival, near Chepstow in South Wales

A bewildering apathy towards music has been one of the strangest and most discombobulating aspect of this year’s deep depression, but I LOVED dancing to Skerryvore from Scotland, and Nogood Boyo from Wales on the Friday night. There’s something about modern takes on traditional folk music that really excites me, even in the midst of some weird things happening in my brain. It was wonderful to feel that excitement return as I danced to these bands.

I never knew bagpipes could be so cool until I discovered Skerryvore!

My top find of the weekend was a Welsh band called Melin Melyn, a very Beatles-esque band whose psychedelic rock touched the part of me that loves music with all my being. I didn’t get to see all the set, as Marcus had to go to the tent to go to bed, and needed me to go with him, but what I saw I absolutely loved.

We’ve got another festival to go to in a few weeks, Beardy Folk in Shropshire, and I'm very excited - the line up is great, and I'm really looking forward to more time away from the demands of daily life and a chance to spend chilled out time with him and with myself. Although I need to find a way to make camping more comfortable. I’m not quite ready to accept I'm ‘too old to rock n roll’ yet, but I'm definitely too old to sleep on the floor of a tent!

I’ve been thinking a lot about comparison and the way we waste so much energy and self esteem wondering if we are good enough, based on how other people are doing, how they look, how successful they are and so on.

A 3 day music festival has a lot of bands on the line-up, These bands are all likely to be very different, and appeal to different tastes. They’ll be on at different times, competing with other bands and activities that people can engage with. There will be different weather conditions affecting the crowd. They are going to be on different days, so not everyone who attends the festival will even be on site for their performance.

There’s a huge number of factors that can impact the size of the crowd watching them that have nothing to do with how good they are as a band or as musicians. 

And even if they are not as good, as established, as experienced as some of the other names, they are there, they have devoted themselves to their craft and they have earned their place on the billing. Even if they only attract a tiny crowd, they will give it their all and show that tiny crowd what they have to offer. And one day, maybe, they will be the act that huge crowds flock to see. But even if they don’t, they still can show up fully, and express the music that comes through them.

Comparison shows up in all areas of life, and can hurt us in ways we don’t even see until we look back and see the damage it did along the way.

When I was a little girl, I knew there was something 'wrong' with me. My teeth were too big and stuck out of my mouth too far. My face was too long. My eyes were too bulgy. I spoke weirdly. I was weird and people didn't seem to like me, so I clearly wasn't likeable.

Other girls in my class were pretty. They had teeth that fitted in their mouths properly. Their faces were cute. Their eyes the right size for the sockets. They spoke the way everyone else did. They seemed to fit, and people seemed to like them. Even the boys. They clearly were likeable.

I wanted to be more like them and less like me. And yet, when I look back at photos of the little girl I used to be, I see such a pretty child, with such trusting eyes, and a face I want to take in my hands and kiss. I want to tell her that she was never meant to fit because her name means star, so clearly she was meant to shine and stand out.

Definitely not the ugly child I always imagined I was!

A recent write together session with Jeannine Ouellette elicited some writing from me that, strangely, emerged as a poem. I can’t even begin to unpack the comparison fears that writing anything that might be seen as poetry brings out in me, but I'm going to share it in it’s perfect imperfection.

“Am I pretty?”

The child to her mother as they walk 

from the car to their home

“Am I pretty?”

She is so sure that she isn’t one of the pretty girls

The pretty girls don’t pick their nose.

The pretty girls don’t stink up the bathroom

The pretty girls have tidy bedrooms

So she can’t be one of the pretty girls.

Mum will know.

“Am I pretty?”

She wants so bad to be one of the pretty girls

If she’s pretty, they’ll like her. 

If she’s pretty, they’ll want to be her friend. 

If she’s pretty, she’ll be allowed to join their games.

But they don’t seem to like her.

They don’t want to be her friend.

They don’t let her play their games.

So she can’t be one of the pretty girls.

“Am I pretty?”

The answer hits with a sting that lasts for decades

“No, you’re striking”

She doesn’t know what striking means. All she knows is “no”.

That little girl didn’t understand what she was being told, and the older woman I am today still bears the scars of that misunderstanding. If only small me had even known that she was misunderstanding what she was told, if she’d asked her mother to explain what she meant, my self esteem would have been very different. Because even though now we know that there is more to being valued as a girl than whether or not we are pretty, at that time, it was very important. I wanted to be pretty like the Miss Pears girl, pretty like Natalie, Lisa or Claire, who had lots of friends AND the boys liked them as well.

If only I’d looked it up and seen the dictionary definition, and learned that ‘striking’ means 

“attracting attention; fine; impressive, a striking beauty”, I’m pretty sure that the internal image I have of my face would look VERY different now. Although when I look in a mirror, on a good day, I can certainly agree with that definition! 

How often have you suffered because of what you THINK someone means, or what you THINK someone thinks of you, without finding out if that’s true? I could fill a whole book with ‘Things I’ve misunderstood or assumed that have shaped the person I have become’. 

In recovery, I often look around and wonder what is wrong with me. I see others who have less recovery time and marvel at all the amazing things they are achieving. Running marathons, creating and running successful recovery focused businesses, writing books, growing huge followings online, writing beautifully on Substack and so much more.

And I'm over here, doubting myself every step of the way. Fighting against my own brain to get anything done. 

But then I look at my life, the daily struggles I have, the emotional cliffs I have had to scale, the challenges life has thrown at me, and the things I HAVE achieved, and I remember. This is my life, and no one else is living it. I don’t have to be like the pretty girls, or the ‘6 figure business’ successes, or the ‘100 gazillion followers’ Substack successes. I’ve achieved a lot in my time, and I’ve done things I’m really proud of. We can, all of us, only live the lives that we were born to, that we experience on a day to day basis.

When I did the Yoga teacher training that was my unexpected path to recovery from addiction, we were told a phrase that became one of the guiding principles of my life (for a while, until I forgot it until now, of course!)

Don’t judge

Don’t compare

Don’t beat yourself up

Imagine a world in which we all lived according to these simple ideas. Social media would look very different wouldn’t it? Mental health statistics would look very different. Even our politics would look starkly different. Hell, everything would look different in our world, a world that has been pretty much rooted in getting us to judge, compare and beat ourselves up.

How could your life be better if you could judge yourself and others less. If you compared yourself to others less. If you beat yourself up less? I’m definitely going to start reminding myself of this again, it’s a simple, but powerful tool.

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Esther