Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #7: No Matter What

Dear Mary,

I am extremely conscious of my own limitations. How do I gain confidence to write songs and perform them? Who encouraged you? 

- Simon
Kendal, UK

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Dear Simon,

It’s a long, scary walk from sitting safely in an audience to standing in the spotlight, believing you have something to say. It takes courage to get in front of a microphone with an original song and ask for people’s attention. Audacity is required, something most singer songwriters must learn to muster. For most, it doesn’t come naturally or quickly. It’s developed over time.

When I first took the stage twenty-five years ago, like you, I hyper-focused on my limitations. Performing only magnified deep-seated insecurities and inflamed self-doubt, triggering a myriad of other dark feelings I’d tried to keep hidden for years. Even worse, it activated shame - That intensely painful experience of feeling fundamentally flawed, unlovable, and unworthy of belonging. 

I would take the stage, trigger an invisible tripwire, and KABOOM, a wildly unpleasant feeling would wash over me like a 10,000-foot wave of desperately needing to disappear. It’s enough to make a person run for the hills and never walk onto a stage again.

Why shame? I’m not exactly sure, but people with low self-esteem can struggle with feelings of shame even when they can’t point to a specific source. My guess is that shame came to me because I did not believe I was deserving. When I made even a single mistake, it was like gasoline on the fire of my self-doubt, proof that I was undeserving of the stage I stood on.

I came to songwriting a few years after I got sober. I showed up wounded, with an ego deeply damaged from years of addiction. Like most addicts in early recovery, I had an inflated sense of self-importance, and an arrogance that I now believe developed as protection from self-loathing and low self-esteem. Addiction, a disease of the ego, left me lonely and removed, a condition I have heard described as an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I also carried two other early-in-recovery opposing emotions: a deep sense of entitlement, and the conviction that I was unlovable. As you can imagine, this churning cauldron of toxicity within me was painful. I needed some kind of miracle to bring me to a better place, to find peace, to help me become right sized and reality based.

I did not know it yet, but music and song would become a part of that much needed miracle, a huge source of healing for my soul wounds. It would teach me how to replace negative, binary thinking with positive action. 

But every step forward required courage and commitment.

You ask, who encouraged me? Well, no one really. The journey, and the struggle, were mine. But I did find community to lean on as I made my way from chef/restaurateur to singer songwriter.

I remember speaking in a twelve-step meeting in early recovery as I was trying to make sense of what was swirling inside me. Naming my heart’s desire and claiming it out loud had proven to be extremely difficult. It took me six months of trying, and all the guts I could gather to say in front of my group, “I want to write songs.” 

Time slipped into slow motion as I finally said those words out loud. The sensation was like being in a car crash. Intensely focused on myself and what others thought of me, consumed with what recovery language calls “self-centered fear,” I went into a shame spiral when I opened my mouth. Those five forbidden words “I want to write songs” ricocheted around the room like bullets and I fully expected one to bounce off the wall and kill me. I kept my eyes to the floor, convinced that what I was saying was delusional. I ended my share abruptly when fear drowned out my ability to put thoughts together.

I did not feel worthy of the dream in my heart. I felt like a fraud and my longing sounded absurd. I’d missed my chance when I was young and flirting with it now seemed like a form of middle-aged madness that exposed me to annihilation. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was terrified at being laughed at by people who knew me only as a restaurateur/cook and a person in recovery. People whose opinions very much mattered to me.

Thank God when I ended my share, someone else immediately spoke up and took the group’s attention off of me.

The speaker was a young lawyer named Brad. Inspired by what I had revealed, his voice quivering, Brad said, “I relate to what Mary said. I’m a successful attorney, but I am not happy. I went to law school to please my father, who cannot and will not accept the fact that I am gay.” 

Tears began to fall down his cheeks. 

“I want to be an actor. It is what I have always wanted! But I have never said those words out loud. Now, I feel sick, I feel like running out of the room. I am terrified.” He began to weep, and his emotion was so heart felt that other members of the group began to tear up too.

Even though it was nearly thirty years ago, I remember this scene like it was yesterday. Two newly sober artists, reaching through terror, to try and become authentic. To become real. Reaching for life, after failing at death via addiction.

In bed that night, it occurred to me for decades it had made more sense to destroy myself with drugs and alcohol than to chase dreams that may not come true, dreams I did not feel worthy of. Better to bury my heart’s desires, than to have them exposed to derision. 

I was beginning to understand.

Fear had been my constant companion for most of my life. I dragged it around like a wet blanket, carried for so long I did not remember life without it. Fear made my choices for me, and as my addiction grew bigger, so did the fear. I drank to have courage, which in turn made the fear worse. So, I drank more. The cycle is deadly, and terribly familiar to anyone who has loved an addict. It is an ever-tightening noose that kills most who get caught in it. Before recovery, as the disease of addiction spread like cancer on my soul; failure, loss, and disappointment were commonplace. Yes, addiction is about excessive drinking and drug use, but underneath inebriation, the fire that burned the hottest, the pressure that pushed the hardest, was God-awful fear. 

Rilke said, “Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasures.”

Integrity, integration. This is what was lacking. 

But here’s the thing: I was not aware that this was what I needed. 

I’ve worked with thousands of songwriters who have struggled with integrating their love of music and song into their daily lives. They fail to name and claim their dream and fully incorporate songwriter into their understanding of who they are. Not as something they want to become, or something they dream of, but as something they are.

This is the point at which my story intersects with yours. Publicly naming and claiming my heart’s desire (to become a songwriter), was the beginning of integrating this dream into all aspects of my life. This, I believe, is crucial to getting good at it. Half-heartedness dominated by fear was never going to get me where I wanted to go. And where did I want to go? 

I wanted to become a better singer, player, and writer. I wanted to learn how to speak to an audience. I wanted to become as good on stage as I was in the restaurant. 

And most of all, I was slowly discovering that I wanted to live. 

Every creative action in service to my art was an assertion of my  commitment to life. 

No wonder my disease was throwing the kitchen sink at me. The more alive, authentic, and integrated I became; the less power it had over me. The act of naming and claiming myself as a songwriter was directly attached to embracing life, with all of it’s imperfection and glory. It was a rejection of self-destruction, hiding, and playing small. Each new song was an assertion to myself that what I do matters. To the world? Well, no. More importantly, TO ME! I matter to me. Whew, even thirty years later, this is hard for me to write.

So, back to your awareness of your limitations. Like you, I was very aware of the fact that I was not much of a guitar player. I also sang flat at times, and had no idea how to address an audience from the stage. These were all limitations, and yes, I was acutely aware of them. 

But with integration, over time, I became less fragile. It was as though I were a three-legged stool prior to my commitment to songwriting. Once I fully articulated my dream to write songs, play them, and commit myself to it, I grew a much needed fourth leg. This helped stabilize me. This is integrity. The disabling fear became much less disabling. The more committed I became, the less urgent the fear felt.

I began to tell myself, “I’m gonna write songs and play them even though I suck. I’m gonna do this even though I am worse at it than everyone else. I am going to do this until I get good at it, no matter how long it takes.” 

I had to accept that there will be moments of humiliation along the way. And yes, there were thousands. There still are. I had to accept that there would always be a whole lot of songwriters who are better at this than me. There are, and there always will be. Better singers? Check. Better guitar players? Check. But I also had to accept that my songs matter, and my voice matters, these are sacred parts of me. They matter to me.

So, I commit daily to doing my best, not being the best. 

Doing so has helped my ego heal, it has helped me become right sized in my mind, a worker among workers, a teacher and a student. Becoming authentic and living in truth is the definition of recovery. It’s also the definition of integrity. 

Confidence comes from commitment, it comes slowly over time. It comes from knowing that, even if I fall on my face while walking to the stage, I am going to get back up, dust myself off, and keep going. 

I am DOING THIS.

No matter what. 

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #6: Calling

Dear Mary,

Do you think it’s possible to become a songwriter later in life?

- Gail
Pullman, WA

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Dear Gail,

For me, songwriting is a calling. A calling presents itself as a tiny, nagging thought or far-off feeling that grows, and sooner or later begins to consume your mind and drive the decisions of your everyday life. A calling works on a timeline of its own. It can surface quickly or take decades to fully announce itself. One thing is for certain, unlike whims, callings endure.

The call to song first came to me when I was in my teens. I bought a guitar, a Mel Bay chord book, and learned to play. I was unable to embrace songwriting without encouragement and support. With no creative community to help guide my young heart’s desire, I was too wounded and insecure to go it alone, so I stopped trying.

Every couple of years, the call to song would resurface. I’d try to write, but along the way, vulnerability would fill me with terror. I know now that there’s no songwriting without vulnerability. Instead of running to my heart’s desire, my calling, I ran from it. 

Then, I dismissed it.

I put songwriting in the category of “childish things.” Corinthians 13:11 reads, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put aside childish things.” I figured my desire to write songs was a childish whim. I told myself it was good that I’d grown up and left it behind. I put my guitar in a case, left it there, and banished songwriting from my mind to pursue other things. 

I completely forgot I ever longed to write songs. 

I went to culinary school, found investors, and opened a couple of restaurants. I stayed very busy, intensely focused on success in my businesses. The guitar stayed in its case in a hall closet, and the call to song laid buried in my subconscious mind for years, dormant and unspoken, a truth I’d successfully hidden from myself. 

Then I got sober.

During moments of silence and stillness in my early sobriety, when I was not busy with the extreme demands of running multiple restaurants and juggling thousands of items on an endless to do list, I felt an aching deep in my heart. A voice in my head whispered, “Do you really want this life? Endless busy work, the endless churn of acquisition?” At dusk, perhaps, when I was driving on an empty highway listening to a song I loved, or when I sat by the fireplace after reading the last page of an incredible book and looked out the window at snow falling, the voice would ask, “Is this all there is?” 

Recovery from addiction asked me to be honest, and the truth was, I was not happy in the restaurant business. I liked dreaming them up and making them work, but running them made me feel trapped. I longed to transcend the confines of the routine I’d made myself a slave to.

My life changed the night I went to an open mic and saw a room full of entry level songwriters take their turn on stage. Sitting in that club, watching the courage of those young artists was a lightbulb moment for me. I knew right then, instantly, what I wanted.. It was what I’d wanted to do since I was a teenager. I wanted to write an original song and sing it on stage. And within a few months, I did.

I began writing songs in my mid-thirties, which is hardly “later in life,” but the music business is youth driven, and I was well aware of the age difference between me and the other songwriters when I started playing open mics.

No matter, I began showing up to my writing desk daily, playing out nightly, and slowly coming to terms with my calling. Ten years after that lightbulb moment, at age 40, I moved to Nashville to start a new career: Songwriter.

So, to answer your question, do I think you can become a songwriter later in life, my answer is yes. You can. I did!

But answering a calling does not require you to make a career of it. Answering is exactly that - saying, “Hey there! I hear you, and I will dedicate a part of my being to what you are asking. I’ll put time aside to get good at it, and I’ll give it my best. 

I’ve taught hundreds of songwriters in their sixties and seventies, many of whom were just getting started. Most were aware of the call to song inside themselves for decades, but they’d left it unanswered, thinking it was childish. They moved through their lives, got “real” jobs, raised their families. They shyly answered the call only after their children were grown and they’d retired from their careers.

It is forever thrilling for me to see the joy on a songwriter’s face as they take their first steps in the direction of their heart’s desire. Some cry when they share their first song with a group of other songwriters who are rooting for them and support their efforts.

Gail, my guess is the call to song has been inside you for a while, probably quite a while. Festering underneath a million rationalizations and excuses, sitting dormant, waiting. The calling will never knock down your door or jump up and down to get your attention. It simply waits for you to be ready. Answering it will catapult you into a new reality, but you have no way of knowing that. Not answering it will leave parts of you unrealized, and to me, this is a sad state of affairs. I shiver to think of all the souls who have left this earth impoverished for having not answered their calling. One of the reasons I decided to pursue songwriting was that I did not want to be on my death bed full of regret, wishing I’d had the courage to do so.

"If you bring forth what is within you, 
what you bring forth will save you. 
If you do not bring forth what is within you, 
what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 
- Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas

Callings, like wounds, when ignored, denied, repressed, neglected or pushed away, will begin to fester and can eventually poison us. Those called to song would benefit from answering. Not because the world needs more songs, but because to ignore your heart’s desire is to ignore your creator’s instructions. Creating art by writing songs, is about growing the heart and soul and increasing their reach. It has more to do with the act of creation itself than what is actually made. That said, what is made might be exactly what a soul needs. But you’ll never know, if you don’t answer the call.

 - Mary

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