This is the beginning
Unpacking the last few months
In some ways, it feels like I am a habitual starter-overer. Sometimes it feels pathological, but I quickly remember my real pathological issues, and starting over doesn’t seem like that big of a problem. I haven’t written this newsletter in months and months. I’ve been feeling bad about it for the same amount of time, and (per usual) have once again undergone mass upheaval in my life. There are apologies owed, but I’m trying not to start with those unless it’s necessary. Thanks for being here, and for reading love over fear.
On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse happened and I was turned inside out. I went to the library to look at it and started talking to an 84-year-old woman named Sally. We talked about how she & her husband (and very sweet dog) were in the path of totality during the 2017 total eclipse and saw it from their porch. How she had looked at everything differently since then. I told her that I moved to Virginia for love and she told me I was a fool with hearts in my eyes. I joked that they were over my eyes as well. She said I was a fool either way.
Sally was right: the relationship I moved to Virginia (!?!??!) for did not work or last, and I spent the first half of this year mostly alone in an apartment finding and covering up ex-wife decor I didn’t want to touch or look at. I decided I had to move and started looking for the next place I would press restart. Again.
April 20, 2024, came and went. It would have been the first anniversary of this newsletter, but I could barely look at myself that month. I had tickets to the 420 Cannabis Festival and lay in bed all day instead. May passed similarly: being a person got harder and harder, and every time I passed my reflection I felt either intense distrust & disgust, or sheer confusion. I felt misunderstood, but especially by myself. I couldn’t stand to be online. I dissolved my band and split from my manager. I turned down shows I wouldn’t have if I felt connected to myself (or anything, really), and I felt bad about it. Bad, bad bad. Bad, bad worse: toward the end of May, I was experiencing mood swings so intense I couldn’t do my job for more than a couple of hours a day. I went on disability and cried and cried and cried, feeling deeply sorry for myself in a way I hadn’t in a long while. Not since I was sixteen, I think.
The up and down that is my life had become entirely too much and I had almost lost interest completely. I called my sister crying every bad day (4 days a week) and on the good ones, I went to the ocean, sang to my cat, and thought about Taylor Swift more than I ever have in my life.
In May, I also realized that you don’t get to be what you’re going to be faster than it’ll take for you to become that. There is time. Of course there is. Things take time. Of course they do.
June passed as I packed my stuff to move again. I tried to start dating again, and I was sexually assaulted on my first go around. He left a lighter and I put it in the freezer after dreaming I turned him into ice and watched him melt. After the fact, I intended to recoup by having a lovely drive to New York to play my June 20th show and instead started Cancer season stuck on the New Jersey turnpike in 100°F weather with a dead transmission. After a $200 Uber to Manhattan from almost Pennsylvania South Jersey, I played a set I wasn’t proud of. I bought a train ticket home while I thought about the $7,000 it would take to fix my car (that I couldn’t get rid of because I have a loan on it because I bought it in November), and cried for four hours straight.
At some point, it becomes entirely too much. My existence felt as embarrassing as my luck, and I had already been dealing with self-repulsion for months by the time July rolled around. I archived most of my Instagram posts and nearly all of my previous newsletters. I started spending more time being uncomfortable instead of trying to avoid it, focusing more on what I was feeling instead of why I hated feeling it. I started working on accepting that change, like love, looks different on different people. I started wondering what it looked like on me. I wondered if I could like it more. I thought that I liked it, but I didn’t.
So much has changed in the last two, five, seven years for me. Seven years ago in August, I was nineteen and moved to the U.S. with two suitcases, a mishmash accent, and a deep yearning for connection. I clung to it wherever I found it. I carried it with me when I felt myself ascending and plummeted to the depths when I lost it, and rinsed and repeated until I was twenty-five. I think I never questioned it because it was my entire experience of adulthood. I was 19 and 8,000 miles away from my big family, trying to understand student loans and balancing two jobs, in a sea of college freshmen with 750 credit scores trying so hard to be like them. To be connected.
When I had it — typically, when I have had it — the connection I feel is so deep. The connections I have with people I love run straight through the heartlines on my hand right into my chest. They bleed through like ink into everything I do, feel, think. When things are good (2022: record deal announced, New York City Summer™, crowd chanting my name at the end of my first show) they lift me up, and when I’m up there, I often convince myself to do whatever it takes to stay there. Even if it means someone I considered a sister colonized my apartment & rendered me almost-homeless (and then told me, “I would have done anything to keep you safe”). Even if it meant working 70 hours a week so I could afford to stay in New York. Even if it meant not knowing who I was outside of the people I loved.
I feared the down, the loneliness, so severely. And then it happened. And it kept going lower and lower, until I thought it couldn’t possibly get any lower, until it did. And it kept going! Now, at 26, I am working on being okay with being afraid of it, and trying to be curious about my fear instead of writing it off as personal failure. Choosing (self) love over fear, if you will.
I did a reading for myself at the end of May and pulled The Tower as my “what lies ahead” card. I interpreted it pretty generously: big changes & shake-ups are incoming! I notably told myself not to interpret it as a chaos card because I didn’t want to put my extra-strength jinx power to use. As it happened, I didn’t even have to.
All this to say, especially to my handful of paid subscribers, I am sorry for not writing these last few months. I am grateful for the time and attention you give to my words & my work. I am working towards being the person I think I want to be moment in and moment out, taking it one small, small step at a time. I’m taking more pictures, of things and of myself. I’m going through my camera roll & looking at things I haven’t for a while, some for the last time before deleting them forever. I’m interested in reading again, and have some new philosophy books I’m excited about. I’m excited, and I’m trying to be without being petrified of things going wrong. Historically, it seems things will go wrong if they will in any case. It also seems that I will make it if they do in any case.
I live in Baltimore, as of yesterday. I have a couple of solo shows coming up, and after not wanting to look at myself for a long time, I’ve struggled with being looked at. I thought I enjoyed it, but it turns out singing about your shattered heart hurts a lot more when you’re alone on stage and feeling like a gremlin. Maybe sunglasses on stage, like baby Shalom. Maybe closing my eyes. Maybe devising a way to make the songs sound good if I play and sing while crying. Maybe taking it moment by moment because nothing else is for sure.
On Saturday, July 20, I am opening for Queen of Jeans at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia, and you can get tickets here. I love this band, and they just put out a ripper of an album called All Again. I made a playlist for the newsletter last year based around their song Get Lost and it’s still one of my favorites.
On Friday, August 9, I’m opening for Bellows & Terror Pigeon at Purgatory in Brooklyn, NY. You can get tickets here. We played with Bellows at the second-ever NYC Shalom Band show in 2022. Oliver called me “the excellent songwriter Shalom” on the poster and I think about it still.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your patience. I’m grateful to be around.
love always,
shalom
Thank you for sharing this. I'm glad to see you writing again and I appreciate your vulnerability. ♥️ That playlist was one of my favorites, too. It introduced me to Queen of Jeans and I am so excited for you that you'll be playing with them.