From Building Up Everyone Else To Building Me

It came natural to me, a girl from Brooklyn raised Catholic by immigrants, to help and serve. I started out as nothing more than the extremely helpful friend & girlfriend. This identity kept me so busy filling myself with other people’s stuff and it made me feel productive and for a while, even happy.

Ignorance is bliss after all, right? As a songwriter I would not only come to sessions to get ideas out, but I’d also help run sessions sometimes, I choreographed, danced and did whatever I could to be useful.

Not only did it keep me busy, it kept me hidden. Subconsciously, being seen was the scariest thing to me. So I buried myself in other people’s stuff.

As someone who posts pictures & videos of myself on instagram, people are usually surprised to learn that I used to hate having my picture taken. I always felt like I was stumbling clumsily in the dark.

I resigned myself to “not being that type of person”. What kind of person? The type who finds themselves in the center of things or in front of a camera. Without realizing it, I started to ascribe a righteousness to my hiding. Can’t hold yourself accountable when you feel like you’re on some false moral high ground.

“Those people” cared about attention and money. I laugh now when I think of how the mind will bend and twist and weave all kinds of realities when all we’re looking to do is confirm our beliefs.

Those people were my teachers. They were so committed to their vision, they spent their time trying to rise to the occasion of their dreams. If I wasn’t so terrified of my dreams, I might’ve been inspired.

They had clarity, and they were driven & emboldened by it. It was easy to believe in them. Easier to believe in them.

Eventually I found myself with nothing to show for throwing my eggs into everyone’s baskets. All of my energy, and efforts went towards building things that weren’t mine. Everyone was gone, and I was there with myself, still hidden. Still buried.

It was time for some reckoning. I had to start unpacking a lifetime of messages that told me I wasn’t good enough. These messages seeped into me which lead to attracting people that reinforced these themes.

I was co-creating with the wrong entities. Wires were completely crossed.

It was time to re-wire, unlearn, and re-program. This was the beginning for me.

It was the seed that lead me to trying, and using “believing in myself” as a practice and not just a concept.

So with everything I do, everything I attempt, I’m practicing believing in me. It was only natural to come out of hiding.