Miss Leslie

Opportunities

I used to wait tables and work for a manager that asked us to call all issues with customers “opportunities”. They were not negative problems or issues. They were an opportunity to gain a customer for life.

And we have opportunities – windows in our lives where we can see ALL the way into ourselves. We can gouge out the stuff that’s either “bad” or just weighing us down. We can scrape off the things that only pull us away from who we really are. And the good news is that these opportunities allow us to change our course – take a new path that will lead us to a stronger bond with ourselves.  I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunities this last week. It started off with some conversations with friends and peaked at a frenzied garage cleaning.

First I talked to a dear fan/friend of mine (we’ll call her Anna). Anna was diagnosed 3 years ago with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. That’s right. I said STAGE FOUR. That means that she really shouldn’t be here. But she is. I talked to her a little bit about my friend (we’ll call her Amy) who was just diagnosed with Stage 2 Breast Cancer. Amy is in Week 6 of chemo and she’s doing great. I went to see her the night she cut all her hair off and wore her first wig. I didn’t even notice the wig. She looked beautiful. And she was in great spirits. She’s so positive about the disease and dealing with it. Anna said that that’s a huge part of it – your outlook. You have to be positive – it makes a huge difference in the outcome.

I felt guilty. Here I am feeling down and this woman has beaten cancer – and was POSITIVE about it! Of course, Anna wasn’t positive every day. But she constantly worked to get back to that positive spirit.

And I thought about warriors. About how we battle with things in life and sometimes want to just quit. But the thing is: you can’t quit cancer. You can’t say, “I don’t think I’ll have cancer anymore. I’m tired of it and I’m done.” Cancer IS. You have to fight until you’ve won. You have to find the courage, the perseverance, and the tenacity to be able to stay with it and FIGHT. There’s no choice – you have to.

So the question I ask myself is: Do I have the courage? Can I persevere? Can I fight for myself? Can I act like there’s no choice but to just stay with it?

Later that night, I ran into a fellow artist. He has some good things going for him. He’s going to have a couple of songs in an upcoming major motion picture. And he’s been at this a long time. And he talked about how it’s still a struggle – trying to make a buck, trying to make your career take off, trying to get noticed by an industry that doesn’t notice music anymore, and dealing with the depression that comes along with it.

He told me he just takes a step back sometimes. He looks to see how far he’s come. It’s then that he realizes that he has progressed. No matter what that means in this god forsaken music industry, it is still progression. It is still an encouragement to continue.

Because we all need encouragement – we all need to see a progression and see those reasons for continuing our fight. My friend Anna told me some encouraging things to tell my friend Amy. It’s this huge cycle that starts with an opportunity, goes into a fight that finds you at times down and despairing, and then that encouragement gives you the breath of fresh air that you need to continue on and keep going.

Sometimes when I get down, I get in a cleaning mode – and I don’t mean dishes and floors. I mean a serious upheaval of all of the junk that I’ve accumulated – usually in the garage or the closet. This time it was the garage. It was unreal – not in a hoarding kind of way, but certainly in an unnecessary kind of way. I was throwing away records from 1993 for goodness sakes. And I found 2 journals of songs.

THEY WERE SONGS I HAD WRITTEN. SONGS BY ME. I forgot that I had written songs prior to 2005. My God – it’s like my brain just erased an entire season of memories from my past. I WROTE SONGS.

And I realized what I had done. I had an opportunity to find myself that stared me in the face. I stopped my life and I realized who I was. And I just went on and erased her.

It still hasn’t sunk in. I’m up to my ears in everything right now. I had to set the notebooks aside so I can look at them later. So, I’m still relatively numb to this entire concept.

I’m going back and forth between incredulity and frustration. How did I do that? WHY did I do that? I already struggle with feeling like I’ve wasted so much time, but this is just mortifying. I wasted years of songwriting. YEARS.

But this is SO human. We do this ALL OF THE TIME. We have a life opportunity.  Usually it’s some crisis in our life – a big life change like a divorce or losing a job or car accident or something that takes us to a really low place. And we have an OPPORTUNITY. An opportunity to get to ourselves – yes, we get to the bad stuff, but we get to the good stuff too. It’s like cleaning out that garage – sifting through the muck and the dirt and the old records of life and chunking the trash where it belongs – in the trash. And discovering, saving or reusing the good. We find this energy to fight for ourselves – not that person that we try to be for work or church or general society – the person that we ARE and CAN BE.

So here I am in my opportunity – my moment to continue to fight or to give up.

And I realize, once again, that Life has a sense of humor. After breaking my back cleaning the garage, I take a break and go to see an artist play at a local dive – to a very small crowd. And he says at the end of the year that he will quit. After 40 years of being a musician. And I hear myself say these words:

“When I first started my band, I got frustrated at a gig where hardly anyone was there. I said aloud, ‘I should quit.’ And the drummer said, ‘Yeah, but no one would notice.’ And I have never forgotten those words. See, it taught me that I’m in this for me. The question is: Who are you doing this for? When you play gigs or practice your instrument or whatever – are you doing it because you love it and because it’s what you want to do? If so, then keep at it. There’s no point in quitting – cause it’s not about money and it sure isn’t about fame. It’s about something inside of you that’s important to you. And at the end of your life, that’s all there is.”

And I found myself full circle and the words of Waylon Jennings echoing constantly in my head:

“You’ve got to care. You’ve got to care about the music. You work with other musicians who care, and your audience cares. You better care too, hoss, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be doing it. You better not be doing it for the publicity, the fame, or the money. And you sure better not be doing it because it’s a way to make a living, ’cause that ain’t always gonna be easy. You got to believe it, believe in the music, you got to mean it, that’s all.”

I work in a music industry that in general does not care a whit about the music. It is concerned with number of units sold, number of friends on Facebook, number of hits on a website, number of people attending shows and number of drinks sold at shows.

But me? I say f-ck it. I’m all about the music – because THAT is what is inside of me. Doesn’t matter what’s inside anyone else. It’s my life and this is what I do - MUSIC.

You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

I’ve always been goal-oriented. It’s a personality trait, you know. You take those psychological tests for your personality (um, no not the ones online – I mean the REAL psychological tests), and one of the personality traits has to do with whether you are task-oriented or goal-oriented. I am strongly the latter. Tasks drive me crazy. Details annoy me. I don’t have time to look at small things. I’m a big picture gal.

But one thing that the goal-oriented person learns as they live their life is that sometimes the goal that they think they are aiming for is not the true goal at all.

I started this honky tonk band in 2004. My goal was to be successful. My plan was to run the band like a record label would – focus on marketing, distribution and exposure in order to build a larger fanbase in a shorter amount of time.

The funny thing about life is that it’s just like that Rolling Stones’ song – “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

I have learned that instead of being some regional hit, I have become an artist. I have touched the deeper places inside of my soul and have written songs that speak from my heart. And what amazes me constantly is that they touch other people too. It’s not a goal. It’s not a destination. It probably should be categorized as a purpose. But it is certainly me.

THAT is what I needed – not to play the Grand Ole Opry. Not to be some hit. Not to be the It Girl. I was born to be inspired and I was born to inspire. I have needed that and have been that in various capacities my whole life. And music has brought me that ultimate goal – the ultimate journey really, of writing or performing music from the heart that is heard and touches other people.

We live in a shallow society. We value those who lack talent and have qualities that do not have meaning and do not last – people with money and fame. We focus on them – they rule our news and our entertainment on a daily basis. Is this just an effort to neglect ourselves? Do we focus on something else so that we do not have to look inside at who we are?

Lately, I’ve been watching too much TV. I’ve had to move my laptop into the living room. Emilee is suffering from separation anxiety and the only cure is for her to look up every 3-6 seconds at her mama. So I am working in the living room. And watch TV while I work.

And I write all of this wondering whether I’m just ignoring myself. Is it easier to watch a desperate housewife and not think about that I might be wearing that same title? Is it easier for me to sit and turn on something that doesn’t really turn me on?

I know that I go through modes – sometimes I cocoon a bit. I wrestle with my struggles. I mull them over in my brain. I think about my issues or my fears until I’m ready to either vocalize them or do something about them. I’ve always been this way.

But there’s a difference between an active cocooning and adopting some vegetative state. The cocoon is filled with life – a life changing, working, growing. The vegetative state is dull, dead and unable to grow. It just exists.

I don’t want to just exist. I want to live.

My challenge now is one of re-adjusting my goals. How do you make your goal “to write music from the heart”? Where’s the brass ring? Where’s the trophy? Where’s the accolades? Where’s the recognition? Isn’t that what us goal-oriented people live for? Don’t we need the standing ovations and widespread acceptance?

When I first started songwriting, I came across a songwriter named Craig Bickhardt. I fell in love with his blog and his journals. One thing he wrote that hit me hard was “the songwriter’s life is a lonely life”, and I think I understand more and more what that means.  You have friends. You have performances and fans. You can be surrounded by admirers. But the reality is that you HAVE to go to that cocoon. You HAVE to find that solitude within yourself. You HAVE to deal with those things inside you one-on-one that you don’t particularly care to face. Because those deep places are where the songs come from.

Sure, Jamey Johnson co-wrote “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”. But that song did NOT come from the same place that “Even the Skies Are Blue” did. No one is writing Jamey Johnson to tell him that “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” changed their life. They’re not writing him about how that song means so much to them and they’re so glad he wrote it. They party to it at 1am with 2 shots of tequila and press NEXT on the jukebox. Done. Thank you for the mini-party.

But I bet he’s getting emails about “Even the Skies Are Blue”. I bet people are telling him how it’s been really rough since the recession hit and they feel like no one is recognizing or admitting that there are people in our country that are really struggling and a lot of them just not making it.

Maybe you look at your life or your goals and you think that you haven’t made an impact or maybe you think it hasn’t been what you thought it would be – maybe even that it can never be what you wanted it to be. But if you take off your 18 Year Old Filtered Lenses, look at your life in a fresh way. Is it possible that what you have wanted all this time is not really what you needed? And maybe there’s a part of you that can fulfill what you need? And maybe that can turn into that new goal of what you want?