Blog: If I'm Being Honest...

If I’m being honest these blogs have become a difficult thing to maintain. It’s not out of any desire to stop creating them or any lack of time but instead out of a lack of inspiration. I started this part of my site as a way to engage with my audience about the things that I love, specifically when it comes to food & travel. I made this my public journey because I didn’t feel that I could properly share my expertise & adventures over further points of social media & wanted a place that was distinctly my own to fill with the inner machinations of my ever curious mind. However lately this has felt a bit like a constant uphill battle.

I used to look forward to writing these entries every week, but back when I started I had content to share & insight to give out. Now I feel like I’m doing my best to come up with a topic each week that people will find interesting & engaging. I wanted to start this as an expanded travel & advise blog but along the way, be it due to ADHD or lack of funds to cover the travel aspect of this, we drifted away. None of this is to say that I don’t still enjoy crafting this blog each week in the broadest of terms, I think I’ve just lost what made me feel like this was something special & am having a really hard time rediscovering that & creating entries that I think you all will find helpful & inspiring.

If I’m being honest, I feel burnt out but don’t want to stop the content drip because I know the moment I do I won’t pick this back up again. That’s just how I seem to function. This would be thrown to the wayside like so many other content projects that I started & fizzled out on & I really don’t want that to happen with this as well.

I’m sure many of you who keep up with me on the regular have noticed that my posts have been coming in late, or not showing up at all & I promise you it’s not from a lack of trying, I’m simply feeling entirely fried. If I’m being honest I feel as though, each week, it’s a losing battle to try & come up with a topic for this site that I can sit with & write an entire blog about. I don’t want to be this way & for a while the “requested blogs” were really helping that because it took my mind off of the pressure of what I feel is a near constant failing to incept anything meaningful topic-wise into my mind. I have become jaded & disheartened by the things that used to bring me joy because, if I’m being honest, I feel entirely lost at the moment.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing or not doing & it feels like everyone else has their life figured out or at least pointed in the right direction, but me. I just want so badly for someone to tell me, in earnest, what I should be doing & guide me along that path, but that’s not how life works is it? We are all our own people, our own psyches, our path is our own & it is distinct to each of us. I just feel like I got derailed somewhere along the way & I have been fighting to get back on course ever since.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant or for it to become a cry for attention because, as always, I write these blogs to forge connection. I lay my thoughts & my heart out to you all, not for your sympathies, but in the hopes that you will see this & think “wow, that’s me” & realize that your situation is not as lonely as I’m sure it feels. I’m grateful that I have the ability & opportunity to make the art that I create & to have been so many of the amazing places that fill the archives of this page, please know I never take that or your patronage for granted, but I know sometimes we all get lost & want just someone to stand up & say “I understand your struggle & it is valid.”

I will continue doing my best to post here weekly &, of course, on time, thought I can’t make any promises. I am a human after all, prone to failure & struggle, & that’s okay. You’re not always going to agree with what I have to say or the messages that I try to share & that’s also entirely okay. This is my platform to speak freely & openly in the hopes of finding like minded people or starting constructive dialogues. If you would like your own echo chamber to do the same I’d be more than happy to share my Squarespace referral code with you.

Wow, this blog has really gone awol hasn’t it?! I hope wherever you are, who eve you are, that you’re having a great weekend or a great whatever based on when it is that you found this post.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Stumbling Through Life

This past week when I arrived back home from Arizona I received an email from a site called Feedspot. In the email they congratulated me on being placed as one of their 70 Best Nashville Music Blogs & Websites in 2023 to which they assigned me the 35th place. Now, I never applied for this site, nor had I honestly heard of it until I received the email, additionally I know absolutely zilch about the site or company itself but at the end of the day I’m honored that I was even considered to be on the list at all. After all, this blog is often just a journal of my ramblings & misadventures, a collection of my thoughts & feelings. The crazy thing is that, for whatever reason, it connects with people & that is what I am most grateful for.

So be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing each Friday or Saturday when I post a new entry in this crazy chronicle. What started out as a way to share my travel expertise & taste has shifted into a bit of an enigma that I’m still not entirely sure I have a grasp on. I’ve mentioned it before in previous blogs just how random & unexpected this is at times but in all honesty it often feels like I’m just stumbling through life, randomly landing on the occasional accomplishment.

I think this is true of most things I do; I put out music & it often sticks in the most random of places but seldom the ones that I intend. Same goes for this space. The blogs I write out of pain, frustration, or exhaustion are often the ones that are still read to this day. So too are the ones that I write from random spur of the moment travels, not the ones I spend weeks crafting trying to give my best possible recommendations for the many places in the world that I have frequented. To say I feel a tad unmoored or aimless in my day to day would be an understatement.

Maybe that’s all a part of the human experience, maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but it feels like most days I wake up with a big, fat question mark floating above my head. I spend most of my mornings trying desperately to figure out the course of my day. Do I still have lists of tasks & work that I do each day? Of course, but it feels a little like I’m going through the motions a bit with no real end in sight. I don’t mean to say I’m depressed, quite the opposite, of the most part I find myself content, which is something that I believe we should all strive for, but I wish I had a better sense of direction or overt purpose than what I feel on my average day.

Again, maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, or maybe this is entirely taboo to you as a reader but there are so many days that I wish someone would just grab me by the shoulders, look me dead in the eyes, & say ‘this is what you’re meant to be doing & this is how you get there.’ I wish there was an overt light or guide holding my hand through the blackness & pulling me towards my destination instead of feeling like a mast-less ship adrift in the middle of the Pacific surviving of a steady supply of rainwater, fresh fish, & a library of assorted books, musical instruments, & games. Did that analogy land or did it sink?…I’ll leave.

At the end of the day I am grateful. I am grateful that I get to spend my life creating in different fashions. I am grateful that I get to see & experience the world & all of the incredible beauties it holds. I am grateful that I have the space & lack of pressure to do something that is soul sucking & I am grateful to each of you out there who read or listen to the inner machinations of my mind & find them interesting enough to keep coming back. I am just longing for clear direction as so many of us do but in the mean time I intend to stay in my contentment & learn as I try to grow towards whatever end awaits me.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Bloglet: On Easter

I don’t know why I felt called to write this today, but I did. I think a lot of my internal battles around faith have led me here & I thought a few of you out there might resonate with what I have to say.

First of all, I just want to remind each of you that your faith is your own. The level of belief or non-belief in whatever you believe in is entirely your journey to have outside of exterior influence & in fact I’ve often found that “exterior influence” tends to make my personal faith wane. No one is entitled to your spiritual journey except for you. Naturally, as the title would suggest, this little bloglet is coming from my own christian-centric journey. That being said, if you are someone who finds the act of going to church on Easter performative or disingenuous I would honestly advise you to not go. Faith shouldn’t feel like a chore & despite what Ragetti says in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Curse, I don’t believe that you “get credit for trying” at least not in the sense of attendance points. Likewise if you are someone who finds the church space uncomfortable, unwelcoming, or alienating, I would advise you not to go. You should feel welcomed & celebrated to come as you are, not as someone else would want you to be.

I personally am someone who finds churches, more often than not, falling into the above categories. I tried & tried for years to make them stick because of the way I was raised & it all just felt so superficial. I know that’s a massive generalization on my part, I’m simply speaking from my experience. I also know there are going to be many people out there who give me the “well, not my church, you should try mine” & if I’m being honest, it all just sounds like a sales pitch to me. If you’re someone who has found genuine community in your church, I’m so happy for you, truly I am, because that should be the goal, but for so many of us, that’s just not the case.

So, as someone who identifies as “Christian,” a phrase I use cautiously if you’ve read my other blogs on the topic, how do I celebrate Easter if it’s not from a church pew or a cushioned folding chair set up in a shared space? I celebrate Easter by seeking out God in the places I often find them. I celebrate Easter by immersing myself in the wild places; the forest, the ocean, the mountains, the meadows. I celebrate Easter by engaging in the passion of human beings; food, culture, closeness with those I love, music, the things that allow me to sit back & sonder, to see humans in the greatest expressions of joy, gratitude, & fulfillment. I find the signatures of God in nature, in genuine connection, & in the purest, most freed expression of what it is that makes us human. As Alan Moore wrote in his acclaimed graphic novel, V For Vendetta, “God is in the rain.”

I’m writing this today because I know there are so many of you out there like me, who see the disconnect between book & practice & find it jarring to try & squeeze into the mold of ‘the church goer’ on this holy day. I know there are many out there who are clinging to remnants of their faith because you desperately want to but your lived experience has been contrary to what The Bible says it should. I know for a lot of you today can be painful, especially for those of you who have lost or been ostracized by friends & family by actually practicing the words of the book. I am here to tell you that you are not alone, your experience is valid, & I understand what you are going through.

I want to challenge those of you who are clinging to the fragmented, tattered scraps of your faith to spend a portion of your day finding your reflections of creation wherever it if that you feel them. Bask in them, be grateful for them, & for the connection you share & live your life through the lens of unconditional love as we have been called to do.

The Happiest of Easters to those of you who follow the way!

He Is Risen!

Blog: You'll Worry Yourself Sick

I think it’s no secret at this point in our society that our emotions & the things that we give “energy” to end up coming to fruition. Call it laws of attraction, quantum physics, etc, we now have fairly solid volumes of evidence to indicate that where we place our minds, especially where our health & wellness are concerned, ends up becoming our reality. I’m a very strong believer in this & so too are many people around the globe, whether they realize it or not.

I’m going to be using the term “energy” quite often in this blog. I don’t necessarily mean a physical voltage or anything of that nature, although that is also part of it to a degree. Instead I tend to mean more about your physical, mental, social, productive, & spiritual energy. The finite amount of internal processing power we have to give in the day to day or the moment to moment.

I want to circle back to something that I said in at the end of the first paragraph before we go any farther. I mentioned that a lot of people, globally, practice & believe in this philosophy, whether or not they realize it. I mean that simply in the context of prayer. Millions, or even billions, of people around the world pray daily, some more than daily. They put thought & energy towards a desired outcome, an aspiration, &/or a need. A lot of the time these come from a place of lack; Lord, keep me safe, heal my father, help me accomplish my goals, etc, etc, etc. & I think the laws of attraction would tell us this behavior only repels our desired outcome. Our prayers are not but energy put towards what we have each decided to call our own creator. I think there’s no denying that this all functions well outside of the religious or spiritual worlds as well.

So why make this the topic of today’s conversation? Why put energy towards it?

Well, it seems over the last week I’ve been running into synchronicities. This topic seems to be popping up left & right. It’s appeared in conversations I’ve had with at least three separate individuals, it’s appeared as one of the primary topics in one of the books that I’m reading, it’s been on the Tik Toks & Instagrams I’ve been receiving. Really the frequency of its occurrence has been startling!

I think it’s also worth mentioning that I’m not here advocating for toxic positivity, which is very much a real thing. I’ve just noticed that when you live believing the worst it tends to come to fruition.

So what is worry? Why do we as a species have it? The simple answer is that is was designed to keep us alive. Worry is what propelled us forwards as a social civilization, worry towards where our next meal is going to come from, whether our kids are safe, whether there’s a predator lurking in the brush that we can’t see, but I personally don’t think it serves us as much in our present society & way of living as it use to. Worry is how we kept ourselves safe & sustained but it can also very easily be debilitating.

Much like almost anything else, too much worry can be incredibly harmful. It locks us down, prevents us from taking risks, I’d even go as far to say that it prevents us from living altogether. But the worst part of worry is that it can literally cause you to worry yourself sick or even dead.

Worry is brought on by adrenaline, it’s a form of anxiety that saps your adrenals & can cause anything from chronic fatigue to anemia. When we force our body into constant survival states of fight or flight, a state we’re only supposed to be in in short bursts to keep us alive, it wears down the body pretty quickly. This, in addition to being bad for the heart, is bad for the immune system at large. There have even been studies of people who have worried themselves into organ failure, tumors, chronic sicknesses, autoimmune diseases, etc.

Again, not harping on exclusive positivity here, I think a little worry is good for you, but as the saying goes “worry is away present energy towards & unknown tomorrow.

What am I advising? How do I recommend you behave? How do you limit your worry?

I, for one, compartmentalize my worry into rational or irrational. Is what I’m afraid of a rational thought or likely to happen? If no, then I do my best to brush it off. If it continues to nag me I sit with it & try to find the reason behind its existence in my brain. Why am I worried about this? What caused me to worry about this? How can I show my body that this is not something worth worrying about?

In the context of prayer or manifestations how do we reframe our wants & navigate away from this place of lack? Always go from a place of gratitude & joy. Instead of “heal my father” think of how joyous the miraculous reparation would feel or how incredibly it would be to reach your goals! Instead of asking for safety be grateful that you have been kept safe thus far! The key to all of this is of course belief & not letting fear, doubt, worry, & suffering embed their hooks into you & literally drag you down into sickness.

I know all of this is easier said than done. I know, especially for those of you with anxiety it’s like you telling me to just be happy as someone with depression or to pay attention as someone with ADHD, but I promise, as someone who literally had shot adrenals, that there is a path forwards that leads to an easier, more worry-free future.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Story: Let's Go Back, Back To The Beginning

Earlier this week I grabbed coffee, or rather tea because I’m trying to cut my caffeine intake, with a new friend. At one point in the conversation he brought up my blogs. You know, this thing you’re currently feasting your eyes upon. The first thing he asked me was “how & why did you get started doing blogs” & it occurs to me now that I’ve never formally had that conversation with you all who return week after week, drift in & out, or have randomly stumbled upon this here post. It was an interesting thing to talk about & kind of piece together along the way as I told him the story but the idea of recounting it here hadn’t occurred to me until today when I sat down to write, at which time I was met with a random passing “how did you get started, how far have you come?” question while pilfering through the internet.

My blog page started as a recommendation blog. I had a former manager who commented on the fact that I always have food & drink recommendations for people when they go anywhere & that I should compile a list so that people can access that information at any time without having to text or DM me. The first one, naturally, was Nashville. I compiled a list of restaurants on one blog post & bars on another & published it to actually fairly moderate success. In fact the blog still remains actively edited to this day when I remember to make edits & feel like adding in new restaurants/bars or when some of the ones on the list have closed. From there my recommendation blogs continued. I did an LA food one next, followed by LA drink, then came Kansas City, which I’m pretty sure is a combination blog, & Portland, which I know for a fact is.

Now around this time the mailing list craze was really kicking off & I went to a seminar about marketing for artists such as myself. Someone on one of the panels brought up that one artist they knew did a weekly blog where she detailed & documented her week & then sent it out as a newsletter before the weekend. This sparked the idea of these now weekly blogs.

I knew I didn’t think my day to day life was interesting or varied enough to entice readers to come back week after week so instead I opted for a different approach. My blogs would be varied. Sometimes they would be recommendation blogs, sometimes recipes since I cook quite often, sometimes they would actually be about an event I experienced if I found that event to be interesting enough for a retelling.

Around the time I started to write blogs happened to coincide with the events & civil rights travesties of the Trump Administration. As someone who found himself incredibly politically literate & in possession of a platform, I started writing blogs highlighting the damage that was being done to The USA at large. Additionally, within that same vein, I started to write think pieces directed towards those reading who I knew might fall on the conservative spectrum about more liberal policies & why they are beneficial. I tried to frame them from the perspective of someone who would be against them to mixed success. I continued on this track, using my blog to post my opinions as well as resources when natural or political disasters struck. It wasn’t until May of 2021 that I started doing travel blogs.

Evan & I ended up in Maui right around the time that the tourism industry reopened in Hawaii. I had gone to finish the open water side of my dive certification & had just invested in a GoPro to grab footage of our time there. I did it partially for content & also so the people I knew that cared to know about my adventures had a place to turn to & get the inside scoop of all the goings on of my travels. Additionally it allowed me to combine a lot of the elements of what I was doing; storytelling, recommendations, etc., into one single post in one single place. The thing I ended up underestimating was the time in which each of these travel blogs take.

So the travel blogs ate up a lot of time, most of them ended up being around a two to three week series that took me around the totality of the week to complete for each. I had to write the stories, link the places, go through edit & add the photos, place the photos aesthetically, etc. etc. etc. but I quickly found that these were my most popular submissions. That’s until I wrote a blog called “No Hate Like Christian Love.”

NHLCL was really a think piece for me, a plea for the evangelicals of the world to look at how they were asked to behave in the book they claim to cling to & compare that to the way they are actually perceived by the world & also understand why “the church” is dying. It remains my most popular blog to this day, out performing each of my weekly submissions during the week they’re posted. NHLCL still garners easily around one hundred individual views a week just from people either searching for something of the like or having stumbled upon it some other way. It has, aside from each of my travel blogs, been the biggest source of outreach & foot traffic to this, my website.

So where are we today? Well, this piece, I suppose, could be filed under “story.” The shape that my blog has taken over the years is very reflective of who I am as an individual, all encompassing. I think, if I were to choose a direction for it to go, it would mostly remain in the story telling world, specifically as a recounting of my travels & the highs & lows of my life. I like to think that my blog has a positive influence on the world, as small or large as that is, but I suppose that’s for you all to decide, not me. The hard part about getting travel content for you all is getting to travel, having the funds & time to scour the globe for my next adventure to bring back & share with you all. If that weren’t as much of an issue, I think this blog would definitely take that shape more often than not. I’m always down for feedback though! I’d love to know what you’ve liked & disliked about my blog over the years. I’d love to know what you’d like to see more of or less of. I’m always intrigued to know who is reading my posts, why, & what they got out of it.

As always,

Much love to you all & thank you for supporting this crazy weekly thing that I do!

-C

Blog: Charlie Rogers, Renaissance Man.

I don’t remember in which grade we discussed the renaissance in history class. I’m not even entirely sure whether or not I was in middle or high school. While I’m pretty sure it was the latter, I remember immediately becoming obsessed with the idea of being “a renaissance man.”

This is a term that I heard pop up recently, though I can’t for the life of me recall where. I remember someone saying they always strove towards being a renaissance man themselves & it immediately struck a chord of commonality in me. So what exactly is a renaissance man?

According to the Oxford dictionary a renaissance man is:

“a person of many talents or areas of knowledge.”

— Oxford Dictionary, Renaissance Man

Some famous examples of which include the likes of Leonardo DiVinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, & Nicolaus Copernicus, all who excelled in multiple fields of study. The moniker of “renaissance man” is not limited to men though, nor is it limited to the time of the renaissance, with there being quite a few “renaissance women” throughout history as well as “renaissance people,” if we are being all inclusive. Nor was the idea specific to the time, though I feel it is the most prominent within culture at large. Before the renaissance individual there was the Greek concept of a polymath, having learned many things. This list includes individuals throughout early history such as Archimedes, Hypatia, Ptolemy, Imhotep, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Zhang Heng, Al-Kindi, Shen Kuo, & Averroës. Farther into history we get Ben Franklin, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Jefferson, Issac Newton, etc. etc. etc. Catching on to the concept yet?

So why did this become a small obsession of mine? What was it about the renaissance polymaths that made me say “ooo, that!” Well, I’ve always wanted to be a jack-of-all trade, eliminating the “master of none” part of the saying. I never wanted to be someone who was exclusively known for one thing & that’s why finding a Capital C “Career” has been difficult for me. I never JUST wanted to be known as a singer or a songwriter, I wanted to be known as the multidimensional human that I am. That’s part of why I started writing these blogs, because I felt I had more to offer the world than just the songs I sang & the performances I gave. Can we chalk it up to ADHD & chasing the dopamine a little bit? Of course. But I highly doubt any of you out there ever lived your life wanting to be one note.

So where does that place me? Well, for starters it makes it very hard for me to play the long game in the Capital C Career world. All I’ve ever wanted is to have as many plates spinning in the air as possible & to make those plates as relatively self sufficient as possible so that I can return to them with my fancy. My brain stretches me in so many different directions that the clear path forward for any given career seems impossible to me. Let’s talk about just right now shall we? Where am I at right this minute.

Well, Charlie Rogers right now is a blogger, as I sit at this computer I am a blogger. Not just am I a blogger, I am a travel blogger, a food critic, an advice columnist, a humanitarian, a recipe creator, a motivational speaker, an encourager, & a pundit. That’s just within the digital walls of this section of my website. Swipe one page up & I am an artist, a musician, a songwriter. Click on my socials & I am an influencer, a bumbling comedian, an adventurer. Search me on YouTube & I am an actor, a singer. Meet me in person & I am a scholar, wildly spiritual, peacefully grounded, a zoologist, a marine biologist, a botanist, a foodie, a connoisseur, a collector, a chef, a mixologist, an explorer, a lover, a brother, a son, & a friend. Look inside my mind & you’ll find a stoic, a wanderer, an inventor, a well of ideas, a catalyst, an empath (even though I hate that word & it’s connotations), a free spirit. How do you sum all of that up at all times? How do you “market” all of that at once?

I think in a lot of ways we all fit the renaissance man mold, it’s just that some of us, like myself, wish to act upon it. I wish to be known for all of my aspects, not just the one or two that I can focus on at a time. I want to be the touring singer-songwriter, I want to be the inventor, I want to be the philanthropist, I want to be the actor, to be the influencer, to be the traveler, the humanitarian, to be the food critic, the revolutionary, & the jack-of-all trades, but I often find myself lost in the constant tug of war these concepts give biding for my time & my mental space.

For now I’ll just claim the moniker. Here I am, Charlie Rogers, Renaissance Man, what I shall be in the future has yet to be written, but I can’t wait to see where I end up!

Here’s wishing you all a fantastic week or weekend, whenever this blog has found you.

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Blog: Little Abundances

If you’re a follower of mine on my Instagram, today’s blog posting will not be entirely foreign to you. I posted the tiniest anecdote around the roots of this story on my story posts a few days ago & got incredible feedback simply regarding the short paragraph that I had written. So, naturally I though that I should expand upon it in this longer form setting.

Towards the turn of the year I had a TikTok creator, of whom I should give credit for this idea if their name hadn’t been alluding me for the last few weeks, come across my daily doom scroll. She works specifically in a spiritualist setting but has had a lot of clients talk about their manifestations & how they have trouble believing that the things they want are coming their way when they live in a state of lack. She went on to explain that it, to her, an impossibility to manifest from a mindset of lack & offered a quick tip on how to escape that cumbersome feeling. Her method was altogether simple & has, over the last week & some change, become a staple in my day to day thought process.

Her suggestion for escaping scarcity mindsets was incremental. She said that every day, at the end of her day, she writes down three things that happened that were little abundances. This teaches the brain to look out for things to be thankful for & recognize that even when things don’t seem to be going your way, there are always little things to latch onto that will shine even the slightest bit of light on darker situations. So what are little abundances? What does that look like in the mundane day to day?

A little abundance is simply something that went your way in the tiniest of ways, let’s come up with some examples shall we?

Maybe there was a 10% discount on something you needed from the grocer.

Maybe your fragrance of choice or someone else’s hit the olfactory just right & made you smile.

Maybe you woke up without feeling achy or sore.

Maybe you wore an outfit that made you feel alluring or sexy.

Maybe you made it through the day with less anxiety or depression than the day prior.

Maybe you came across a post that made you think of an old friend or helped you to learn something interesting you hadn’t known before.

Maybe you simply enjoyed being in someone’s presence.

Maybe the perfect stone caught your eye as you were walking & you gained a new pocket companion.

Maybe your pet showed you affection & love.

Maybe someone in your family or friend group did.

Maybe that last quarter mile of your run felt a little easier than normal.

Maybe you found time to read a book or watch a show or movie that makes you feel something.

Maybe you had a good hair day.

Maybe you noticed a new grey hair (again is a gift after all).

Maybe you felt a sense of wanderlust walking through nature.

Maybe you got in your car & it was the perfect temperature or the perfect song was playing.

Maybe all of the machines or weights at the gym were open when you needed them.

Maybe you enjoyed a cup of your favorite tea or coffee.

Maybe an animal graced you with its presence outside.

Maybe you found a $20 note in your coat pocket.

Maybe you finally beat that level in that game you’ve been playing.

Maybe you brightened someone else’s day.

Is this starting to make sense to you? There is no limit to how “small” these little abundances can be. The point is to start recognizing them as God, The Universe, Nature, whatever you believe in sets them in your path, accepting them, & being grateful for their enrichment of your life. You cannot expect to embrace & love the unknown that is life if you aren’t willing to, as the saying goes, stop & smell the roses.

Now my method of this looks a little different. I knew that if it came down to be writing out my little abundances list every night I wouldn’t do it, I’d forget to or view it as a chore. So my list is mental & isn’t restricted to the time in which I lay my head to rest at night, nor is it limited to three items.

I count my abundances as the day rolls on, why this works for me, I don’t know. How it ends up not being forgotten, again, don’t know, but thus far, every day throughout my day, I am reminded from something within to find my little abundances that I’ve experienced thus far & look on them with love, gratitude, & admiration. On my list today: I had a package arrive that I wasn’t expecting until next week, I woke up several times in the night to Max, on of our cats, snuggled into me purring loudly, I had enough time to complete all of the tasks I needed to get done today, I had a humorous dream last night, my dogs listened when they got in a tiff while playing & I didn’t have to break up a fight, I had ample leftovers in my fridge & didn’t have to cook in a day where my time was scarce, I was notified of a refill order for one of my scripts that now I don’t have to call my doctor to get filled, I lit & dispelled some Palo Santo, one of my favorite, most comforting scents, I noticed a few of my plants have new leaves despite it being winter & not a time for usual growth, I woke up today but did so feeling energized, well, & taken care of, my Irish Breakfast Tea that I’m sipping while writing this is brewed perfectly, I got a good picture of Harvey, my rapidly aging Golden, of whom I don’t know how many more pictures I’ll have the privilege of taking.

Your life is rich my dear readers, you just have to look for it. That’s not discounting your problems, your ailments, your struggles, but the beauty in life is found in the little things, in the little abundances that show us that somewhere out there something, someone, is on our side & that this beautifully tragic, lonely, simply complex life is worth living day by day.

I’d love if you all would adopt this philosophy as well or at the very least give the abundance lists a try. Do it in your own way, make it your own, however that looks. Talk about it openly & honestly, let people in to celebrate with you your tiny victories.

I hope this post hasn’t been too flowery for some of you, I know we’re all on different levels of our life journey & have different degrees of happiness, privilege, health, & prosperity. Just know this comes from a place of love & gratitude for all of you who take the time to read my thoughts each week. You all make my little abundances list every week!

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: #Goals! Wait, Scratch That, #VisionBoards!

I’ve never been much for goal setting, though I’ve never been entirely sure why. Whether it has something to do with the fleeting fancies of ADHD or the feeling that somehow, if I don’t complete everything on it, I’m some sort of a failure, I’ve never been able to stick out my goals & make actual steps towards their achievement. That’s not to say I never meet my goals, but for some reason there’s a sterile pressure around the idea & practice of goal setting; it feels oddly corporate or cheesy, like something you do in a quarterly review with a higher up who really doesn’t care whether or not your aspirations are met. I guess a part of me still attributes goal setting to the academic setting, a worksheet to hand in for trivial credit that never actually amounts to much.

If you’ve read my previous blogs that were written around the transition between the old & new year, you’ll see that I also am not an advocate for the new year’s resolution, nor for that matter is science. Simply stated, they don’t work, they fizzle out. To some degree I’d say I feel the same about goal setting. In all honesty, I’m sure, if you’re like me, that you saw the title of this blog about “goal setting” & probably didn’t even click the link. I guess we’ll never know though seeing as the simple window shopping didn't come in to investigate.

This past year both myself & my lovely friend, Kate Cosentino, came across the same TikTok around the same week. It was a woman talking about how she, like me, hated the traditional form of goal setting & why said past goal setting attempts didn't work for her. Her approach, instead, was that of a guest who had previously appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. If their segment they talked about vision boards & what to do with them/how to place & arrange them in a way that allows you to use them towards the aims you were after. Their method was quarterly, requiring a new vision board every three months, & asked you, not only, to visualize your board on the front, but also to write your visions & goals out on the back. In this way it was similar to the “Mind Movies” that Dr Joe Dispenza uses in his seminars to teach shifting perspective & mental energy in alignment with the things you desire. As aforementioned, the vision board you’ve created is meant to be revisited on a quarterly basis, the only difference from your first board being that you are meant to review & revise.

Let’s say you put on your vision board that you want to rekindle a relationship with your parents. If at the end of Q1 you’ve made attempts & gotten no where near where you want to be you write on the back of your Q2 vision board the same goal emphasizing the things that worked & writing & evaluating a new path forward. I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that you’re meant to write how you plan to go about your visions on the back of the Q1 board.

Another major component of the vision boarding is that you’re meant to do so with a group & share your vision board with said group when you are finished. The day Kate & I came across out vision board TikTok we both planned an evening with Kimi Most & Evan to create together & share. This outward expression of your desires helps to get the word out, it helps to solidify the things you want in the words you say. After all, how can it be known what you want if you won’t ask? In this way it gets you accustomed to speaking on your wants, your shortcomings, & your plans with those who will love & nurture you along the way. It also allows people the chance to help you if something comes up on your board that they feel they have insight on.

So how did my vision boarding go? How did it turn out. Well, much like I mentioned above with goal setting, we all fell off the wagon. We did the one evening of work & then never followed up with the next three quarterly reports. That’s not to say it was a failure though as yet another aspect of this vision board journey is that you place your board somewhere you see it daily & somewhere people who enter your home will see it & can ask you about it. Again, the goal is to talk about the things you want, to keep them at the forefront of your mind so that they become the magnetic north that guides your internal compass. Mine & Evan’s have been in the kitchen, right next to the place where we consume majority of our meals. Both boards are highly visible & both have been talked about openly amongst each other, friend, & the like. I’d say of the twenty-five things I have on my board, around seven of them came true in one form or another. That’s not bad for not following the program to the letter you’re supposed to.

So why do I draw attention to all of this? Why do I talk vision boards, goals, & the steps it takes to actualize them? Well, because I’d like to, if I may, use the last half of this blog as a digital vision board, so to speak. I’m sure in the type format it will come out looking more like a goals list but I promise you, on the other end of this I will be making a vision board to represent all of the things listed below & probably more. I’m doing this here as a form of accountability. We’re meant to share & talk about our dreams & that’s what I’m doing here. I’d also like, if you may, for you to remind me to revisit this quarterly, checking off & adjusting as we go along!

I wish you all the happiest of new years, filled to the brim with love & joy!

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Charlie’s 2023 Digital Vision Board

-Sign A Publishing Deal (Smack, Universal, Warner Chapel)

-Get At Least Five Outside Cuts

-Tour As An Opener For A Larger Act

-Sign With A Talent Agency (WME, CAA, ACA)

-Get Paid To Travel

-Get Paid To Promote The Products I Already Use

-Cross Two More Continents Off The Total Seven (Still Need South America, Australia, Africa, & Antarctica)

-Release A Minimum Of One Song Per Quarter

-Get Verified Across All Social Platforms

-Grow Creatively

-Help More People

-Get Social Numbers Up (Instagram 20K BYE, TIKTOK 10K BYE, ETC)

-Get 1K Spotify Followers

-Get On Editorial Playlists For Spotify & Apple Music

-Visit Japan

-See The Northern Lights (Preferably In Iceland)

-Become A Master Diver

-Have At Least One Song Trend

-Write More Honest Lyrics

-Cut Medicine Written By Harry Styles

-Do More Features

-Add At Least Five More Michelin Stars To My Belt

-Find Daily Moments Of Gratitude

-Get Back Into Eating In A Healthier Manner

-Hit The Gym At Least Four Times A Week

-Walk My Dogs More

-Spend More Time With The People Who Bring Me Joy & Less With Those Who Don’t

-Find A Consistent Form Of Financial Freedom That’s Not Soul Sucking

-Embrace The Unknown

Blog: Now You're Family

I swear this is my last blog about Fiji…unless you’d like it not to be, I’m sure I can squeeze another two or three stories & life lessons out of that amazing trip! For now I’ll leave you all with this blog in hopes that it leaves you as inspired & hopeful as the experience did me!

One thing I thing that ended up being very different from my expectation of Fiji was the reality of it. I think we’re often times, especially in the US, thought to view Fiji as the perpetual postcard; a place where no matter where you look you’ll find picturesque white sand beaches, palm trees, & crystal clear waters & while that does exist it is definitely an exception, not the rule.

Majority of the residents of Fiji live below, what we in the western world would deem, the poverty line. The housing of those who dwell on the islands often consist of tin roofed, one room homes with an outdoor kitchen & while I’m sure a lot of us would find this difficult, the Fijians don’t seem to let it dampen their spirits.

It’s true of a lot of tourism driven countries where the lives of those who were born & raised in said country live drastically different lives than what those visiting are presented with, it creates an odd disconnect. There’s a very odd feeling when you’ve spent x amount of dollars to fly halfway across the world, hop on a privately escorted shuttle service, & are being taken to a resort whose rooms are bigger than majority of the homes of those who reside there. It’s an odd disconnect when you’re met with something clearly meant to welcome visitors that often has an “off limits” feel to those whose country it is.

This is not the point of my blog, but I feel its worth mentioning in order to set the scene for what I want to talk about.

While riding in one of the aforementioned private escort shuttles to go river tubing I overheard a conversation between one of my fellow divers, Elaine, & our driver that day. Elaine had sat up front with the driver & the two had been talking for quite a while before he mentioned the following. He said to Elaine that even though the Fijians may not have the room or the food outright, there is always room at the table & room in the home for one more. That no matter how hard life appears they are always willing to sacrifice a little room or a little food for someone else. I soon found out this was a common feeling amongst the Fijian people.

I wish for the life of me I could remember our driver’s name that day, shame on me for forgetting the openness & outward kindness of a stranger, but he also mentioned that to Fijians, once you’ve been on to the islands once, you’re a part of them. He said that to his people each of us was now family & that at any given time their doors were open to us for as long as we wanted or needed.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the rest of the world worked that way? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we all thought as such & acted as such? That no matter how hard things were for us, we always have the time & energy to embrace those who come knocking on our door & say “how can I help?”

You see it occurs to me that the people that have the most, the countries that have the most, are often the ones who are most cut off to helping their “family.” We were welcomed, graciously, into a home in a village with around twenty people. Asked to take a seat, to make ourselves comfortable, & were then offered a portion of the owner’s lunch. A lunch that he had to farm for six months to get to produce crop. He not only offered us up the portion, but the entirety of what he had to eat for that afternoon with a beaming smile & radiant joy! Why aren’t we all like that?

We, in the US, have so, so much. A lot of us do anyway. Yet we shut our hearts, homes, & borders off to those who desperately need to be welcomed, to be shown through the door, welcomed, & offered a plate & a seat at the table & if they are offered entry it’s usually with stipulations. You have to give your life to MY God, have to work towards MY system, have to do something for MY cause or life. Acts of kindness & support rarely come simply from the goodness of ones heart. We need to cut the divides, to cut the ego & the “I’m better than” attitudes, & proudly exclaim to those who come willingly to our door “now you’re family.”

I hope you have a fantastic weekend & find a little moment or two over the next week to make a stranger feel loved, even in the smallest capacity.

Much love to you all,

-C

Blog: No Hate Like Christian Love

Hold up, hold up, hold up. I know a few of you have read that title & immediately gone into defensive mode & have a paragraph long comment ready, but how about we hear what I’m trying to say first? I think it’s also worth noting for the assumed bias of this blog that I myself identify as Christian, though I am far beyond the point of disillusionment with the church at this point & if we’re being honest so are a lot of people these days.

America has seen a drastic drop in new christians or individuals attending churches in the last few decades but for the life of a lot of the religious leaders they can’t seem to figure out why. They blame it on the media, they blame it on culture, on politicians, on x, y, z, but never seem to want to look internally. You see, so many of us who no longer find ourselves as congregational regulars grew up in churches; we grew up going to Sunday school & vacation bible school & lived through all of the “keep the Christ in Christmas” ish & those who remain in the hallowed halls don’t seem to understand why we don’t want to go back or actively attend those churches any longer. The answer is a simple one, we learned about Jesus, his way, his light, & we didn’t see his teachings being implemented, practiced, or reflected by those within the church, so we left. Truly I say unto you the most Christ-like individuals I’ve even known have a strong distain for the church.

To put this all in perspective the statement in the title above has become one that I’ve seen expressed more & more frequently over the last few years, “no hate like christian love.” If you as someone who identifies as such don’t see that & immediately see the problem I hate to break it to you, but I think you’ve missed the point of your religion. Christianity has become so synonymous with hate, bigotry, white nationalism, fascism, misogyny, homophobia/transphobia, xenophobia, islamophobia, racism, etc. that the statement “no hate like christian love” rings true to very large groups of individuals. So much of our culture’s pain & modern reliance unfortunately owes itself to years & years of religious trauma & continued attempts at oppression.

In recent years the US political climate has become more & more divisive swinging aggressively more & more towards a fascist right. Those leading that charge are claiming to do so in the name of God, they say God is disappearing from a country that was never a theocracy & founded itself on the principles of religious freedom, meaning freedom from others forcing their religion views onto you, & want to bring America back into its “former greatness.” A “former greatness” that holds a lot of pain, suffering, & lack of rights for those who find themselves in minority groups. Tell me, where are the teachings of Jesus in that? The campaigns of these Christian Nationalists go entirely against the teachings of Christ. They actively shun & vilify the “foreigner,” the needy, the immigrant, the refugee, the less fortunate, the different, the other. They propose laws to limit rights of these individuals, they strip back protections in place that give these individuals a chance at having an equal life to them, & they do so all in the name of “christian love.”

Often there is a bubble created around a church community, a church home if you will. This is a place, in theory, meant to allow you to feel love unconditionally from your fellow christians, to have support systems in place that allow you to express your pains & burdens freely & get support while remaining unjudged. I have never felt more judged or more completely ostracized than by members of the church who often use their born again status as a means to justify their hatefulness when things don’t fit their preconceived mold. Now people are looking around & seeing a congregation that reflects one way of being, one style of life, often limited diversity from a nationality, race, sexuality, gender identity, & social class & finding it lacking. They see themselves & the world more represented in the faces of their peers & diversified friend groups than they do in the pews on any given Sunday.

The bubble also often acts as a safe haven for abusers. We all know, very effectively the crimes of the Catholic church, thanks to the journalists at Spotlight out of Boston, but this guard isn’t limited to the catholic church. I’ve heard innumerable stories regarding the handing of abuse within the church. Higher ups will make excuses for abusers & protect them at all costs instead of hearing out the side of the abused. They refuse to acknowledge the often ugly side of humanity & outwardly condemn these actions that overall harm the community at large & weaken the bonds of a church.

The complete & utter lack of critical thinking is also a major deterrent for those looking to join the church. So much of the counter culture that christians justify with the bible has either been altered completely for political agendas (see the RSV translation of 1946) or completely lacks historical context. There also happens to be a lot of picking & choosing which verses to follow & which to omit completely from the modern dichotomy because “things were different back then.” It’s blatant hypocrisy & when faced with facts alternative to the fiction they’ve painted in their heads or carried their whole lives they refuse to even consider the possibility of them no matter who it harms or what damage it does to their brothers & sisters in Christ or the world at large.

If we as Christians were truly following the ways of Christ we’d embrace those around us with open arms, celebrating what makes them different & unique. We’d help refugees & immigrants unconditionally. We wouldn’t hoard wealth & covet riches when so many are doing everything in their power just to have a scrap of food to eat. We’d lovingly take preventative measures to insure that our neighbors & those at higher risks can remain safe & disease free. We’d recognize the disconnect & disadvantages certain communities & minorities have systematically & do everything in our power to overturn them. We’d be voting for people who want to help the less fortunate, not ostracize them. We’d be embracing our children for who they are whole heartedly not kicking them out of our homes or shaming them. I personally believe that Christ would be disgusted by the modern church & those in attendance & clearly a growing majority feels the same way. I think we need to take "no hate like christian love” as a major red flag & find ways to correct course immediately, taking proactive measures to correct the damage done to those who are bearing the brunt of the “love.”

I hope this blog wasn’t too much of a rant or a finger wag, I also hope most of you made it through this. This world deserves better, the people in our communities deserve better. I know at the end of the day we’re all human but if the saying goes “they’ll know we are christians by our love” then it should be love people know christians by, not the over abundance of hate radiating from the steeples.

I hope you all have a great weekend,

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Blog: A 12 Week Accelerator & The Offer

Hello loves, how are we today?

Yesterday I finished a 12 week accelerator called the six figure artist. In this class, hosted by Lindsey Kirkendall, me & 10 other artists were put through a series of different tasks over the span of the 12 weeks where we were asked to reframe our thinking & belief systems about what it means to be an artist as a whole, how it’s possible to make money in the current independent artist economy, & what strengths we as artists/individuals bring to the table. In addition to that we were asked to put together an offer that we, as artists, could offer to the public that would add value to the world & help those who are walking the paths we have already trod. This accelerator is where the desire to share my object writing pieces came from, it’s also where past blogs such as Vulnerabilities & Rejection, Curiosity & Experience, Understanding Your Value, &, of course, Object Writing came from. This course also encouraged me to step out of my artistic & personal comfort zone; it got me to audition for a major musical, try on new live streaming platforms & ideas, & pushed me towards expression not hindered by the walls that I’ve built to hide being.

While many people in the course have gone through & are already out selling their respective offers mine is still a work in progress. You see in the group we narrowed down that the thing that makes me tick, the culmination, the shared thread amongst all of my many passions & hobbies, ADHD aside, is experience & curiosity. I am driven to try new things out of another of my defining words, consideration. I want to know how other people live, I want to experience their culture, their passions, I want to, as I’ve stated before, chisel away the marble encasing the man underneath. I think we as humans all do that to some extent, we use experience & curiosity to decide who we are because of the things that light us up, or as Lindsey puts it “flip our skirts up.” So I looked around at this idea of self discovery & wondered what I can do as a knowledge enthusiast to help others discover who they are.

My first offering came in the form of live performance. At the end of the day I am a lover of performing, it’s where I feel the most alive, on a stage. The idea modeled itself off of “Oprah’s Favorite Things” where in I would put on a concert & with the price of admission you would also get to experience some of my favorite things locally. From restaurants to distilleries/breweries/vineyard to shops that help fuel my many hobbies, the idea was a concert that was interactive & a little less formal. Think Sofar Sounds meets a craft fair/farmers market meets a restaurant pop-up shop meets a Q&A session. If this is an idea that “flips your skirt up” don’t worry, I’m in the process of planning one!

That exciting offering aside Lindsey & the group kept coming back to the feeling that I needed to be mentoring people, to offer my rather large knowledge & experience bank up to those who may feel a tad lost or disoriented. There in lies the second offer. The idea behind offer #2 is that I would spend five weeks with a group of individuals under my wing, prompting them to try new things, new ways of thinking, new paths, in the hope of helping them find which direction feels right for them in the next stage of their life. Originally the idea was to aim this at those who are switching from the high school world to that of the collegian. After a talk with my friend Miss Christine, whom I met through the group, they suggested that I bump my ideal participant up to those who are now exiting the college world. They stated that someone in their life had just graduated & was feeling entirely lost after spending the last 18 years of their life entirely entangled in the education system. I get it, I’ve been there, the other side of school is scary especially after we spend 82%-ish of our lives dedicated to it up til that point.

As I said above, the finalized version of this group offering is still a work in progress, but if you feel this is something you &/or someone you love could benefit from, I’d love to offer my assistance!

I truly wanted to just hop on here today & give a little insight into what I’ve been up to the last couple of months & why I’ve been posting the way that I have! Not sure what the next two weeks of posting will look like from me, as I’ll be in the UK, but you can bet there’ll be a travel blog or two to follow when it’s all said & done!

As always I hope you all have fantastic weekends! If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading, it means the world to me!

Much love to you all,

-C

Blog/Object Writing: Grief

If you noticed I did not post an outright “Object Writing” post on here on Wednesday, that is because I did a five day series on grief. I was given the grief prompt by a dancer our of University in Canada who asked if I would do an object writing page for her final dance project using the five stages of grief. Naturally I agreed & was delighted, this is that assignment! In my initial writing I did my best to make the stages flow naturally into one another, over the last week I had to figure out ways to segment them out into five one minute posts, they are all attached below. So, what I’m going to do is first post the written form then if you feel so inclined, or if you’d rather, you can go through the individual posts & watch/listen to what I did with them. I can’t wait to share the final dance product as well once it’s presented! Enjoy!

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF

“This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.” The shock of the news nearly knocks me off my feet as the message the tsunami of information carried echoes endlessly around my brain. I feel faint, detached from the human vessel that tethers my spirit to this earth, adrift in the noise & chaos. My myriad of emotions cause me to question what is real or even possible. Is this? Is it all just a dream, some sick illusion my subconscious has cooked up for some unknown reason or have the unfathomable nightmares of my deepest, darkest dread become reality? At the end of my Rolodex of “no’s” hangs the fixture to which I attach blame. “IF” I am to believe this malicious marquee of misinformation then someone is at fault. Someone or something is the culprit for this misfortune; effect is nothing without cause. My adrenals pump molten rage into my bloodstream, igniting my senses into fiery passion. I am fuming, eyes frantically searching for elucidation & something to pin the focus of my frustration. Then it hits me. It smacks me in the face with the fury of the scorn I’ve irradiated into my atmosphere. What if it’s me? What if it’s my fault? My mind begins to work overtime, clockwork machines come alive & the pressure & steam give way to desperation. I return a call, for the first time since being encumbered by the burden of knowing I reach out to another human being whom I share commonality with. I am insistent, disheartened, “if only I’d done this,” I cry, “if only I’d done that” but my cries are fruitless. What’s done is done. Life has no redo button, it offers no relapse into the undoing of retribution. Maybe an exchange then, something for that which I’ve lost. Maybe the almighty, the cosmos, the powers that be will shine one glint of mercy upon me & offer me a fair trade. Time, money, possessions, health, all are on the line, all viable options for the return. But the universe sits silent, unbothered by the heart-wrenched pleading of a drop in the river, in the grand stream of time. All is silent. The stillness creeps into my being & settles uncomfortably into my bones. The meaning & spirit drains from me like sap oozing softly from a tree into the ground below me. Gravity’s weight is multiplied ten fold & soon the creature comforts that bring me respite begin to do little the fill the void. I am hollow, an empty shell of icy numb hurt as the colors melt inchmeal around me into sickly, sullen shades of grays. It’s pointless, all of it. Pointless. My energy depleted, my hopes scattered, my berth begins to feel more & more like a tomb; a black void of nothingness to which I shall willingly succumb. Little by little I fall further into the pits of my forlorn until, at last, I reach the soft maw of the abyss. Cradled in self pity & affliction I lie there, transfixed by misery until a delicate ember drifts haphazardly into my core. It too rests with me in this eternity, offering a knowing melancholy smile before wrapping me in warmth. The freedom of empathy washed through me & enrobes me in loving light. It does not discount my loss or patronize but instead sits in amiable eloquence carrying me through my despair. It lifts my chin, places a quant reassurance on my forehead, & nudges me affectionately towards tomorrow. “It is time,” it whispers to me. Like a freshly birthed foal I stagger to find my footing; one & then the other. I look up to the mountain that stands proudly aloft before me & I begin the ascent; one foot at a time, one day & then the next. The sun breaks through the morbid gray & for the first time in what feels like an age I am at peace.

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF PART ONE: DENIAL

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF PART TWO: ANGER

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF PART THREE: BARGAINING

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF PART FOUR: DEPRESSION

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OBJECT WRITING: GRIEF PART FIVE: ACCEPTANCE

Blog: Is It Worth It? Let Me Work It.

The more I observe society the more commonality I find amongst us, especially, I feel, where people my age are concerned. We struggle with our with, our inherent value & worthiness that we bring with us into the world. I think growing up in the 90s & later, the 2000s, our worth was minimized. We were given participation trophies, shown that the work we put in didn’t matter, that we’d still receive the same level of prize. We were thrown into jobs as teenagers that had us working minimum wage jobs where that minimum wage never increased despite the value of a dollar decreasing. We were told we were special then shown the exact opposite.

Worth is definitely something that I’ve struggled with myself, I haven’t felt worthy of success or happiness or whatever else. Why? Lord knows, but something in me was ingrained to believe that I was only worthy of being considered a human being when I had found success. When I no longer struggled for money or had to fight to make headway in the music industry, only then would I be worth of the name I carry & the feelings of success or happiness I have.

I think a lot of that stems from growing up in church. No shame to the big man upstairs, I’m a fan, just not so much of the church world. When you’re living actively in the christian world there’s a lot of rhetoric around shame. We must be shameful of being inherently sinful or ashamed of the parts of ourself that some printing press decided should be included in the bible back in 1946 due to personal politics. We are told that we fall short of the glory of God simply by being born.

So of course so many of us struggle to find our worthiness. We’ve been told from a very young age that hard work & success are what brings us worthiness, but what happens when society doesn’t hold up its end of that bargain & your hard work just leads to more struggle instead of success or financial freedom? We’re told that if we want to be worthy in the eyes of the church or in the eyes of God that we have to hide parts of ourself or be ashamed of who we are. That no all loving God would accept you as they made you, that you have to fit the christian mold to be in God’s grace. That’s never sat right with me.

So many books that are published these days seek to resolve this issue. In “Rich As F*ck” Amanda Frances makes the bold claim that we are worthy of happiness & of our dreams simply because we are. You are worthy because you are. You were born worthy, raised worthy, & will die worthy of basic human rights, decencies, success, abundance, & happiness.

We, as millennials, definitely have a worthiness problem, fortunately it doesn’t seem to have carried over to Gen Z who appear to see right through the BS & are ready to come swinging. So many of us end up failing though simply because we do not believe that we are worthy of success. We self sabotage, we doubt, we make excuses instead of owning our inherent worthiness & just doing the damn thing with our chests puffed out & our head held high. We are so afraid of the fall that cometh after pride that we have completely depleted ourselves of any of it.

So here’s my challenge to you this week, in all honesty it’s probably something that’ll take more than a week but we gotta start somewhere don’t we? I want you to practice your worthiness. I want you to stop accepting the abuses you deal with at work or at home. I want you to demand to be paid what you’re worth. I want you to stand up for yourself & say “enough.” Why? Because you’re worthy. Why are you worthy? Because you are. Write it on your mirror, put a memo in your phone, put a slip in you car that says “I am worthy because I am.” & own it! Say it, repeat it, feel it, live it!

You are worthy because you are my lovelies, have a fantastic week, much love to you all!

-C

Blog: Vulnerabilities & Rejection

There will be times in your life where people will come to you in their most brazen & honest moments. They will intrust you with information about who they are, what they stand for, who they love, what they do, etc. It is your job as a friend, parent, sibling, lover, mentor, etc to remain as judgment free as humanly possible & make that person feel seen & heard & accepted in those moments.

I’m sure many of you have already had such encounters in your life. If not, there may be a reason why. There is a lesson I came across a few years ago that has stuck with me to this day. I can’t for the life of me recall where I heard it, if I could I’m sure it’d be linked below., but he point of this discussion was “testing the waters” specifically where the ‘parent/child’ relationship is concerned. In the discussion it was brought up that children will often, as the name would imply, test the waters with their parents. They try to gage little bits of information on how their parents may feel regarding certain topics or use hypotheticals to see what the outcome would be if they were blatant, honest, & authentic with their parental units. Often parents fail the test, they give their child an answer that builds a wall or creates a divide & all of the sudden, several months or years down the line, these parents feel like they don’t know who their kids are anymore. That’s because their child has decided it’s in their best interest to stay resigned because they no longer feel safe sharing information with their parents.

So too do we do this to the people we care about. Our friends gage our responses on how we feel about certain things or our willingness to be openminded before they confide in us. If we don’t pass the test, the relationship remains shallow. I pride myself on being able to be the keeper of the true lives & selves of many of those I hold dearest to myself. You see I’ve built up an err of compassion. My friends & loved ones know they can come to me with anything, as their true & authentic selves & know that I will be grateful for their vulnerabilities & embrace them as who they are, accepting the information they’ve told me as their truth, knowing it may have been a conversation, confession, or thought years in the making.

We never know how long these machinations stew in the minds of our peers. It may have taken them years to have the courage to voice exactly what they’re trying to say, it may have taken years for them to even come to the conclusion themselves & they felt safe making you privy to this new found part of self. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this person felt it pertinent enough to tell you, they saw you as a large enough part of their life or even someone they thought they could receive counsel from. You have been honored with vulnerability, the worst possible thing you could do is respond with judgment or rejection.

The more occasions that your loved ones come to you with their vulnerabilities, the more you meet them with love & understanding, the deeper your relationships & bonds will grow. As a friend we can easily let those who reject us go or cut them from our lives but when it’s a family member, it becomes much harder. When holidays & family gatherings are still a thing for the member who feels estranged or like they can’t be authentic in those spaces, the time spent wearing that mask of “the perfect family member” can be exhausting & disheartening.

We are social beings, creatures of community, & when our chosen community meets our authenticity with a cold shoulder it scars, deeply. Feeling the outcast in an environment meant to cultivate & embrace your humanity gets very lonely very quick.

My challenge for you this week is to be honest with yourself. To look at the times where maybe you fell short of being the perfect confidante, friend, lover, or mentor when someone chose to confide something deeply personal in you. I then want you to reach out to those people, to mend the gaps, & in turn, to share your own vulnerabilities. I also want you to find someone you deem “safe” & foster a space to be vulnerable with them. Fortify that relationship, for as the song goes, “we all need somebody to lean on.”

I hope you have a fantastic week going ahead!

Much love to you all & appreciate you taking the time to read my thoughts every week.

Thank you, truly,

-C

Blog: Curiosity & Experience

There’s a quote that recently surfaced from an interview that Jim Carrey did with TIFF about four years ago. The topic involved brought into light Carrey’s own struggles with mental health & finding identity, even at his current age of sixty years old. Jim talks about the characters he’s played over the years & states that this menagerie of characters also includes his best known one “Jim Carrey.” He then goes on to say something that really struck me. He asked the interviewer if they knew the different between sadness & depression. The interviewers shrugged. Carrey the said the following:

“People talk about depression all the time. The difference between depression & sadness is sadness is just from happenstance-whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, or grief, or whatever it is. Depression is your body saying “f*ck you, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.”

You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.”

— Jim Carrey on TIFF, Sept 22nd, 2017

I know that quote is a little blunt & I’m sure stirs up interesting thoughts or emotions for yourself. Whether you agree or disagree with Jim’s point of view is beside the point here. I’d like to invite you to follow me down the rabbit hole of my own thoughts regarding the quote at hand.

I remember the first time depression hit me, I think I was around seventeen at the time. I felt crazy, truly I felt like I was going mad, my mood would swing randomly, I would dive into emotional lulls fairly often, & could never seem to climb back out into the light. My parents, God bless them, didn’t know what to do with me so they sent me to their company therapist at the time. A wildly artistic woman, my first therapist introduced me to the works of Kahlil Gibran, an American-Lebanese artist, writer, poet, & philosopher, an author I love & frequent even to this day. She specifically wanted me to read the segment of Gibran’s book The Prophet called “On Children.” In the book a prophet arrives in a village & basically hosts a Q&A session for the town to come & grill him on his philosophies, this is what she had me read.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Her point in prescribing this passage was that I had not embraced my own thoughts, beliefs, & feelings. I was going off of my heritage, which we all do naturally. I wanted so badly to fit in as the ideal midwestern good ole boy that I’d completely neglected the actually person residing in my body. Furthermore, I hadn’t just ignored him, I’d straight up avoided him.

I’m a lover of media, as an art form, I feel it to be truly limitless. I love film, invigorating stories & novels, video games with compelling narratives, & music the makes me feel something in a profound manner. I still do to this day. I’m not saying these things are bad or that these things hindered my personal growth, I actually think I’m hinting at the opposite. You see media, in addition to my escapism into characters played on a stage or the role I assumed of the “country star,” allowed me to try on different hats. It allowed me to make connections with my true self in ways that it took me far too long to realize. Media was giving me the vicarious experiences I needed to chisel away the marble covering the man underneath.

Through these new & differing stories I began to embrace the thrill of curiosity. I wanted to know & feel more, I wanted to experience more & see the world through more eyes than had preciously been offered to me. I became obsessed with experiencing food first. Those that know me will tell you I proudly wear the obnoxious moniker of “foodie,” but I am. I’m always astounded by the ways in which culture shapes food, the way science shapes food, the way art shapes food, the way history shapes food. If you’ve ever been on a trip with me you can also attest to the fact that I tend to build my travel around food. There’s so much that a plate of food can say in just a single bite.

From food naturally followed drink, in addition to the aforementioned, travel. With each new experience I gained insight, with gained insight I gained empathy & compassion. The marble continued to get chiseled away.

I dove head first into my curiosity, it allowed me to find the facets of myself that I love & taught me how to manage & confront the parts I find less desirable. So too did curiosity & experience allow me to pilfer through the box of passions & pull the things that spoke to me, leaving the rest behind. That’s a journey that’s an ongoing process for sure!

You see in the past I’d become so ingrained in the miasma of what was in vogue that I abandoned some of the brightest parts of my being. I gave into what society wanted me to be, what my community wanted me to be, what my family wanted me to be, what the media wanted me to be that I became so convinced I couldn’t find success as an artist unless I forced myself into the preconceived boxes I’d been presented with. I’d looked at the world around me & found, white CIS male aspects aside, that my voice, my authentic voice, was one neither worth celebrating nor promoting. I thank God that I’ve since cast those feelings aside.

We are creatures of habit, us humans. We get so stuck in our ways that we forget just how massive the world is & how varied & diverse life can be when it’s allowed to flourish without the constraints of expectation. This is why I urge people to travel, this is why I urge people to make friends with people different than them, this is why I urge people to experience cuisine & media that may seem foreign or taboo to you because at the end of the day we’re all human & the veins of humanity run deep. Hell, you may even be surprised what you uncover about yourself along the way!

I hope you have an incredible week, I challenge you to go out & try something new this weekend; read a new type of book, watch a movie that follows someone whose life is drastically different from your own, be bold & unafraid to change your opinions or perspectives when presented with new information or lifestyles that aren’t reflective of your own experiences. After all, how boring a stagnant life would be?

Much love to you all,

-C

Blog: The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is.

This past weekend a friend of mine hit me up to go audition for a mainstage musical at TPAC (Tennessee Performing Arts Center). TPAC is where we get all of our touring shows here in Nashville; Hamilton, Wicked, The Lion King, etc. The musical in question, May We All, was a Nashville based production being produced by the lead singers of FGL, Brian Kelley & Tyler Hubbard. The modern country jukebox musical was specifically looking for country artists over musical theater actors, would feature an array of country songs, in addition to featuring a nightly revolving country artist role with the likes of Hubbard, Keith Urban, Breland, Carly Pearce, Etc. set to appear. In addition to all that the six week run would pay a minimum of around $1K a week to each performer. I saw it as an opportunity for great exposure in addition to some major monetary gain. So I auditioned.

My friend Kimi, who was the one insisting I go to the open call audition, had done a private audition through her acting school on Friday, the day prior. Having made the decision to go, Ev & I set out to preparing audition material at around 10:30 PM Friday evening, the open call was Saturday morning at 10. We did headshots in the upstairs bedroom, ran to Walgreens at 11:15 to print off said headshots, then I came home & made up an acting resumé & chose an audition song. All-in-all I ended up getting to bed around midnight 30 that night.

The next morning I got up around 8 to start warming up & finalize the sheet music I needed for my audition. I got to Starstruck, where the audition was being held around 9:45 & the audition list already had 65 people signed up in front of me. I waited around 4 hours to audition & was finally called in around 2 PM where I sang 32 bars of “Speechless” by Dan + Shay. I was immediately asked to come back in on Sunday afternoon for a callback. That evening I received my callback packet with the music & lines to prepare, it was for one of the supporting leads! I prepared the lines & the song, “One Man Band” by Old Dominion & prepared to return around one the next day.

Enter Sunday Morning. I wake up & my voice is exhausted, flat out exhausted. I warmed up through it, being gentle & trying to get back to at least a semi-decent voice for this audition. I had the song memorized, as it was one I was already familiar with, & felt complete & utterly ready to go nail my call back! I went back to Starstruck, ran into a few old Belmont friends of mine I hadn’t seen in a while, & waited to get called in.

After an hour or so my name was called & I got in line with a few other people who were called back for the role as well. I was last in my group to go, & again, felt completely confident in my auditioning capabilities. Boy was I wrong.

I get called into the room, nerves are fine, nothing out of the ordinary, & get told they’ve cut the song from the Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, to just Verse & Chorus. Totally fine. I get halfway through the first verse & my brain goes blank. To be completely honest I’m not sure which went first, the lyrics or my voice but one of them said “deuces” & bounced. Having completely forgotten the words to this song I’m very, very familiar with, I started making them up. I flat out started making up lyrics. THEN I did my best to find the words in my sheet music & got further lost. It was a catastrophe. Between my made up lyrics & my voice not working every other note it came as no surprise to me when I finished singing & the casting director said “I think that’ll be all for us today,” to which I replied, “I completely understand” & proceeded to laugh my way out of the room. They didn’t even have me attempt to read lines, something each person in front of me had done. I went back to where I’d left my coat & just bounced.

Surprisingly I wasn’t mortified. Quite the contrary. I had screwed up this callback so horrifically that it didn’t even feel real to me, it felt like a farce. I had gone into this room feeling 100% on top of it & had, at best, delivered 40% of a performance for them. It was baaaaaaaad.

I’m sure some of you saw me post about this on my story. There I expressed that I was actually proud of the magnitude at which I’d failed & I still stand by that. You see I went in confident, I went in prepared, but nothing I could have done would have prepared me for the flub up I made. It was out of my control.

Did I fail? Yes. Exponentially. Was I embarrassed by it? Partially. Was I upset? Not in the least bit.

You see, so often we put so much pressure on success, so much pressure on the avoidance of failure that even our victories fall short. I failed this last weekend in the ultimate form. I failed not because I didn’t try, but because I did. There was no room for “what if” there was nothing different I could have done to have made that audition stellar. Why? Because at the end of the day I had reached the limits of what my body was capable of at that time.

A day later, Monday, I came to find out I was sick with a cold that’s still pinning me down a little today. I knew in that moment, on that day, that my extreme mess up was not the measure of my success nor was it a measure of my talents. It was my body saying “enough.” But hey, at least I tired right?

We put so much pressure on ourselves to be the best, to be better, at all times & for what? Exhaustion? Burnout? I’m not saying that you shouldn’t push yourself but I am saying you need to allow space for yourself to have grace. It’s okay to fail, it’s how we learn. Imagine how boring life would be if we got it right all the time, there’d be no point in celebrating anything. Nothing would ever be exciting.

At the end of the day I clearly wasn’t meant to do this. This clearly wasn’t the path that had been set for me & I may have very well dodged a bullet or cleared the way for something even greater & more in line with what I want & who I am. I remember sitting & thinking before my first audition, much in line with FGL, that if it’s meant to be it’ll be. Which clearly it wasn’t.

Failure is an excellent teacher, or as Yoda put it “the greatest teacher, failure is.” It requires us to look at our short comings, requires us to see where we need to work harder, requires us to acknowledge when we need rest, but it also gives us a chance to course correct & rediscover the path we’re meant to follow.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Blog: Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Fan!

I started writing this blog the week that Spider-Man: No Way Home came out. At the point of this blog’s inception I had already seen the film two nights before, at this point I have seen it another time! If the title of this blog or that first sentences weren’t dead enough give aways, yes we will be talking about Spider-Man & all things the love of in this blog!

NO, I WILL NOT BE SPOILING SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME FOR YOU EVEN THOUGH IT’S BEEN OUT FOR ALMOST A MONTH & YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT BY NOW!!!!!

Instead of talking directly about NWH, this is intended as a bit of an open letter to whomever regarding a character that I love so dearly & that I identify with so intimately.

I remember vividly going to see the original Spider-Man in theaters. I was newly 10 years old at the time & we were in Eugene, Oregon. I remember it being a rainy day, I remember us eating somewhere across the street from the theater, & I remember the lasting impression the film had on me as an adolescent. I had been a Spider-Man fan prior to the release of the original Sam Raimi film but this is what truly turned it from something that piqued my interest to a bit of an obsession.

Spider-Man is my guy, he’s my dude, just as I’m sure he is for so many of you. He’s not the statuesque boy scout that Cap usually is or the brooding genius of Bruce Wayne (I know, DC, just thinking of people’s favorite superheros), Peter Parker is simply a kid trying to have a normal life while balancing a truly amazing gift that he was miraculously given.

Peter, despite his quips & quirks, often presents as a soft-spoken, mild mannered guy with a genius level intellect, an often socially awkward nature, &, dare I say, an impeccable moral compass thanks to the guidance of people like Aunt May & Uncle Ben. It’s safe to say, all considered, that the story of Peter Parker is seldom a happy one. In spite of the loving, happy go lucky, positive person that he often is, his life is riddled with tragedy after tragedy.

You see much like Captain America, Spider-Man is the type to make the sacrifice play, to lay down his life & livelihood for anyone, truly anyone. However, I feel unlike Cap, that Peter lives further in the realm of obscurity within the Marvel universe at large. Where as Caps actions are often unintentionally grandiose & allow him to receive even the slightest bit of recognition, Peter is often left to make the more subtle sacrifice calls that come at great personal cost to himself. Pete doesn’t often get the happy ending but he willingly sacrifices it time & time again without hesitation.

I think that is the beauty of Spider-Man as a hero, he is truly a super hero. I’m going to pull in an example from Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4/5 because I think this illustrates my point very well so if you haven’t played this in the two years that it has been out & are planning to, skip this paragraph because there will be spoilers from that. Still here? Okay, let’s go. In the Playstation game, at the very end, New York has been overtaken by a deadly poison unleashed by Mr. Negative. Peter ends up with one vial of the antidote that he can use to replicate. However, before he can replicate it he finds out that his Aunt May is on her death bed from the poison. He is faced with the choice of save the person closest to him or save New York. Of course he chooses the latter & Aunt May dies.

These are the stakes Peter is constantly faced with. The world or himself. He never chooses himself.

For those of you who have seen No Way Home you know exactly what I’m talking about here, specifically where the ending is concerned & with the ramifications of the choice he’s made.

For all intents & purposes, Peter is a fantastic moral role model. He is an incredible symbol for us in society to try to live up to. He is the definition of self-less & the things he constantly has to sacrifice are heart wrenching. The selflessness even extends to the villains he fights & to those who have caused him harm while outside of their own sanity.

You see, to me, Pete is someone to aspire to. I truly feel he, as a character, makes us societally better. He is a pop culture icon that gives people hope & shows us how to be better human beings to those around us. I grew up loving Peter because of that. Despite this immense power he has it never goes to his head or corrupts him. Peter makes me want to be more selfless, more intellectual, more kind, more quirky, he truly shines, by himself, as beacon of light in the darkness around him, something I think we could all use a bit more of.

“I believe there’s a hero in all of us…that keeps us honest…gives us strength…makes us noble…and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady and give up the thing we want the most – even our dreams. ”

— Aunt May, Spider-Man II

I think we should all aspire to be more like Peter in our day to day lives. I think Spider-Man is truly Stan Lee’s & Steve Ditko’s greatest achievement in character creation. We all know Pete was the creation that Stan was the most proud of.

There’s a reason we all flock to the cinemas for this character, there’s a reason we all buy up the merch & play the games. To put it simply, Spider-Man gives us hope, hope that we ourselves can be better.

Have a lovely weekend & a fantastic January.

Much love to you all,

-C

Oh & my live action ranking goes:

Andrew

Tom

Tobey

This is not up for debate.

Blog: 2021, A Year In Review

So here we are again at the end of another year. I know 2021 was a tough year for a lot of us but at least we had glimmers of hope within the raging storm of the pandemic. I want to take a moment to highlight some of my personal glimmers of hope over the past year in the hope of welcoming in more light in the coming years, not just for myself but also for you, dear reader.

2021 started for me, as it did for many of us, within the fatigue of the pandemic. It also started with the torrent climate of the US political landscape. That’s not why we’re here though, we’re not here to talk about the dark, the muddled, the divisive. We’re here to talk about the hope, the joy, the novel, & the progress.

The first hope of early 2021 I can remember was the distribution of the vaccine. We’d come out of a long COVID riddled winter & were offered the chance, as a society, to change the course of this disease we’d all grown soooooo fond of. The most vulnerable among us were offered that vaccine first, then the on & on it went to it was available to the masses. I personally got both of my vaccinations in March!

Being a newly minted member of the neurodivergent family, something we’ll get more into later, I tend to develop hyper fixations, little things that I find exciting until the dopamine wears out & I move onto the next thing. In early 2021 my first hyper fixation became my home. I looked around & found my house severely lacked things that I felt made it unique to those that lived here. I felt like anyone could have walked into my house & found it hard to pinpoint the exact kind of person that resides within these walls. I decided to introduce a little of what I called “quirk.” I invested in better decor; new lamps, rugs that had subtle Star Wars prints on them, art that hinted at the things I love, etc. Slowly but surely my house began to feel more me.

My next fixation came in the form of self improvement, not a bad fixation to have. I looked inward & found that despite having spent basically the year prior forced into further introspection & was mostly just covering up the things that had been eating me from the inside for so long. I started meditation, I started reading books on psychology, quantum & energetic sciences, even dipping into self help from time to time. I uncovered parts of myself that I had neglected, feelings I’d held onto that no longer served me, & true peace. I fell in love with the natural world around me & with the ghost that lives in the shell that is me.

In the midst of this time of self actualization I found scuba diving. My parents, knowing my deep love for the ocean & all things aquatic, decided it was time I got scuba certified. I know wonder why it took me til almost 30 to get that certification as I immediately fell in love with it.

Around the time of my 29th birthday, my inner work, & scuba certification I also fell in love with plants in a way I never had before. My mother had always been the green thumb of the family & I always leaned more towards the fauna of the world but I guess with the appreciation for all things nature so arrived the appreciation for all things botanical. I started collecting house plants.

I guess that’s a bit of an understatement seeing how, in my living room along, I have over 50 different house plants now. Yes, 50.

Longing to get my travel legs back & wanting to use my scuba certification Evan & I booked a trip to Maui. I’m sure many of you have read about the Maui trip as those three blogs are still the most viewed on my page to this day, almost seven months later, but to put it lightly, the trip was everything. Maui felt like coming home. I mean that in the energetic sense as I cannot lay any claim to Hawaii being 0% pacific islander myself. Maui charged & invigorated my soul, it made me excited for life in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. Our trip was jam packed, our own doing, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. If you care to read more on that of course here are the Maui blogs; Part One, Two, & Three.

After Maui we spent the summer in & out of Kansas. We went on a family vacation to Table Rock Lake for a long weekend, I chipped my tooth tubing, & got to spend time with parts of my family I don’t often get to see. Upon returning home from family vacation Evan & I were stricken with COVID, having been fully vaccinated though the effects were minimal. I was achy with a cough for about a week & lost my sense of taste & smell for a total of three days.

About the same time I got COVID I found a crack in the sump of my 125 gallon saltwater fish tank. I had been wanting to upgrade the size of my tank for a long while & seeing how I needed to completely drain the top tank to get the bottom sump tank even out, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. This reinvigorated my love for aquarium keeping, a hobby I’ve had since I was 16. I upgraded to a 185 with a 15-20 gallon sump in the base & my tank continues to flourish & be a great source of joy & relaxation for me.

In August I began to play again, something I’d seen advised for creatives, it helps to feed that inner child we all still have. I began building legos again, a hobby I grew up loving, I tried to be more playful, to have fun in the mundane day to day experiences! I began painting my nails regularly, I got my ears pierced, why? Cuz I felt like it! I highly recommend it to all, but play responsibly & respectfully!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the two songs I tracked this year, both of which I love dearly! Music has always been a way of connection for me, a form of expression & entertainment that I have made my life’s calling & creating new music is life giving to me, I can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on in 2022!

After August came Puerto Rico, a bit of a spur of the moment trip if I’m being honest. Puerto Rico is as the name suggests a rich port. It’s rich in culture, atmosphere, heritage, & adventure. I got to dive more in Puerto Rico in addition for further flexing my “foodie” tongue. You can read about that adventure in my Puerto Rico blog! Part One. Part Two.

We finally got to go back to Los Angeles in October, I hadn’t been since March of 2020 & normally it eats up about a quarter of my year! We went to Disney, I built a frickin’ lightsaber! I got to see a lot of old friends, went to a few Halloween parties, made some new friends, wrote a lot of new music, etc. Read more here.

We almost lost one of our cats, Max while in LA. Max is a three year old short haired tabby/bengal mix, who ended up getting a urinary obstruction. Our house sitter was lovely enough to sit over night with him at the emergency vet & after a few days in the hospital Max was fine. It’s incredibly difficult to have to face surgery or euthenization from the other side of the country but it really put into perspective how much I am grateful for the day to day interactions I get to have with each of my animals.

Max is the first animal to greet you at the door, the first animal to come running when the alarm goes off in the morning, in addition to being the last thing I see most nights as he kneads & purrs us all to sleep. He is an integral part of our household & I’m so blessed that he’s made a full recovery & gets to hang around this world for a long while longer.

In November I was formally diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. It was something I thought I’d had for a long while but after three months of testing I finally got verification of that. I wrote a whole blog on that process & the impact it had as well. LINK haha.

Thanksgiving was a blur, back & forth across the country seeing family members all over the states in addition to people coming into Nashville. Truly a whirlwind where at one point we’d spent two weeks traveling & only 24 hours at home in the middle of it. Lots & lots of driving.

I was also in the process of trying out different aids for my new found condition which made the Thanksgiving holiday even harder. My mother said “it was like someone had sucked out my joy.”

For once I felt a bit of the holiday spirit but with the crazy fluctuating weather that feeling fizzled out fairly quickly. I, like so many, saw Spider-Man: No Way Home opening night, the only reason for which I bring it up is because I definitely already have a blog written about that experience that may be coming out next week!

Christmas was also a whirlwind & sitting here writing about it just a week later, feels like a century ago.

Now it’s New Year’s Eve. We sit on the precipice of 2022 & I fear much like so many of us felt around the holidays this year it doesn’t exactly feel much like something worth celebrating. We once again have COVID raging across the world, we have labor shortages, & the world seems bleak but I’d advise you to look over your year & find those shining moments, the diamonds in the rough. Look back on them with fondness, with love & realize that’s what will make up the next year for you as well; small moments of human joy that bring out our appreciation for this life we’re given.

I know it’s not always easy & I know it’s hard to be hopeful when things seem such a mess but as I’ve said before, preserve. Find daily moments of gratitude & get to know yourself a little deeper.

I love you all dearly, Happy New Year & thank you ever so much for reading these. It is my true joy to connect with people & make them feel even the slightest bit more seen than they did mere minutes before coming across my words or my songs.

God Bless You All!

I wish you nothing but a prosperous & fulfilling 2022.

-C

Blog: Sympathy Vs. Empathy

A few weeks ago I was part of a songwriting workshop with a few of my fellow songwriters led by Leena Regan. One of the first things she started out with on the very first day of the workshop was reiterating the importance of trust & vulnerability in the co-writing space. It is often very hard to be vulnerable with people if you don’t trust what they’ll do with the information you give them after all. We as writers, or I guess even as humans, tend to paint the broad strokes of our stories & negate the little intimate details that personalize the story to you. I think a lot of us have been taught over the years that broad strokes equal more of a mass appeal & I’d argue that’s a false belief.

Think of your favorite artists, think of your favorite songs. Are they broad or are they very specific to the story being told or the life of the artist/writer in question? I’m going to go ahead & guess that, for the most part, they’re very specific. These are the songs we should all be trying to write, those that are personal to us, those that convey emotion not only in the listener but also in the artists themselves. Ever watched an artist try to sell a song they have no attachment to? It’s painful.

So what’s my point in all this? How does this relate to all of you non-writers out there? How does this apply to your life? Leena’s next point in fostering a creative space conducive to specific art is to approach the write, the story of life you’re being told, with empathy.

I think most people assume that they’re empathetic humans, I’m not arguing that you’re not, but I would like to highlight, as Leena did with us, the importance in the differences between being sympathetic & being empathetic. I think a lot of people assume they’re synonymous. That sympathy & empathy are one in the same, but at simply is not the truth. Let’s break it down by definition first.

Dictionary.com defines sympathy as ‘feelings or impulses of compassion.’ Well then what is compassion? It is ‘a feeling of deep sympathy & sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.’ Meanwhile the definition for empathy reads ‘the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.’ Notice the difference there? Sympathy boils down to simply feeling, it does not seek to equalize, it simply exists as a separation. You feel this way & I recognize it, but I want to fix or change it. Empathy on the other hand is the equalizer. It is identifying something within yourself that can relate to the other person’s experience. It does not seek to repair or alter, it seeks to humanize & understand.

There’s an excellent video from Brené Brown that was shared along within the lesson, in it she shows that often the sympathetic seek to divert. “I lost my house.” “At least you had a house to lose.” “I failed out of college.” “Well, at least you could afford to go in the first place.” Where in the empathetic would approach “I lost my house” with something along the lines of “I’m so sorry to hear that, I’m here for you & I’ll do my best to meet you where you’re at emotionally” or “I failed out of college” with “do you want to talk about it?” It does not seek to repair or override someone else’s life experience or emotion. I’ll link Brené’s video below, she explains it a lot better than I do. It’s also a short video that I promise it’s worth the watch!

I have said quite often in blogs of the past that I feel we as humans sorely lack empathy. I think it is one of the biggest things dividing us as people. So many of us strive for empathy but stop at sympathy, we do not bring ourselves into the experience of another to the best of our ability, instead we simply seek to divert & adjust. In the writing space beautiful art is born from a space of empathy, in the corporate world employers begin to understand their employees, in the political world we begin to recognize & acknowledge those we marginalize & belittle. Empathy is the key to all of it. It takes the selfish angle out of the picture & instead strives for human understanding. We could all use a bit more empathy, we could all show a bit more love & understanding.

I write all of this from a place of love & with a desire to unify, not alienate, but I hope the next time someone comes to you with their pain or troubles that the words “at least” don’t appear in your response. Treat your peers, your family, your loved ones, your colleagues, your grocer, your gas station attendant, your etc, with empathy not just sympathy. We each deserve to be met where we are not passively rushed out of our strife.

I hope you have a great weekend & remember be loving to one another.

-C

Blog: Be Kind, Remind(er).

Tis the season once again, the holiday season & with it comes all the ingrained stress. Lines get longer, the gifts we wanted to give or the ingredients we needed to make that one special dish get more & more scarce. Tensions rise & often with it, so do tempers. We often get lost in the capitalistic frenzy of “I need, we need” that we forget about the people we interact with on the day to day basis. Having spent some time myself working in customer service space; from being a barista to driving ride share, I can personally tell you when the weather turns cold, so do the people, at least where November/December are concerned.

This blog actually came at the request of a dear friend of mine who basically wanted me to use this platform as a PSA. She works as a barista & for whatever reason people think it’s okay to treat those hand preparing a beverage for you like garbage. I know the feeling, I’ve been there. People can often make you feel dirt low simply for the dumbest of reasons. I don’t know what brings people to the point of being completely & utterly devoid of empathy but I guess that’s a question we try to answer each & every election cycle as well.

I guess the point of this PSA style blog is simply to remind you to be kind. I know for many of you that isn’t necessarily a problem, but I feel the point needs reiterating. You have to understand that the people preparing your coffee, ringing you up at the gas station, running around returning the mountains of clothes that have been tried on, restocking shelves, waiting your table, driving you home, etc. are exactly that, people. They are, as you are, flesh & bone. They have their own lives, their own desires, their own struggles, their own disappointments, & their own thoughts that are equally as valid as your own. You do not out rank them in humanity simply by being a customer.

I truly think one of the most harmful practices we as humans have engrained into the customer service space is that “the customer is always right.” The customer is most definitely not always right. Let me say that again. You, as the customer, are not always right. If you make the customer the one & only priority as an employer you completely negate & dehumanize the needs of your employees. In addition to being better people to one another in the customer exchange, I think the current state of The US in general is also emphasizing the need for employers to do better.

You don’t need to be an asshole to get your point across, if anything I’ve found that usually ends up getting you farther from your goal. If you treat people with the respect & dignity they deserve you are 1000% more likely to get what you want or need. And maybe that’s the key to my super power, maybe that’s the key to getting a reservation anywhere you go, not being an asshole about it & genuinely taking an interest in the wellbeing of the people you interact with.

This is all a long form way of saying, be kind. Tis the season of giving; thanks, gifts, love, so give kindness a shot. You may find it makes you feel better as well. To quote a dearly departed mentor of mine, Billy Block, “if you see someone without a smile, give them yours.”

Much love to you all,

-C