My nervous system was reactivated when I started recording again

I am working on self-trust at the moment, and it starts with becoming a friend to yourself that you trust with your darkest and deepest secrets

Photo by Jené Stephaniuk on Unsplash

Hi friend!

Yesterday, I sat down to record a cover of Fragile, by Sting. It’s one of my favourite songs and I felt like I had the energy to do it, after months of not feeling that.

The vocals were decent, the piano playing meh, but I decided to not be a perfectionist about it. I then added a bit of compression and re-listened to the song and discovered that it was completely unusable. I had recorded it with a MIDI piano to get a Steinway sound, but the real piano had leaked into the vocals and it sounded deranged. I should have just recorded it without the MIDI piano.

This would not have been an issue had I just been able to re-record it like able-bodied people can.

Then I noticed my body react, I felt a nervous system reactivation — it feels a bit like PTSD, but in a smaller way. And my solar plexus hurt. From experience, I know that when my solar plexus hurts it often has to do with self-blame and lack of self-trust.

I asked that part of me that was re-activated what it wanted to say and it started talking…

See, there is something I haven’t talked a lot about here, mostly because it has been fairly difficult for me:

When I was recording my debut album and was ready to hand everything to the mixers, my mixing engineer noticed that the sound was distorted in many places in a lot of the songs. I had noticed this myself and was irritated by it, but thought that it was just what a home-recording sounded like.

It took a while, but we found the culprit: I had added a plug-in to my recording chain which my too-old computer couldn’t handle, and that was what distorted the sound.

So I had to re-record many parts of several songs. It was the most stressful thing I have ever experienced. I blamed myself for not catching it at an earlier stage.

Also, I originally had ten songs on the album. But one of those songs centered the flute. It was a kind of call and response song between the vocals and flute — a gorgeous song really. But because I had to have the energy to get through all those flute parts, I didn’t have the energy to warm up and tune my flute, I also didn’t have the energy to actually listen to the tuning. And it was almost half a semi-tone out of tune.

Again, I blamed myself.

And that self-blame had gotten stuck in my body and was reactivated when I noticed the recording for Fragile was useless.

I had to spend time, with a hand on my heart and solar plexus, talking to that part that felt blamed. Calming it down, telling it how proud I was of her, how awesome she was for managing such a difficult thing under inhumane circumstances.

I did manage to calm her down and I think I have healed the damage done from all the self-blame.

I am working on self-trust at the moment, and it starts with becoming a friend to yourself that you trust with your darkest and deepest secrets.

I hadn’t been that friend to myself. Imagine if I had come to my friend, crying about having to re-record when in this difficult body and my friend said: “Suck it up, it’s your own fault, you should have been more diligent.” I don’t think I would trust that friend with anything else — I’m not sure we would even be friends anymore.

P.S Here is some of my artwork I have done recently, I’m really enjoying this abstract art thing:

Tell me…

How are you treating yourself at the moment?

Do you feel you are your own best friend?

Can you trust yourself with the difficult stuff?

I’d love to know in the comments!

Have you listened to Did You Not Know?

I wrote this song when my body was breaking from ME/CFS. I had lost friends and people around didn’t understand what was going on. I felt abandoned and alone.

All proceeds will go to Open Medicine Foundation for vital ME/CFS and Long Covid research. Please consider purchasing on Bandcamp to support the cause.