You guessed it – I’m at the airport. This time, I’m headed to Omaha to meet and work with a bunch of fellow wedding band musicians there. And as per usual, I’m taking advantage of the travel day for this month’s Deep Dive.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been really working on being more open and aware. Sometimes I’m unsure of whether the goodies I discover are wishful thinking, some kind of projection of my optimism.
Recently, my friend Chris recommended this book on Awe. A quote for you…
“You might think that when we more-often experience awe in the wonders of life, those wonders lose their power…this is known as the law of hedonic adaptation – that certain pleasures (consumer purchases, drinking a savory beer, or eating chocolate, for example) diminish with their increased occurrence – not so with awe. The more we practice awe, the richer it gets.”
This feels related.
I love the idea that what I’m actually doing is cultivating an eye for awe, a heart for awe.
The more I look for it, the more of it I find.
In many ways, it’s a choice, though no less full of wonder.
Of course, I find a reliable wellspring of awe in Artifice. I’m consistently moved by the incredible humans I have the privilege to meet and talk with. But honestly, one of my absolute favorite things is rediscovering each conversation as I re-listen six months post-recording.
I so frequently feel the universe (or whatever you like to call it) presenting me with surprise gems I need in the present. It’s genuinely spooky sometimes. A lot of the time.
Sara brought me so many little wisdoms.
I loved hearing Sara talk about moving from a vibrant east-coast locale to the Arizona desert and slowly teaching her eyes to see an abundance of color in her new home. As she puts it, “suddenly, you start recognizing the colors that you see.”
You can see them, too (can I live in this painting, please?).
It reminds me of a lesson I first learned from horticulturist Sheriden Hansen (Ep. 114). She talked about teaching people to see what you know how to see (and asking people what they know how to see).
And of course, there is always more to see.
Sara is so eager to learn, so hungry to take on whatever catches her passion. She’s learned this lesson over, and over again, “digging deeper into anything, you get layers of understanding, and layers of meaning.”
But before those layers begin to reveal themselves, you have to choose to dig, to invest, to see.
And, you must be open.
As Sara says, “in order to create something of beauty, you have to take in something of beauty…all of those things that add depth and give more vitality add to your spirit. It’s important to fill your whole soul. Anything you can do to increase your vibration with your relationships, with experiencing nature, with experiencing beautiful creations from others, experiencing beautiful art, just having a conversation…all of these things fill the soul, and then that soul manifest itself in your creativity.’’
This is the work I’m up to, as well. I’m searching far and wide, I’m cultivating an ability to see, I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve as radically as I’m able.
At the same time, I’m reckoning with new “layers of understanding” around my most abiding griefs.
This year has been harrowing so far. I greeted 2025 with enthusiastic optimism and open arms, but have been met with waves of heartbreak and discouragement.
I relistened to my conversation with Callie on a particularly deflated day and was frankly arrested by what I found there.
In different ways (but in so many ways the same), Callie and I both experienced a lot of trauma in our childhoods.
I’ve been seriously confronting my childhood trauma since 2016. Nearly a decade later, it sometimes feels like I’ve gotten nowhere. Of course, that isn’t true. I’m capable of things now that would have bewildered my younger self. But…it’s this layers thing again, and learning how to see.
As Callie puts it “suddenly being able to process, with more mature emotions, the trauma I had already been through was just a weird thing. It’s so weird to not process your trauma ‘cause you’re too young to do it. And then five years go by and suddenly…my own life was a movie I was suddenly watching and understanding for the first time…I finally could have big realizations and emotional response to the tragedy I had been through as a kid.”
I relate to this SO hard.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been doing EMDR on and off for a little over a year now. As I take myself back to some of the most painful moments of my childhood, I’m able to see them with my adult eyes; they’re no longer trapped in my memory from a first-person child’s perspective.
And god, what I see absolutely floors me. It shakes me down to my bones.
Callie is really spot on about the way this time difference (from childhood trauma to adult realization) can rattle you.
I feel so much for my child self. As a matter of survival, I literally could not understand that my parents were being abusive. It’s not that I don’t remember what happened. I remember exactly what it felt like. I remember how afraid I was, how small and worthless I felt. It lives in my cells, in my nervous system.
But my child self could NOT see how irresponsible my parents were being, how truly evil their actions were. That reality had no way to settle in my child perspective. I didn’t have the means.
For the past year or so, I’ve been experiencing an odd phenomenon. It’s almost like a flashback…but it’s more specific than that.
My mother was 39 years old when I moved out of state for college. My most vivid memories of her are from my teens, those 5-or-so years before I moved out.
I’m turning 37 in a couple of weeks. And I think this flashback-y thing is actually seeing my mother in my own body. I catch a glimpse of my own hand and see her hand. My voice, my face, my hair…everything reminds me of her.
I think being the age mom was in some of my most painful memories has loosened something, with help from the EMDR.
It’s suddenly so clear to me how absolutely unhinged my parents’ behavior was. I know that truly no amount of aggravation even on my very least regulated day would make me behave the way they behaved to me on the daily. Nothing would make me treat another human being that way, let alone a child, let alone a child I purported to love. It turns my stomach. It would turn your stomach, too.
For the first time in my life, I’m SO angry about what they did. My child self deserves for an adult to be angry on her behalf. It’s the only reasonable response. And it’s a real pity that I’m the first adult to fill that role.
But…I’m proud that I’m able to do it. I’m proud of myself for uncovering these new layers of understanding. I’m proud that I taught myself to see it all more clearly.
I’m learning to speak it all more clearly as well, though I continue to pay an incredible price for the truth.
Last Sunday, I went to my sweet friends Flavia+Harold’s house to celebrate Harold’s birthday. Flavia pulled me aside to tell me she’d just finished reading a book that reminded her of me (Amy Griffin’s The Tell), and asked if I’d like to borrow it.
I finished it earlier this week. Flavia was right, this book was very moving for me.
I think I understood early on (starting around 10 years ago) that it was going to be important for me to tell, but my understanding continues to deepen around this truth—the profundity of telling, the necessity of it.
Some quotes that stood out…
- “Now I understand that the telling is the medicine—not the cause of shame but the thing that heals it. Sometimes we keep secrets to survive. Then a moment arrives when the usefulness of the secret expires. Keeping it becomes the thing that hurts us.”
- “We think secrets keep us safe, but they create silos of denial and grief. I have learned the more I tell my truth, the more the telling is what sets me free.”
- “I wrote the book because I had a secret—one that I had been running from my entire life. I knew I had to tell, both myself and others, before I could move forward…”
My conversation with Callie was still floating around the top of my mind when I was reading The Tell. I kept thinking/linking back to so many things we’d talked about.
In a different way, Callie also needed to tell. We talked specifically about some of Callie’s more recent creations and the fear that came with revealing a new belief system, a newly uncovered self, to loved ones.
As Callie says boldly, bravely, “I’m not gonna try to make things more comfortable for people, because I want to be accepted in who I am as soon as humanly possible. So, I’m ripping off the Band-Aid.”
This strikes me as a crucial lesson.
Wonderfully, what Callie ultimately found was that, for them, there is acceptance from family and friends, despite these newly uncovered layers.
What I’ve found, unfortunately, is that there has been no acceptance for me. When I started telling in 2019, I was full of fear, and for good reason. In the past six years, I’ve lost my *entire* family. Everyone. Every single person who was supposed to love me, protect me, accept me…gone.
I’ve learned that I am not accepted. I’ve learned that the more myself I am, the more truth I tell, the more I’m dismissed, blamed, loathed, disowned. It’s been an unbearable lesson to learn, an unbearable price to pay.
But…
As I focus on openness, I’m learning to belong to myself. I’m learning to create the works only I can create. I’m learning to tell the stories only I can tell.
Of this kind of deeply authentic (often controversial) work, Callie says “it helps you process it, and connects to other people…and there’s something about that that frees you, even if it puts you through hell.”
This is about where I’m at right now.
I’m open to wonder, taking in beauty, seeing everything I can see, peeling back each layer I discover.
And fielding some of the greatest heartbreaks of my life.
Alas, the only way out is through.
xoxo,
Emily