In doing so, I am realizing that some very important foundations my life have come from action and that those actions have been scary for me. Since Mike and I have been planning to spend a year traveling in Central America, we’ve really had to get some of those messy “someday” items taken care of. For example, from high school through college, I was busy being a rockstar, playing in bands, and making recordings. It has been a decade since I have played music, so lurking in my memorabilia box was a pile of old demo tapes and live recordings that I figured the “someday” fairy would eventually convert to a digital format.

As you might expect, this Someday Fairy was me. If I didn’t convert them now, I would just have to throw them away. Aside from the tedium of running several entire 120 minute cassettes of feedback, crowd noise, terrible sound mixes, and sometimes embarrassing performances into my computer, I was also running a history of relationships, fears, and accomplishments into my memory.

I have always been a shy person (though it’s funny saying that now, because I’m not quite sure it fits anymore), so even if I were sitting on a wealth of talent, skill, or knowledge, in my younger years I was extremely hesitant to share it. And I really think we can all relate to that feeling to some degree. “I really don’t know enough  enough to actually weigh in in this conversation,” or “other people are much more intelligent or qualified than I am to be able to contribute,” or my current favorite “that’s something other people do that somehow I will never get to do.”

In the context of reliving the stories of these cassette tapes, I was smacked with an awesome new perspective: had I not embraced the butterflies blooming in my I-could-totally-do this-but-should-I-? stomach, and picked up that guitar on open mic night at T’eatro cafe in the early winter of 1994 when I was 15 years old, I never would have been instantly recruited into my first band (first of 5 plus solo stuff) and propelled into the position of front man in a band for the following seven years.

In that moment, I decided to do the brave thing and play a goofy Bob Dylan song, opening myself to the possibility of no applause, snickering or laughter, booing, or simple indifference. I chose not to do the safe thing. I chose sing for the first time in public and to use my simple guitar skills. Most importantly, I chose not to go home wondering what would have happened. And you know what happened? People applauded.

In the following years, this socially-challenged 15-year-old learned (and more than 15 years later is still learning…) what it meant to be part of a team (or band), how to move an audience, how to sell stuff I made (demo tapes), and generally how to believe in herself (though sometimes, quite imperfectly).

These are amazing gifts that I have been awarded from simply deciding to be brave for 15 minutes behind a mic in a coffee shop. And that’s how it works. I have found that if I just jump in, I learn how to swim.

Since then, I have done other brave things and all of these things have resulted in rewards–some of which are tangible, such as jobs, while others are more difficult to pin down, such as a huge boost in self-worth and general satisfaction. And yet I forget all of this regularly when I am faced with the safe vs brave choice. Ah, life.

So maybe if you are reading this, I have inspired you to do one brave thing today. Wouldn’t that be neat? If not, I have at least reminded myself to do so. :)

on clean paper or on just scraps
or napkins or receipts
each one saved most carefully
as if each some mental feat

i found some just this evening
when i was packing up to move
all dusty and most don’t make sense
so must i move them too?

i have reams and reams of bad poems
that took me years to write
hidden now for so many years
until i found them again tonight

some are full of teenage angst
and others adult fears
and some spill forth with silly love
and some were made from tears

do i keep just the good ones?
do i throw them all away?
would i miss them terribly
twenty years from today?

i have reams and reams of bad poems
of every shape and size i know
they served me well while they served me
now it’s time to let them go

so many times i can say i am proud to be an american. this, however, is an absolute humiliation. one may argue that the behavior displayed by our top-dog, deceitful investor pals is a supreme example of the darwinian (dare i say american?) “survival of the fittest”, but in doing so, one may not take into account the darwinian observations that 1) the world has a finite amount of resources and 2) humans are social creatures. if you bolt all of the food rations for the year, in a days time, do you not go hungry along with everyone else? this sort of selfishness is not okay. and socially speaking, humans don’t live in a vacuum. erroneous human behavior does not go unpunished. fool me once, shame on you. rape, pillage, and burn me once, shame shame shame on you.