Yesterday was the very first time in years that I wondered if I went too far with something that I wanted to share with you. It’s never easy to look into old stories, especially when they are still painfully vibrating or part of major traumas I have to deal with every single day. But I guess my primary concern wasn’t truly about me or how I might be perceived. I never played any self-fabricated public identity type of game nor do I have any interest in self-shaping mythologies. If such a degree of honesty never helped sell my image as a fantasy object of consumption in the past, I’d rather be myself than lose my mind in some elusive form of product imagery. And I guess I’m already tortured enough to bother playing a role anyway… It’s all a matter of perception, right? 😉 No, my concern was about my friends. Our stories are so intimately intertwined that I was wondering if I had the right to share my reflective part about it, or anything at all. The matter of the heart and soul are highly sensitive and I don’t want to be the reason for any of those past traumas to resurface for any of them, or for those who were there at the time. No one can really come back from that type of spiritual trauma without a scar of their own.

In fact, regardless of the nature of the traumas, I guess we all want to dig a profound hole somewhere in order to bury every piece of our pain and sorrow so deeply that we might eventually forget about it all or even believe that we got over it. I wish it were that easy sometimes, but it’s rarely the case. If you learn to make peace with it you’re affectively rewired somehow, and when you are confronted with some sort of controlling person or in the middle of a confrontational situation, it all comes back again. Not necessarily the traumas themselves, but your reactions, or the absence of… Your controlling reactions may be disproportionately violent, as much as overly submissive, at least for an instant. You don’t know why you are reacting like this, and sometimes it’s better not to know. But when you take a minute to wonder about the triggers to whatever reaction you might have had, those old scenes of your lifestream, the very same ones you thought had been cut and edited, are not only vividly present, they’ve never aged. They even managed to extend the reach of their side stories without you ever noticing. They are part of your love relationships, your friendships, your creations, your life views, and on, and on, and on… It’s as if you became the by-product of a season’s misery… of yours, but of others as well. That’s why I named the previous studio diary entry “Shadows Always Long For Doubtful Shine”, as it’s not entirely darkness or light. We feel like a shadow, but if being a shadow means that we don’t have to suffer much each day, that’s a major solace for many of us. We roam around but haven’t completely turned into the specter of our denial just yet, which is an ultimate victory. We’ll take every single one of them, regardless of what they are or whatever they actually stand for. They’ll be ours to define at some point.

Therefore, when I wrote about our collective traumatic time while attending that church, I wondered where I should set the limit of my openness. Should I have a limit? Should I auto-censure myself or restrain what I’m opening about? The line between expressing myself freely and what shouldn’t be in the public domain is always blurry. I only follow two fundamental “rules”; to be highly sensitive to the emotional impact my writing could have on you and, no matter how hurt I could be, to never speak evil of anyone who might have been part of my lifestream at one point or another. For the rest, I never restrain the flow of my writings for anybody’s opinion whatsoever. I’m honest today and might find out I was wrongfully sincere tomorrow. It’s an evolving reflective motion. It’s not about the pursuit of truth, or the settlement of what’s an ultimate absolute. What I’m exploring is the intangible undefinability, the transcendent elements of spirituality, and the invisible aspects of our existence. For me, it’s where the source of all creativity lies and blooms from. At least, that’s where mine does. It will eventually grow into an entity of its own once I let go and dwell in that source. That probably explains why it’s difficult for me to interpret the essence of my art as much as it seems impossible for any of us to foresee the natural curve of progression of its evolutive arc. It’s all over the place and challenging to understand at times… My bad, not. 😉

One thing is for sure, it could be pretty puzzling for my friends and bandmates to make any sense of my nonsense, that’s for sure. 😉 So to do so, we talk about whatever publication I put out, from my punctual journal “From A Stranger To Another”, up to my “Studio Diary” entries. And since we have our daily 10k steps to do, we take a moment and share about it all as we walk. Last night, I sensed a little bit of uneasiness when Jeff told me: “Man, you opened our collective genesis Pandora’s box in that one.” It doesn’t take much for me to doubt or feel insecure about what I’ve shared. I’m much more brave at writing my thoughts than having to expose any of them over an open conversation. So I kept on asking him, Ben, and Miss Isabel if I had gone too far. It made space for very raw and real types of conversations, some about our mutual past, but mainly about its obvious influence on our present behaviors, as individuals and as a group. “We’re greatly damaged… but we are survivors, not victims. We should be proud of that. F*** censorship”, Miss Isabel said. As a preacher’s daughter, while growing up she was at the front row of everything “sick” that religion can cultivate and exploit. And we’ve eventually all been, thankfully without losing our compassionate hearts and our evolving minds in the process. Thank “God”.