Making Life Beautiful Again
The Road to A Debut Album & Returning To Self
When I was in high school, writing was my lifeline. An avid Tumblr-blogger, short-story-writer and competition-enterer, relentless diary-keeper — writing and, most importantly, sharing my writing was how I maintained a sense of self. A sense that I had thoughts and feelings worth sharing, stories worth being told. It was how I made sure that I was understood.
I had no qualms with vulnerability. No problem with turning my skin inside out to expose the dustiest crevices of my mind, generously lending the lens with which I saw the world. Like how you make a friend try on your glasses to see for themselves how blurry your vision really is.
I recall with fondness years of poetically angsty teenage-venting on public platforms, allowing my friends to flip the pages of my diary and read them like a book…being unabashedly myself was no issue for me. I relished in the ability to bare all. It felt like a superpower, this nonchalance towards judgment.
Somewhere along the years, I lost that. Even trying to articulate why is a testament to how my vulnerability has eroded to almost nothing, replaced by an intense fear of being seen, truly seen. I can almost trace it back to when I began making music, halfway through a Creative Writing degree when words on a page no longer did my feelings justice. They needed to be accompanied by melody, song. I think somewhere along that road I started to convince myself that I’d bare all through my music, not realizing that so much more would come with that. Subject matter? Songwriting? Marketing? Branding? Social media?
Writing became an exercise of musical skill rather than expression. A delicate balance of packaging thoughts, stories, feelings into something I could eventually release and market. I somehow lost the ability to be true through efforts of clever word play and song structure. I stopped writing without caring how it was being received. Through this I became hyper-fixated on perception, image, how I could be seen rather than should.
As I complete my debut album Life Is Beautiful Again in New York, the city of my dreams, as a Sudanese woman who always wanted desperately to be an artist of any sort with absolutely no blueprint on how to get there, this Substack will act as an archive of this journey. Real, true, a rejection of the fear of being seen. This is the Behind The Scenes of all the polished and manufactured content you will inevitably see.
Once a week, this will be my own reminder of my raw humanity, deepest flaws, anxieties, and hopes. You can read it if you like. Warning: it will be imperfect. It will not involve AI, and please never offend me by suggesting it does (I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my shit). It will be honest. It will be scary. It will be sad and funny and weird and definitely boring if you don’t care.
If you do, thank you. I hope you know that I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m figuring it out as I go along. But I’m glad I’m trying.
Love,
Nadine