Sounds Like Me

by Sara Bareilles

  You try therapy for the first time. It was impossibly hard to start down that path, because surrendering to how bad things got in your brain is embarrassing for you and makes you feel weak. The lady you end up finding is a frumpy, cold, older woman with glasses who smells like very strong air freshener. You secretly hate her. She says hardly anything at all, and it makes you very uncomfortable and so you just start talking out loud to fill up the silence. She is not a very good therapist, but filling up the space between the two of you with your thoughts teaches you to articulate them. The emotions that felt overwhelming before become puzzles to try and solve. You start to slowly climb out of the darkness, and the relief you feel is as wide as the whole galaxy.

  You have a blurry image of what you want out of your career, and you are in the middle of building the foundation. Playing shows around Los Angeles, you are also making your first record. You seek approval and validation from just about everyone around you and lose your own opinion along the way.

  You stumble into moments that trigger a triumphant feeling but end up making you feel tricked. In a studio in New York City you will be told, “You are the truth!” by a very powerful man who stands on a couch to show you how much he means it. You feel electric, and it makes your heart soar. He makes you big, beautiful promises that don’t come true. You learn quickly that people say things they don’t mean. You quietly harden yourself toward the business and build up your armor.

  You’ll call your first major-label record Little Voice to help you remember to listen to yourself. You only sort of get the message. You are going to muddle through the best you can, and this period of time will launch you onto a roller-coaster ride that will fill you up more than you could ever imagine and then empty out your bones.

  You hate your body again. You have to take photographs to use in promotional materials and feel exposed. The girl who photographs you at the studio is so unbelievably beautiful you are embarrassed to have your own face. There is a growing team of people critiquing your image, and it makes you feel violently angry, and you learn to sit on that fire. Their comments on your appearance will be dressed up in kid-glove phrases like, “This look is more flattering,” and, “That dress is slimming,” and your face will burn hot. You’ll only take some of their advice, pretending to be confident in your choices because you are also going to be your most stubborn self in these next few years. I’m glad about that now.

  You are defending some unnamed territory inside of you that houses what’s true. It exhausts you and burns you out.

  You are convinced there are right and wrong answers to all of the questions in front of you, and the pressure is suffocating. You sit alone outside the Sony Tower in busy, bustling midtown Manhattan after a meeting for album artwork where you didn’t know what you wanted. After hobbling meekly through the meeting you just sat and cried on the curb until a kind stranger put his hand on your shoulder and said everything was going to be okay. You smiled at this kind person and thanked him but didn’t believe him.

  He was right.

  You are beautiful.

  You are overwhelmed and haven’t learned to be your own friend through this yet. You will. Your fear of jumping without a net is so valid, and the trick that you haven’t learned yet is that that’s life, always and everywhere. There are no nets. Life is a big, long free fall, and the sooner you can embrace what is beautiful about that, the sooner you will start to enjoy the ride. You won’t really get this for a while, though. Sorry, sister.

  You don’t feel your own power at all right now, and I understand. Yours is not the kind that wants to announce itself. It is slow and quiet and tucks in behind things waiting to be discovered. Some people have power that is thick and neon-colored and races around the room making sure everyone pays attention. It’s fascinating but it’s not yours. You are learning how to hold yourself up and believe in the strength of your own conviction. That is not an easy thing to do, and you are doing the best you can. Keep going. I’m very proud of you.

  Love,

  Sara

  Dear Sara,

  You are sitting in your hotel room in Sydney, Australia, and feel like you should have your shit together by now. You don’t. Overwhelmed with travel and the stress of your job, you have become increasingly anxious, dreading feeling out of control. One way this is manifesting itself is an irrational fear of leaving your hotel room alone, because you believe you’ll get lost and not be able to find your way back.

  You have written in your journal:

  I’m in that fear place again. I feel messy inside. I feel undisciplined and angry and tired. I feel less than.

  You buy yourself a book titled Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and you’re embarrassed to read it in public, but it helps you make a decision to try and break out of some of your patterns. You eat lunch alone in a café across the street from the hotel and are proud of yourself. You also feel pathetic.

  You are on your way to volunteer with an organization called All Hands Volunteers in Ofunato, Japan, after the tsunami. That trip will remind you that we are all very, very small beings who simply have to figure out a way to cope with feeling powerless sometimes. You will be awed and inspired by the people who turn that powerlessness into the power of service.

  You will see mountains of debris and thousands of people’s belongings that belong nowhere anymore. It’s backbreaking work, and your band and crew are all by your side, yet again showing the world their ferocious hearts. It’s a deeply soulful place and fills you with gratitude. You will be given Coca-Cola and hot miso soup by an elderly Japanese couple who want to thank your muddy, sweaty, motley team for clearing out the gutters in front of their building. They have nothing. And it means everything.

  You are facing a summer of touring, opening for the band Sugarland. The audiences are polite and warm, but you are on borrowed time from the headliner and you can read that in the energy of the crowd. You become insecure about your worth onstage. In Indianapolis, the stage will collapse about twenty minutes after your set. It is bone-chilling and surreal and infinitely tragic. Seven people from the audience will be killed and many more injured. One of the men who dies is a security guard who danced to your music at your sound check. He had a round face, a trim gray beard, and a kind smile. It is devastating, and you will carry that with you for the rest of your life.

  You are about to agree to be a judge on a TV singing-competition show that will be the reason you decide to find a therapist again. She will end up being someone extremely important in your life. You will exhaust yourself flying back and forth to shoot the show during the week and then meet up with the tour wherever it is to perform shows on the weekends. It’s too much, and it breaks you down.

  You will be slapped with your own self-image issues again.

  You will be asked to send pictures of yourself at your wardrobe fittings in different dresses for the producers to sift through and decide which ones you are allowed to wear. You will have to do this three different times, because they don’t like anything that you choose for yourself. They will put racks of bedazzled dresses in your trailer. It’s humiliating and degrading. Executives involved with the show will have meetings outside your trailer about how they aren’t happy with the way you look. They’ll say you aren’t wearing enough flashy jewelry, and that you don’t have enough makeup on. You need more hair extensions, and your lipstick should be brighter. Your dresses aren’t glamorous enough and you need to be sexier. They’ll ping-pong their bullshit to one another in their little huddle two feet from your door and you’ll watch through the window and feel numb. Three of them will be women, and you will find that equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating. It brings up a lot of the body issues that you have worked really hard to undo, and you feel manipulated and paralyzed at your own lack of control. You want to rage on behalf of girls everywhere and you don’t know how. You will end up wearing sparkly dresses that you hate and you will feel like you don’t look like yourself. That part is true. The insecurity
this causes bleeds into how you carry yourself, and you will suppress your shame and embarrassment until the season is over. You smile to their faces, talk shit behind their backs, and in the end, lie to the press about why you left the show.

  You are beautiful.

  Fuck ’em.

  The kaleidoscope of experiences you have had this year are deeply meaningful and have enhanced your perspective on what actually matters. You have seen firsthand how fleeting and fragile life is, and it has changed your DNA. Your tolerance for bullshit is lessening, and although you are not always graceful with how you fight back, I love that you are a scrappy little lady.

  You are bored with the value system you see celebrated around you. “Compromise” is sometimes just manipulation, and you are learning to identify that. You see a need for more people, women especially, to push back against the system that is in place, and you’ve decided to do more of that. This experience will only turn up the volume on your voice the next time around. Hell yes to this, and go go go.

  Love,

  Sara

  Dear Sara,

  You are writing a book. You have just cut your hair and you chose to try out bangs and you think it looks terrible. You feel old. You went through a recent period of seeing yourself as beautiful but that feels far away from you now. You see your skin changing; more wrinkles and more fatigue. You spend more and more money on products that will reverse the thing that we all know cannot be reversed. You look more and more like your parents, and it feels profound somehow. You are seriously struggling to get over a relationship that recently ended. You thought you were going to grow old with him, and you are resisting letting go. You don’t believe anyone will ever love you as much as he did. You are throwing yourself into your work. You are feeling uplifted and overwhelmed in equal parts most of the time. You have carved out a place for yourself in an industry that you still don’t understand very well, and you don’t feel inspired to keep making music in the same way you have before. You don’t know what you’re going to do with that yet. You feel like writing this book is the hardest thing you have ever done, and you’re certain that people will think you’re stupid, or not funny, or saccharine, or too precious, or a million other adjectives describing a negative experience. You have a loud voice inside yourself that is telling you that you aren’t good enough and aren’t pretty enough and aren’t smart enough . . . AND YOU TOTALLY SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE, DON’T YOU?

  You are beautiful.

  I am your friend and I wouldn’t lie to you. This will be a conversation you can count on having with yourself forever and ever, so get comfy. There are always going to be reasons to doubt your own worth; the question is, how far do you allow yourself to go down that road before you look up and realize that, just like that girl in the ruby-red slippers, you had the power to come home all along?

  Things evolve into other things. Emotions do the same. Forever. Your best ally in all of these shifting seas is your faith in the fact that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. Stay put. Stay soft. Stay gentle and kind. Listen to your instincts. Meditate. Pray. Laugh as much as humanly possible. Pain is okay too. Say thank you for all of it. Feel proud that you have spent most of your life’s energy on cultivating a strong connection to your own soul and the will of your heart. It is leading you somewhere deeply satisfying but never perfect. Observe what is painful right now and see if you can stay courageous enough to share it wholly and honestly. Invite it into your house and be a good student. You are a patchwork quilt of all of these past selves, all these wounded little girls, and they are all here too, listening in some form or another. You have grown into someone I am very proud of, and though I wish I could give you the gift of knowing we won’t ever need to have this conversation again . . . that’s not really the point, and probably not true.

  The work is learning to love whatever it is, so for now let’s do that, shall we?

  I love you, my beautiful girl, and I hope that’s enough.

  Love,

  Sara

  RED

  * * *

  THE DAY I MET Joni Mitchell was as profound an experience as I have ever had in my life. Now, I will start by saying I’ve never actually met Joni Mitchell, but I was introduced to her music by a total stranger in a tiny music school I stumbled upon in the streets of Italy, in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

  I spent the whole of my junior year of college in Bologna, Italy, in an exchange program, studying Italian language, literature, and how many pizzas I could eat in one sitting. (At least two.) My life in Italy was a complicated, yearlong exploration of self-discovery. I was hunting myself down while in the context of a completely foreign world. Some of it was euphoric. Some of it was devastating. All of it was wildly important to shaping me as a human.

  HIGHLIGHTS:

  I ate the foooooooooooood.

  In Italy, it’s totally acceptable for a person to eat an entire pizza alone in one sitting and, well, that’s just outstanding. Italy, you are the granter of wishes. My obsession with Italian food only grew after my year abroad, partly because of the food in Bologna. The city is in the heart of a northern region of Italy called Emilia-Romagna, and is best known for the richness of its cuisine. Hearty, rustic food like meaty Bolognese sauce, long blonde noodles called tagliatelle, and the delicious and fatty mortadella (the Italian bologna) are just a few of the things that were available anytime, anywhere, and were best when washed down with a pizza. I came to know that truly authentic Italian food is actually quite simple, made with a few high-quality ingredients, patience, and plenty of good olive oil. It was hard to find a bad meal, and I didn’t find too many, clearly, as evidenced by the twenty pounds I gained while I lived there, which might be more of a “lowlight” kinda thing.

  I went to Rome.

  I have never been somewhere new that left such an immediate impression. So much so, that during a long walk along the sloped banks of the wide river through the center of the city, I convinced myself that in a past life I was a Roman girl. I visited a few different times over the year, and each time fell deeper in love with the grandeur and muscle of that sprawling city. Even its rough edges were inviting. I once stayed in a youth hostel near the train station that reminded me of the dark, dilapidated house in Fight Club. I briefly thought my friend and I might actually die at the hands of the madman with peroxide-blond hair, who was living in one of the rooms of the hostel. He mumbled things under his breath like, “Keep me away from that window!!” while we tried not to make direct eye contact. He turned out to be a harmless man named Ron, who called every woman “flower” while singing original songs he wrote about forest animals. Rome was full of surprise and wonder like that. It loomed up, first like a fortress, but then eventually softened into a rambling stone maze of history and art and ruin and light. Before I left the hostel, I was kissed passionately by a quiet Roman boy with dimples in a broom closet, and the next day he presented me with a handmade drawing of a delicate alien flower inspired by me. Rome is magnificent.

  I learned to speak Italian.

  Not perfectly, mind you, but pretty damn well. I could walk into a shop and ask for exactly what I wanted without the hot flash of panic that used to accompany that exchange. I still had the vocabulary of a slow-learning four-year-old, but I was proud of myself and gained confidence in my ability to communicate. Eventually, something just clicked, and even though I was still speaking in fairly simple terms, I stopped having to translate every word from English to Italian in my mind before I spoke. There was a newfound ease and fluidity with my speech, like I was a rusty bicycle chain that had finally clicked into a higher, smoother gear. I spent entire evenings around a dinner table with new university friends, clinking glasses of cheap red table wine, speaking only Italian, and came away from those nights full of something even more satisfying than the pasta and tiramisu.

  LOWLIGHTS:

  Most of the American TV shows are overdubbed with Italian voices.

  IT’S FUCKING AN
NOYING. Friends. The Simpsons. Seinfeld. All of them. The bottom line is, I don’t want to watch Elaine push Jerry and say, “Get OUT!!!” but hear “VAI VIA!!!” in the voice of some woman who is not Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I don’t want Phoebe to be in the Central Perk coffee shop playing her guitar, singing Smelly Cat, but have to settle for some rough translation of it that ends up being Cat Stinking sung by the Italian Kathleen Turner. In my time away from home, I craved certain creature comforts like peanut butter (which they don’t sell anywhere), large coffees in to-go cups (not a chance in hell), and George Costanza in his own voice. I know this sounds trivial, but this one hit me where it hurt, in my TV bone.

  I hated being a woman sometimes.

  At first I didn’t see or feel a problem with the constant chatter from men; in fact, I enjoyed getting some attention, and much of it seemed innocuous. “Ciao bella” from a stranger as you walk by isn’t particularly offensive, but it starts to grate on your nerves after a year of hearing it and seeing it anywhere and everywhere. You start to question whether or not it’s “fair” for a man to get to say whatever he thinks about you simply because you have boobs and a vagina. The catcalling was constant, and most of the time, it was more direct and less innocent. My American roommate got hit on at a dance club and then got her hair yanked when she refused to dance with one particular guy. I shocked myself when I grabbed the collar of his shirt and shoved him to the ground and got us all kicked out of the bar. I got my crotch grabbed, standing in a crowd at a concert, by some mystery hand that snaked out from somewhere and then disappeared. It left me feeling the sickening buzz of having been violated without any possibility of recourse.