Why a pedestal is no use to anyone

Before my first single comes out on 25 September, there’s a note back in time.

Dear 21-year-old me,

I wanted to catch you now, because this is the year you’re going to decide you don’t write songs.

Can’t, actually.

And what’s so sad about that for me, looking back from twice as long as you’ve been around when you make that decision, is that can’t isn’t just wrong in the literal sense. Your decision isn’t about your sense of your ability. It’s not that kind of can’t. It’s about permission. You’re about to take the message you’re not good enough; not allowed.

At twenty-one, you make a mistake with who you take feedback from. I’m afraid that mistake is going to haunt you for a long time. You’re not going to lay it to rest. You’re going to stick to the story it tells you, and tell the story to yourself again and again, deeper and deeper.

This is the story you’re going to tell yourself for a long time.

Someone you know who is (drum roll) A Musician – which at this point in your life you believe is like being A Lion or A Giraffe: a thing of itself, separate from being just another human being – that it’s not good enough for them to set music to. They’re going to laugh at you for having shown it to them with that idea.

There won’t be the ‘yet’ you would offer – will offer – in their place when you discuss any kind of writing with anyone who trusts you enough to show you an early draft. You’ll get none of what you yourself will learn to do (and now do every day with your coaching clients, nearly twice your life time from now): narrowing the gap between what they want to create and what’s made it to the page.

At twenty-one, you’re going to think this is your shame to carry and not theirs. That it only says something about your writing and nothing about them.

In what will become one of your favourite books in a few years, you’ll learn the expression ‘We accept the love we think we deserve’.

Later still, you’ll learn how it applies to our professional lives as well as our personal lives. How we take feedback, or not, and how it shows up all over the place.

But for now, you’ll internalise that person’s opinion, or really the way they gave it, as objective fact. Not that they don’t like what you do or that it is – God forbid on your first go – underdeveloped. You’ll think this is guilt (that what you’ve done is bad) when really it’s shame (that something about you is bad). On every level: wrong.

I think they’re going to enjoy it a bit, what they say to you and how obediently you listen. I think – though you won’t for years – they’ve not had enough true enjoyment or success to realise the world is, actually, big enough for all of us and that as a novelist will one day tell you on your podcast, we don’t do any good by pulling up the ladders we climbed; that it’s our job to help the next person up.

This person doesn’t know you that well; they’re a friend of a friend you look up to, and while they’re (again with the drum roll you’d give it at the time) A Musician to you, for what it’s worth, you won’t have heard his name anywhere except through that same mutual friend as you write this.

It’s okay. You don’t have to know any of this now. I wish I could give you the gift of knowing how much time is ahead of you.

But you’re wrong about something really important, and I’m telling you today because I need to remember this about myself. What you’re wrong about is attributing other people’s confidence to them knowing what they’re talking about. Attributing other people’s treatment of you and of a perfectly good first draft as a failed final one, as meaning they’re better than you the artist and your art, present and future, instead of that they’re simply less aware than you are of how all our minds, all our possibilities, really work.

A pedestal is no use to anyone. Not the person on it; not the person who put them there. No one sees eye to eye with a pedestal. No one gets insight. Save pedestals for art, not artists.

By the way…

If I googled their name today, I wouldn’t find it.

But I would find yours.

In fact, as you write this, you’ll realise you can’t even remember their full name. And that, between ourselves, is still delicious.

By the way, twenty-one-year-old me, our first single as a songwriter is coming out at the end of this month. The singer on it was on the BBC Proms last week. You’re proud of it. You’re proud of her. You’re both so happy doing what you’re doing.

And you’ve both realised making yourself small was never the answer.

Sod the answers. Keep writing questions. And don’t believe anyone who thinks their answers are the only ones.

Enjoy the questions,

Rachel x

Pre-save ‘Kicking The Machine’ by the Knightleys, a break-up ballad about falling in love with your own new beginnings, here.