The Song on Repeat
On inherited music, being with your grief, and learning to receive
Last week I wrote about losing one of my best friends, Kristina, after a two-year battle with bile duct cancer. This week I’m writing about what her death is forcing me to look at. I’m still in it… the grief, the frustration, the unraveling of hard lessons… and this is how I process it all, by writing my way home.
Yesterday my daughters and I were talking about self-sabotaging thoughts (yes, I talk to my girls about self-sabotage and a whole list of other mental/ emotional health topics), and my youngest daughter, Solie said something that sent me a long rant about what it means to own your relationship with your thoughts.
She said, “I can’t help what I think. It just comes up and plays over and over in my head, like a song on repeat.”
She’s eleven, and she described one of the most common human conditions we have, and something that has plagued me for most of my life.
So, she got the big motherly speech. Poor thing. Ha.
Most of us treat our thoughts like weather, like something happening outside of us. Like something we can’t control. Our thoughts are these abstract things that just swoop into our mind and control us without us being able to do anything about it.
But your thoughts come from your brain, and your brain is part of your body the same as your heart and your gut.
We already accept responsibility for the rest of the body. We know movement tends the heart. We know food tends the gut, and the gut tends everything else. Nobody expects the body to feed itself. But somehow, we expect the mind to just... think better, on its own, without us feeding it anything new.
The brain plays whatever is familiar. Whatever is ‘normal’ because it’s what the nervous system wants. Repetition.
So, yes. The looping song is a perfect simile for what is going on in with your thoughts.
If you want a new song, you have to force it in, the same way you have to make yourself pick up the bowl of grapes when the ice cream is right there. The same way you have to force yourself to take the walk instead of sitting down with your phone.
We have to train ourselves. Nobody else can do it and it doesn’t happen by accident.
I gave my big speech (which both the girls sighed heavily at — in the same way I sighed at one of my own mother’s speeches growing up) and then, I went inside to write. Because that is what I do when something feels knotted up inside of me.
Writing helps me detangle the knot inside myself.
And it’s not just any kind of writing. It’s The Memoir Method. My method, the one I stumbled upon in my hot pursuit of trying to help others gain more clarity and confidence in the same way that I have over the years.
I went into my story; I went into the scenes of my past to find the first times I had felt what I was sitting there and feeling.
And what I found while writing was actually something I had just heard inside my long speech to my girls, it my mother singing.
When I was growing up, whenever I complained, my mom had a little song/ witty retort for it. She would say, "Don’t be a mamby pamby, wussy pussy, sissy baby.”
It was a joke and a jab at the same time. It meant Suck it up, buttercup, we’ve got shit to get done, and I didn’t mind it, because I knew she was right.
My mother is one of the hardest workers I have ever known. She ran heavy equipment on all-male crews for decades. She’s been reading self-help books since I was six, and working to rise above life’s difficulties with as much grace as anyone can muster. She is kind and resilient and intelligent and I am her in so many ways, and that makes me both proud and exhausted all in the same breath. Because the song under her song, the one she never sang out loud, was this: softness is dangerous. Rest is weakness. Love is earned by carrying everything and complaining about none of it.
The nervous system learns through repetition, and it learns what to repeat from the people who raise us.
A song sung to a complaining child doesn’t stay a song. It becomes the voice she hears at 41 when she wants to lie down. It becomes the reason she calls her own need to be held “laziness.” The lyrics get passed down the way eye color does, except nobody checks for them at birth.
My mother’s mother gave it to her. She gave it to me, and my eleven-year-old just told me, in her own words, that the record player is already running in her too.
Here’s where mine started, best I can tell…
We lived in a farmhouse in rural Indiana until I was ten. No subdivision, no close neighbors. I wandered the countryside often alone, and I don’t remember ever being bored, because my mind was alive with imagination, lost in whole, wild and fantastical world and futures for myself. My imagination has always felt — almost like a superpower to me.
I still slip off into daydreams easily. It’s one of my gifts, but now I can see what the gift was built on.
For a large portion of the year, my parents worked 12 hour days, six days a week. On Sunday’s, when my parents were home, my dad would often be found out in the pole barn with his friends both thirty yards and a whole world away. My mom could be found rushing through the house trying to stay on top of everything.
Meaning that they were there, but I was alone anyway.
A quick note: this is not - and has never been a jab at my parents. They, just like me, just like you, did and do the best that they can with what they know.
As I sat down with my memories, writing out the scenes of when and where I first felt what I was feeling after our talk, I found that as a child growing up in that house, I learned something very specific: love exists, love is real, it just won’t come out and show itself.
So, that little girl I was, built a world where it does.
She got very good at loving things from a distance, at loving the imagined version, the future version, the potential. Because the far-away thing can’t disappoint you. It isn’t here yet.
I have spent a lot of my adult life loving from a distance. Countries and cities I’m not in. Futures I haven’t built. People I’m not with.
Kristina was one of them. (And yeah, I know this all sounds bad and trust me it’s not easy for me to sit with and even harder to admit out loud and solidify in writing, but here it is.)
I’ve written about the regret already, the calls I kept meaning to make while my friend was dying, the support I kept thinking about giving.
For two years the love I felt was enormous but mostly unexpressed, because expressing it meant arriving, and arriving has never felt safe to me, and I didn’t know that until she was gone and it was too late to arrive anywhere.
That’s what this grief is teaching me, and it’s brutal: love that won’t show itself might as well not exist to the person who needs it. I know, because I spent my childhood on the receiving end of hidden love… and I turned around and hid mine.
So here I am, a week out from losing her, doing the only thing I’ve ever trusted. I write. Not journal. Venting just replays the song louder. What I do is get the scenes down, what actually happened, what I actually did and didn’t do, and then I sit back and ask the two questions everything I teach turns on:
What song is playing on repeat?
What song do I want playing instead?
The old song, all the way down, is some version of I am not enough to make the love come out. Not enough to pull dad from the pole barn. Not enough to slow my mother down. It followed me into every relationship and it’s currently trying to follow me into my business, whispering that the slow, quiet months are a verdict on my worth instead of a season of growth.
The new song doesn’t exist yet, not really. Right now, it’s just a few new thoughts I’m forcing in, over and over in different ways. Here’s how:
I let my father help me, and I fight the voice that says I’m bad for it.
I let my friends support me, and I tell them it makes me sad that I can’t pay them, but I let them anyway.
I let myself OWN that I want to be held, that I want to be soft. I let myself desire what I desire and fight off every thought that tells me I’m not allowed those desires.
I am actively pushing through every thought that says I shouldn’t be held or loved in the way that I’ve always hoped for — that I have always dreamed and fantasized about.
That’s it. That’s the whole new record so far. It isn’t much of a song yet, but my grandmother, the one person who ever loved me with nothing hidden and nothing to earn, wrote in me somewhere that I’m allowed to receive.
I’m still learning, and Solie is watching me learn it, which might matter more than anything I ever say to her, because the song doesn’t pass down through the speeches. I know that for sure. It passes down through what she sees me do when I’m tired.
My mother sang her mother’s song to me. I will not pretend I haven’t hummed it to my kids, but I heard it this week, finally, from the outside. I heard it well enough and did the work to not just know it, but to UNDERSTAND IT.
I’m writing my story forward — the way I want to write it, singing my own song now — with lyrics that truly support me.
Join me in The Caim Circle to do it alongside me.
If this work calls to you, The Memoir Method walks you through the same process I’m using here: get the scenes down, find the pattern, choose what plays next. And I’m hosting an intimate writing retreat this September — reply to this email if you want details.
Find all my links HERE.
xx Jessa