Blue Bucket Of Gold is a free weekly newsletter from me, the musician Catrin Vincent. If you pay, I also offer long-form content, like interviews with your favourite artists, new music and songwriting prompts. This newsletter is a passion project; a deep-dive into the human psyche from someone whose life was transformed by discovering how art can heal. It started as a way to digest my favourite music, then turned into a vehicle for change, a beautiful way to understand myself and the world through writing. Please feel free to share and support in any way you can. Thank you for reading.
“I’m rising up with the sun,
no time to victimise myself”
Grief. Sun. Big leaf. Finding an old ‘finstagram’ account and no longer recognising the person I was at 26, but being proud of her - she was on the cusp of great change. And it was so hard, it took years. “Conflict”. How both terrifying and necessary it is. Speaking. Using my voice. Unresolved conversations. Regret. Trauma. Guilt. Anger. Cycling through, cycling back. Spending the day in bed, sick, unsure why. Worrying about everybody, worrying if I’m a good person or not, as if I didn’t just go on an epic odyssey to discover nobody is - there is no such thing. Trying to remember everything operates in cycles, not linear lines. Fighting this OCD brain. I’m cycling back, and that’s okay, it means I can cycle forwards again. And that will be life.
Good days. Birds, animals, anything that isn’t being a human. Watching the way they live in their body, and in the moment, no past or future. Poetry, though. We get words. Gently pulling my mind away from unhelpful thoughts, trying to do the work. Finally being in a safe environment. Wondering how long that will last. Remembering that wondering is a result of trauma, and not a helpful way to live, because then I don’t get to enjoy the safe times of my life. Wondering if I’ll ever really be different. Body scans. Wondering when my body will feel good again. Swimming - yes, it will. Just try. Just get yourself from A to B.
have a little second verse of a song:
my sister, she lives inside three train tracks,
said I'd visit in summer,
watch the leaf tar melt on them,
and at her wedding,
my sister she said she never sang
it's on a cassette tape, Alice, I have the cassette tape
the road gets heavy, the road gets long
I thought me and my sister would always sing songs
