end of 2024

big year

Radio silence - big life changes. I promise I’ll revive this. Poetry? Music news? What do people enjoy?

In March, Another Sky released Beach Day, our second album. Our show at Lafayette this time last year is slowly being trickled out on youtube (and all the normal platforms):

More news re Another Sky will be coming soon.

I have finished working on a score for a beautiful film:

And ended up producing my solo album myself - something I honestly thought I’d never be able to do.

When I worked as a receptionist, I remember answering phone calls while secretly scribbling down notes from ‘sound on sound’, desperately trying to understand how to use gear. It’s nice to think back to ambitious twenty-three-year-old Catrin, desperate to prove to myself I could do it. I wonder what she’d think of me now. ‘A bit of a wreck’, she’d say, ‘but damn, you’ve had adventures’.

It’s safe to say I WENT ON A BIT TOO MUCH OF AN ADVENTURE over the past two years, and I’m looking forward to a bit of peace (pretty please?).

For my solo record, I called in beautiful friends Hana Stretton, Vincenzo Grande, Pete Restrick and Daisy Russell:

And as it comes to a close, I’m accepting it as a snapshot in time, like I had to with Beach Day. In a way, this record is an answer to Beach Day, my own singular voice reckoning with the idea of anger. It feels like a conclusion, of sorts.

I started this substack to try and be a music writer, which failed terribly, but instead, my writing transformed into something really beautiful - a space for self-reflection.

I used to struggle with black and white thinking, believing in ‘good’ and ‘bad’. I’d do anything not to be a ‘bad person’, which really translated into a huge fawn response, attempting to please everyone (an impossible task) and losing myself in the process. Through four years of therapy, I came to learn ‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t exist. The way we experience the world is through our own personal lens, and we all believe our perspective is right. But there is no one universal perspective or truth; and to live, to truly live, is to accept the uncertainty of this.

The wonderful Ellie Moss performed the other night in a circle of musicians, gently introducing a song about change being ‘inextricably linked to loss’, and how we cannot have one without the other.

This year, I lost. Loss loss loss. But through this loss, the great change I need happened. I learned profound things, such as how when we love others, that love is actually contained in us. I learned that when we love, it is a beautiful part of our psyche others can draw from, like drinking from a stream, but something formless that no other single person can ever take away, or take with them when they leave. Isn’t that beautiful? The love we give to others is actually something contained in us, and it is infinite. Love is never lost, it only transforms, and grief stays the same size; life grows around it.

I made a decision at the beginning of 2024, one I knew would have a profound impact on my life. The pain of staying the same became greater than the pain of change, and change has proved immensely painful this year. There have been many nights I’ve laid awake crying uncontrollably the whole night wondering if I’d ever feel okay again.

And I got through every single one.

I had to let go of a lot in order to be who I truly am. A while back in one of these posts, I wrote that I felt like I was at the edge of a cliff, looking into the water, wondering if it’s warm. I’ve jumped in, now. Let’s see.

As this year comes to a close, I think about how writing this substack for two years absolutely transformed my ideas around trauma. Yes, it shapes us, but it does not define us. Mental illnesses are no longer being viewed as exclusionary, we are slowly beginning to understand there is no ‘normal’, mental illness in itself is slowly being understood as a reaction to our profoundly dysfunctional society as opposed to a problem with the individual suffering, what we call ‘personality disorders' we once thought rigid and doomed are becoming more and more treatable and understood. And it is my hope that the people I have loved in my life living with personality disorders get the help they need, and deserve. With enough compassion, and the right environments, we are coming to understand that trauma is this malleable thing we can change within us.

I will be reckoning with my trauma for a long time, which manifests as an anxiety disorder, OCD, but facing it means I have a chance at a happy life.

I think…alright, big claim coming, big ideas, alright? - I think….we live in a narcissistic society, and the root of many of our issues as a species is a direct result of narcissism. I think capitalism is, at its core, narcissism, and I think the patriarchy is inexplicably linked to narcissism, in a similar way to how change is inextricably linked to loss. And I wonder if we are on the crux of a mass reckoning with narcissism, if narcissism has spun so out of control, that narcissism as an idea itself will collapse.

One can dream.

Big unfounded, un-researched claims. Yolo. Maybe that’s what I’ll explore on substack in the new year.

So 2024: hardest year of my life, with beautiful light at the end,

and 2025: I know you are going to be difficult, and life under late stage capitalism/narcissism/global warming might be an ever-slowly sliding scale of difficulty from here on out. But I am so excited to finally live in my own body, as me, and for me.