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.
There is lightning and raging thunder outside my window, cracking through the sky so hard, the whole house shakes. My mum tells me the golf course was hit, a big, monstrous, hot strike of nature, and the golfers all ran for the hills - houses came under attack, too - power-lines out, phones down. Yesterday, my phone lit up with a severe thunderstorm warning in London. I texted my friend who lives on the marshes, in a boat, saying,
‘do you have somewhere to stay?’.
She assured me she was in the best place. I thought of Noah’s ark.
The cracking of this thunder somehow reminds me of fingers snapping. I close my eyes, and I’m back. We’re about to perform. As the trains pass by upstairs, Vinz says,
“wouldn’t it be cool if when you sing your lyric about a train, one goes past?”.
We’re in a beer mile under train-tracks on a bridge, performing for Storytime, and every so often the roof rumbles like thunder, too. I read my poem, messily, untrained compared to the other poets, but as soon as I say the line,
“never again will I choose bitterness”,
The audience snaps their fingers as applause…or is it something else? I’ve never experienced this before. I’ve noticed it at poetry nights, but never experienced this reaction to my own art. I’m so used to hands clapping, and I know, deep in my soul, that I’m somewhere else, and my old life is well and truly over, and there is no road back.
Complexity. I miss the people it doesn’t make sense to have in my life any longer, I’ve finally gotten the change I once craved, and I’m terrified, I finally have the opportunity to be fully seen and I’m running for the hills, I hold both immense gratitude and immense grief, and I now understand that to live is to hold that paradox forever;
“for love and hate mark the same hand”.
Tonight, I cry on my boyfriend after taking headshots and self-taping for an extras company who need a pianist. I’ve been making content for my music career, too, and I’ve always found being filmed massively triggering for my body dysmorphia. But tonight, I make a break-through. I get to the root of why I’m struggling;
“I had so much to offer. All through my twenties, I had so much to offer; my words, my perspective on the world, my intelligence, my kindness, my art, my ability to hold complexity and speak and say all the things everyone’s always too scared to say. And it felt like all anyone did was attack my appearance, and so I had to put on a performance. I couldn’t be myself. I was being watched. My biggest strength is my authenticity. There is so much more to me, and I’m frustrated with the world, because it’s like we can’t seem to ever exist in it as our full, whole selves.”
And then I think about how I briefly escaped it all into nature, this weird, crazy, desperate bid for freedom, to shut everything else out, and how I finally felt free when I rode a bike down to a lighthouse, and got in the sea, and got hit by a wave, and started laughing and crying with a thick cut down my leg, and how I knew, I just knew the direction I was going in from that moment onwards, and that meant the death of Catrin Vincent from Another Sky, my old life, so many things and people I loved, the end of so many relationships; that meant the death of twenty year old me so desperate to be wanted and liked by others…it meant the death of so many things so that so many more could grow, so I could finally be complex.
Complexity is freedom. To be messy and flawed is to be a whole human being.
We are all an archipelago of islands, these complex messes of human beings who think our individual versions of the world are correct - no, the world is infinitely complex, and underneath all our judgement and anger and self victim-hood is a pervasive love, there for anyone who wants to dip their fingers into the river of it. It’s there, if we just look. We can step out of the false world any time. The door is always right in front of us.
I said to a filmmaker recently about my album,
“I felt like I was up and far away somewhere, looking down on the fabric of humanity, this giant web, and I could see so clearly how we actually do not hate each other, and how all conflict is a form of grief”.
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From burning the way to burning bridges (even if just musically/professionally speaking) 🧡