meeting your shadow

23/02/26

‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’ is the newsletter of signed artist and traveller Catrin Vincent, formerly the front-woman of the band Another Sky. Subscribe for news about my first solo record, touring dates and reflections on life in a van and a boat.

Accepting you are human. Accepting life is terrifying. Accepting you cannot go back.

If only we could re-write things with what we know now. If only we had been perfect.

Such a dull word. Perfect. So unattainable. So boring.

Accepting you are never truly safe. Trying to build that safety within, the only place you ever really can. Trying. Trying. Body tensing. You’ve never truly built it.

But it’s time.

Seeing your shadow, so clearly, for the first time.

And it’s not like in the movies. It’s not a monster towering over you, ready to engulf you. It’s just…stood there, like blank space. It’s just there, looking a bit lost, expressionless. It hasn’t been looked at in a long time. Your eyes meet.

You turn away, like you always have. Fearing your shadow. Ignoring your shadow. Seeing the wounded child in your shadow.

How can you ignore a child?

Accepting that things have fallen apart, yet again, and they always will; come together and fall apart, come together and fall apart, and every dark period of your life is a chance for beautiful re-growth, if you allow it.

Fearing that people see you as unstable for being vulnerable and emotional. But knowing what happens when you shut that part of yourself off.

Finally realising that expressing emotion is not being unstable. To feel, to really feel…is to travel. It is to move forwards, or grow upwards, like trees.

Across perceptions, perspectives, ideas. You can admit when you’re wrong, you can hold complexities, and change your mind with new information.

Your mum calls you brave. Says she’s sat in therapy offices with so many people in their forties who lost years of their life unable to make a choice for fear of disappointing those around them, unable to face pain.

Feeling and facing this intense pain now so you can grow, and heal your wounds.

Can every wound be healed? Isn’t that chasing perfection again? Your friend says on the telephone about re-organising wounds instead of eradicating them, finding responses that work now, as opposed to your old ones that no longer work.

Seeing this other beautiful person as whole, and free, and wishing them the best, even if it’s so painful you couldn’t be that best. Hoping they find what they’re looking for. Hoping you do, too.

Knowing.

Your ever-knowing eye -

That correctly reads the tension of the room, but often draws wrong conclusions.

Knowing, though, that you are willing to travel the distance, to the edge of understanding, to see all sides, to live outside of yourself. Knowing that is beautiful. Knowing that this also leaves you very, very vulnerable.

Knowing that when you leave yourself, your own body, to understand others, you are leaving a door open, and anyone can get into your body, even if the curtains are drawn and the lights are off. In fact, it’s not that anyone breaks in. It’s that you excavate yourself and fill yourself up with others. Wondering if there is a way to lock the front door when you leave.

Wondering if you should leave at all.

Knowing you have been here before. Cycles, waves, this is not forever. Remembering, through Covid, sticking on Music For Psychedelic Therapy, and didn’t it get you through? Didn’t you get through? Wasn’t there such beauty after such pain?

Wait for that beauty. It’s coming, again.

Circling back to old patterns. So annoyed at yourself for not being able to break them, but understanding, once again, that life is a spiral. You will revisit things again and again, each time with more understanding. This will break. Give it time.

Trying to be so compassionate. To others and yourself. Actually, to yourself first, for once. Trying to understand why people ‘split’ (decide others are all good, or all bad), why things go so very wrong in our human lives, why most cannot hold complexity or give others grace. Why when humans go into acute stress, everything becomes a battle ground, instead of a bridge to understanding.

Turning your grief into guilt, because helplessness feels powerless. Realising this leaves you helpless anyway; taking on responsibility for things nobody asked you to, always taking on the blame and shame and grief and anger in the room, as if your needs and your feelings don’t get to matter, as if you are a goat about to be sacrificed.

Thinking about where you learned that from. Where you learned to offer yourself up to fix everything.

Resenting that place, those memories somewhere deep in your mind. How the hell did you learn that you, the only person you can control, didn’t matter?

Trying to see pain as a portal.

What can this teach me?

Where can this take me?

Wondering if you need to just feel it, first, somatically, in your body. You can’t intellectualise your way out of this.

This weekend, I supported the inimitable Lily Lyons at St Matthius Church. I didn’t realise how big the church was until I entered, and realised I feel eighteen again. Without the support of a band, my stage fright has returned.

But I know things will get better. Because they did before. And they will again. The circle of life.

Then I drove up to Colchester, and played the first Ember Session, run by folk legend Dean Frost. A talented artist, Tina Bullen, drew my songs ‘Just Birds’ and ‘Glow Stars’;

On Sunday, I went in the studio, and worked worked worked.

Album 2 begins.

C x