Thoughts

A Year in Rewind: 2012

2012 was a really special and fantastic year. Beyond all the things I’ve accomplished through my Christmas music. I grew so much personally and professionally this year because I learned how to put fear aside and learned how to see clearer the things most important to me.

By April of this year, my life was running me. I had a very demanding job, a husband I barely saw, a puppy I hardly knew, a documentary crew capturing and following my every moment I wasn’t at work, and this deep obsessive passion to write Christmas music and release a record by the holiday season. The stress felt insurmountable. My goals felt unachievable. Between my professional, personal and passionate endeavors, I thought for sure something was going to give. That really in life, people could only have 1 or at most 2, but never all three of these things.

Then I gained something else – perspective.

I had placed my professional life above all things for as long as I could remember. In every job, I am the first at the office and the last to leave, and took work home with me. I never cooked, I ordered every meal to enable me to multi-task. I barely spoke to my family. I never played with my dog. This was because I put my profession first.

Until it nearly killed me.

One thing many of you do not know, and was not made clear (because frankly I hid it from everyone) in “Failure Club” is the failure of my health. The stress took a terrible toll on me. It exacerbated my thyroid condition, I had a heart arrhythmia and I suffered from illness due to a rapid decline of my immune system. I could not keep weight on and it was slipping from me at a dangerous speed that made my husband intervene. It clearly had to be addressed after I had fainted cold in a bookstore. I did not tell my producers about my health, only telling a handful of people closest to me. I was scared and highly upset that if I did tell them, it would become part of an episode and I didn’t want to make my health issues public in that manner.

When faced with this idea of mortality, you quickly take inventory of what is important in your life and readjust.

I ended up taking a 2 week break from everything to try and recover. I was given a break from work. I told producers that all I was doing was writing music, which was the truth – which would be terribly boring to film. Which was also true. I also said I had a very contagious stomach flu, which was a lie – but I knew would keep the crew away- cause frankly when you say flu people fly. That’s when I started to write music everyday. It really helped to heal me and find inner peace I had not had in a long time. How I was feeling that day was juxtaposed with the the backdrop of Christmas songs.

At the end of that break, with my health still tenuous, I had enough time to figure out what was most important in my life. In the most difficult decision I had ever made, for the first time in my life – I walked away from my professional life. That was vaguely captured on “Failure Club” but not in the way that really spelled out what was going on.

This decision saved me.

For all that everyone has seen me accomplish this year – I feel that 2012 really marks the moment I truly understood that which is important to me. I learned to appreciate my friends and family in a way I couldn’t as an extreme workaholic. I focused my workaholic nature into my own passions and watched a new life not only grow but flourish. I balanced my personal and professional life in a positive way, where it was not balanced before.

My life is wonderful, and I will remember 2012 as the year that truly helped me figure out what is important. The most important lesson I could ever learn.