Back To Shore

As long as I can remember I have been a person of words. Reading. Writing. Talking. Though the latter needs the addendum that I’ve always been a bit shy around people I don’t know (yet). If I’m on a familiar / friendly terms with you it might happen that I talk a lot, that I talk fast and that I won’t shut up.

A long time ago I tried to explain why many of Frank’s lyrics resonate with me the way they do:

All of a sudden there were these songs – these words to be exact – that touched me on so many levels, because I could relate to so many of the emotions or situations he was singing about. [….] because these words express what I feel or have felt at some point so much better than I ever could.

When I was writing about some of Frank’s words before, I usually was able to express in depth in my own words how and why his words resonate with me. To reference my own experience in my own words. To share my thoughts and emotions in my own words.

Until “Somewhere Inbetween”.

This song and these words are something I feel deep down in my bones and in every fibre of my being. I can’t find the (right) words to tell you why. And trust me, I tried. In so many words and so many different ways. The song has been released two months ago and I spent quite a bit of that time to think so many thoughts about it. To start draft after draft of this post. For now though I’ve decided to abandon the idea to explain in depth and in my own words why these lyrics resonate with me so incredibly much.

“All my fucking life” I’ve been struggling with lack of self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, tons of self-doubt and everything that comes with it. To some extent I still struggle with it and just slowly with help of therapy I did in 2022/2023 and with work I need to keep doing on myself, I’ve managed to understand some of the causes and to start finding ways to overcome some of it.

My self-doubt and lack of self-esteem have been telling me for so long to “put on a show” of being an accomplished and trouble-free child / teenager / adult. They only rarely allow(ed) me to share my doubts and fears and struggles and often also not allowed me to share my ideas, my wishes or my needs with others, because self-doubt and a lack of self-esteem tell me I don’t deserve to do that. Self-doubt and lack of self-esteem still also question many of the positive things that are said or happen to me. Even with the positive things I facilitate for myself or others, I still doubt that I can own that accomplishment or that I deserve it.

Knowing the concept of imposter-syndrome in theory doesn’t magically erase the doubts and struggles, let me tell you.

“Putting on a show” can be so isolating. Battling imposter-syndrome is so exhausting. And this song describes all these struggles so perfectly. There is nothing left for me to add. Except to thank Frank from the bottom of my heart for putting this deeply personal experience into a beautiful song and for releasing this song into the world. To thank Frank for sharing his vulnerability with us and for finding the perfect words to capture these difficult emotions. And by doing so help me to articulate (to myself at least) more of my own emotions as well.

I have no idea how visceral I’ll react to see and hear this song at my next gig! I might turn into a weepy mess at the barrier. Be that as it may, I can’t wait to hear and experience it live in October.

Here are a few thoughts on the books I read in form of the often short and possibly not very substantial reviews on Storygraph. Even if I don’t rate book as such anymore, I’ll here share them in order of how much I enjoyed reading them. Favourite first, obviously.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin, 2014
If I still rated books, this would have gotten 5 stars. Such a lovely story about real people and their lives, misfortunes and mistakes but also their joys and achievements. It’s also about books and why we love and need them. Sooooo good. This has been the 3rd book I read from Zevin and I enjoyed all of them. They’ve all been unique in their plot, which I also liked a lot because it shows how good a writer she is. I’ll definitely try to read more of her.

No Time Like The Past (The Chronicles of St Mary’s #05), Jodi Taylor, 2015
Another entertaining story from St. Mary’s. There is always so much going and again they are a whirl-wind through history, that I sometimes wish they’d slow down a bit. I mean they do in the plot, but it’s not noticeable in the storytelling as such. I just sometimes feel like I’m loosing track of who’s where/when and what’s happening to whom and all. But maybe that’s just me.

The Edge of Lost, Kristina McMorris, 2015
The summary mentioned “skillfully weaving these two stories” and I found that misleading, because it wasn’t really two stories, was it? I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed the story, but it was such a slow burn and sadly enough I didn’t manage to care about neither the main nor some of the side characters all that much. The end comes with a few surprises at least, but by that time I had already almost lost interest.

The Lighthouse Library, Rachael Lucas, 2024
I enjoyed most of the previous Applemore books, but didn’t know this would be a standalone in the series. It was nice enough, but to me it tried to hard to be educational about environment and poverty and all that stuff. It would have needed more substance for me to have any impact, to me this felt a bit performative.

The Wake-Up Call, Beth O’Leary, 2023
I enjoyed previous works from Beth O’Leary, but this just didn’t quite land with me. The writing was fine and the plot idea as such okay for me. I liked the competition angle and miscommunication as a trope often enough works for me, but at least halfway through the story I wanted to knock some sense into the female lead and force her to address what upset her last Christmas. Ugh! The actual reason for the not / wrongly delivered reason was so lame IMHO. All in all… just no cup of tea sadly.

The Guncle Abroad, Steven Rowley, 2024
I guess after how much I enjoyed “The Guncle” a sequel had a lot to live up to. For me this story sadly didn’t deliver as much as I had hoped. Parts of it felt too much like a travel advert for Europe, parts were just a bit silly. I didn’t understand either why Greg and Livia had to marry right now and neither why Patrick had ended things with Emory. I tore through it on a weekend, but if I’m honest a lot of that had to do with me wanting to get it over with.

American Panda, Gloria Chao, 2018
For some reason this book wasn’t for me. I found the writing a bit boring, didn’t find it in me to care all that much about the main character and all in all neither the plot.

Lyrics: “Tough To Be A Dreamer” – Felix Hagan & The Family, 2017

As you can gather from the lack of posts these past few weeks, I still have not quite the idea / plan what to do with this space. It might indeed end up being a place where I archive some of fangirling activities.

Fangirling | Possibly about books and movies but let’s be honest mostly about Frank Turner probably. I’m still working on my post on the other song from the last album, which resonates with me so deeply: “Somewhere Inbetween.” It’s going to take a few more days; hopefully not weeks. I got a bit distracted this weekend because another of my favourite (sadly still not well known) artists – Felix Hagan – did an Insta Live on Friday. Like in the “(not really so) good old days” of lockdown 2020/2021 where we gathered on his Facebook for Felix Friday to hear him play all the songs from everyone. It was nice to do that again and he shared exciting news about a new band and potential tour or at least gigs. If that works out I really hope I can make the trip over to the UK for that. I also had to have a good “listen to all the Felix songs” session yesterday.

It’s always funny in a nice way when my entertainment / media interests collide. I’ve been reading the sixth book in the The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series recently, on of my favourite book series at the moment. And I came across an historical event that sounded familiar! Because Frank used it in one of my (many) favourites metaphors in a song. That needs to be added to my Lyrical History of course.

Funnily enough when I googled to fact-check, the first results lead me to the 1990 movie (and the novel it’s based on) with Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith. I knew of the movie, of course, though I hadn’t seen it. But I only knew it with the German title, because back in the day we only knew them with the German titles over here. So I never made the connection before.

Looking back know I feel like I chatted with another fan about that metaphor once and they mentioned the historical Bonfire of the Vanities to me, but it’s a very vague memory and it obviously didn’t come to my mind, when I first compiled the Lyrical History list.

Books & Language | I’ll try to post the “Books I’ve Read in June” post this evening, probably while watching the football. For some reason I planned to finally start with “James” by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the slave Jim, who is part of that story. I don’t always like retelling of classic stories, but this sounded interesting enough. I thought I should probably read the original first, because I have never done that. Now while I do, I vaguely recall some of the plot from what I now believe to have been a German translation for children (in a condensed form) of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finns stories. Anyway, I started and am still reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment, but admit that I’m struggling with Twain’s writing a bit. I struggle with the meandering boy’s voice of the narrator and the – what I’ve learned from Wikipedia – vernacular language as the “informal, spoken, dialect” language. I admit I also struggle(d) with the regular use of racist terms, like the N-word, which I consider to be offensive even in the context of this “masterpiece of literature” (some call it). I know it was commonly used back then and I don’t say this novel should be revised to exclude the word now. I’m just telling you how I feel about it. I do think some (childrens) books could / should be revised thought to not use those offensive terms any more or at least should come with an explanation why they still do. But that’s just woke little me, I guess.

Football “Experts” | I’ve been watching the Germany – Denmark match last night with a bunch of guys in the room. I don’t care about football all that much to be honest and realized my main entertainment was hearing those armchair experts comment on the game, the moves, the players, the referees and so on. They had an opinion on everything and of course they were always right. To be fair, they also weren’t dead serious about it and knew their limits. But I was wondering if that is a football fan thing or a male thing? Do female football fans act the same in a group? Do fans of other sports do the same when they watch a game? I used to go to icehockey games for a while and it was similar: the men always had something to say about the the teams, the players, the moves etc. So maybe it’s a gender thing after all.

Mental Health | I’m doing mostly ok at the moment. Trying to practice a lot of self-compassion. Listening to some podcasts to help me get back on track with a more healthy behaviour or to just recap things I’ve learned before. Meditation. Self-care in form of doodling. One of the many postive aspects of that is, that I’ve learned to live and accept and just don’t give a fuck about imperfections. Mistakes. Messing up. We all do.

“All that really counts is how you live today…”