I could talk all I wanted about how I was traveling the world in search of peace and personal understanding, but my Aussie friends consistently called my bluff when I made excuses as to why I wasn’t practicing my god-given talent of being a musician. I didn’t have to be great, but I owed it to the gift to at least try.
The joy of the collective Australian personality is the strong adherence to the social contract of giving everyone a reasonable right to have a fair go. You can be all manner of crazy, spiritual, intellectual, or godless. Gay, straight, Christian, Greek, Muslim, Yankee, a circus performer or a janitor. It shouldn’t matter; no one person is better than another. Each individual is released to dream, achieve, and inspire. The personal challenge to each citizen who calls themselves Australian is to honor the privilege of making another’s path as wide and peaceful as you imagine for yourself. So long as you are fair dinkum, honest and true in your personal integrity, no matter how nuts someone else thinks you may be (and if you are, you’ll usually hear about it!), it is this social contract that helps define the intrepid Australian spirit. In many ways, to make excuses, to fail to try, is practically an insult to the very idea that all things are possible.
It took me a while to break the habit of letting my confused experience in the Christian music industry turn into a condemning judgment of my entire life. I wanted to erase my faith. Erase my talents. But I couldn’t. These things were, are, a part of me. I was still doing my best to excise them through avoidance and minimization tactics, but they kept coming back, demanding to be recognized in moments that seemed like orchestrated interventions.
One such intervention took place in the office of Dr. Petros.
Dr. P. is a plastic surgeon I met in Sydney, who was supposed to remove a couple of potentially troublesome moles that had developed on my face. (Due to the weakened ozone layer over Australia and resulting potent nature of UV rays that sun-drench the country, skin cancer prevention is among the routine health concerns that every Aussie takes seriously.)
The architecture and design of Dr. P.’s clinic spoke volumes about how he viewed the world. The decor of his clinic had a clean, European feel. Every inch of the modern, fashionable interior design smacked of erudite perfectionism. His walls were decorated with photographs of beautiful, pristine faces of serious, steely-eyed models. Next to them, with surprisingly seamless continuity, images along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rolex, and Bentley. Stepping into his faultless, sterile clinic made me feel like a thick and uninspiring Kansas girl. A fat, bumbling accident of nature that needed thinner thighs, bigger tits, and a better nose. I couldn’t help but feel shockingly imperfect in this place. What did it say about my weak attempts to be vain by removing a couple of pin-point moles, when it was obvious only a complete overhaul would help such a sorry physical specimen?
Like so much of my Australian experience, I took comfort in my anonymity. He was to have no idea that I was a fat, aging version of a Christian superstar from America. I was just a chubby Yankee who wanted to excise a few moles before the inevitable black witch hairs started poking out. Judging by the office decor, this would be the least he could do to help me avoid the pitfalls of aging. And, who knew, maybe it was my gateway to a breast enhancement?
When I first sat down in front of his scrupulously arranged architect’s desk, he grabbed my file, leaned back in his chair, and began scratching thoughtfully behind his ear.
“Jennifer Knapp?” He questioned as if I wasn’t in the room. “Jennifer Knapp.” Like a mystery he needed to unravel, he looked up at me and repeated my name again. “Why do I know that name? This is an unusual name for Australia. Why do I know this name?”
It had been years since anyone had treated me with any sort of recognition, so I was just as mystified as he was. Why on earth would he be so interested in what my parents named me?
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, clueless, “I’m just me.” All I could think about was how fat and unkempt I must be compared to his typical clientele. I wanted him to pluck off my ugly moles and get out of there before he started critiquing my lumpy thighs.
“No. No . . .” he mused. “I know your name. You’ve done something. What are you? I’ve heard of you somewhere.”
It finally dawned on me, but I hoped I was just being presumptuous.. Oh God, I thought. My face felt like it was filling with the blood of embarrassment. Please . . . don’t figure it out. I wanted to be anonymous, especially here, in his perfectly manicured world.
“You’re a musician aren’t you? I’ve heard of you.” He was politely triumphant, but was still trying to place me.
Finally, I confessed to my Christian music career.
“That’s it! Yes! You had a record . . .”
“Kansas? The red one?” I felt defeated, reminded of the fact that this part of my history would never die.
“No, it was pale green?” he launched himself into reminiscence again. “You had long, Indian-straight hair . . . A Little More or something?” He named one of the songs off of the Lay It Down record and knew that he had pinned me down.
I had only done a few shows in Australia, and years ago at that. I asked how on earth he would even know of it.
He went on to tell me about his life growing up in a devoutly Greek orthodox family. The private schooling, the assumptions that he would carry on his family’s religion, his own atheism, but strong appreciation for the beauty of faith.
I tried to keep him at bay. I didn’t want to let him latch on to some perspective of me that represented what I wanted to leave behind. I kept minimizing my art, my contribution to the world, with every sincere recollection he offered of my work. I had more than grown embarrassed about what people assumed my spiritual identity was, even more so in Australia, where proclaiming that one is a Christian is tantamount to many as saying, “I’m a religious nut job.” I wanted the conversation to go to my moles, to my thighs, to my less than average-sized tits, anything, except for this conversation about the past. But he kept moving forward.
As I listened to him continue on, I began to realize his interest in the conversation wasn’t about me. He was actually telling me the story of his life. While I was busy internally processing my own ego, I was missing out on his account of his own history. In recalling the music, he placed himself back in his own journey, his own experience with faith, and was sitting here treating me to an account that was appreciative, contemplative, and far from the bitterness that I had come to frame my own experience.
He didn’t know it, but he was schooling me. I was feeling a sense of conviction, being caught out as arrogant. For so long, I had seen the music as something for which I was wholly responsible. I hadn’t accounted for the role that music takes on outside the creator. He went on remembering how the music reminded him of his Orthodox school days, the soundtrack of his life, how he would be in a band or two and play music in and around his church. The music that he heard, adopted, and created, was a part of his life’s fabric. It had nothing to do with my person. He wasn’t thinking about how I, as another person, had impacted his life, but rather, was telling me about where what I had created had fit into his own.
I sat there, stunned. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t entirely ashamed. He took ownership of his faith experience. He was appreciative of my perspective and my art, but in no way made me the creator or instigator of his own journey with Christianity.
My mind went from chanting the hopeful mantra of mole, mole, mole, please to gradually joining in the first of many restorative conversations I would be afforded to process what I had experienced.
At some point, I blurted out my embarrassment of my history. I downplayed my faith to him, as I had done to so many other of my Australian friends, as if it were a phase. He would have none of it.
“Why would you be embarrassed? What you did was good. The music was good. You weren’t cheesy. It seemed honest. Were you hones
t?”
It was a genuinely probing question, the kind that is meant to discover something unknown about another. It wasn’t a setup, I was free to answer truthfully and felt I had no other option but to be honest.
“Yes. It was a season . . . and I gave my all. I wrote about my faith and my experience as a Christian. But I had to walk away from it,” I found myself lamenting, “I was getting to the point where I didn’t feel that I could be myself.” Apparently my plastic surgeon was becoming my therapist as well.
Again, scratching behind his ear with meditation. “If you’ve done your work to the best of your ability, then you have no reason to be ashamed.”
In that moment, he uncorked the years of torment I had attempted to bottle up inside. In my mind raced a thousand thoughts and sermons that I had failed to live up to. He made it all sound so reasonable and easy, essentially, “All you can do is be your honest best.”
But I had. I had done my best, and it wasn’t good enough. I doubted, I pined, I prayed, and I was still me. I was a gay woman, inspired by Jesus in ways beyond my ability to communicate, who failed to live up to the expectations of all that a Christian was supposed to agree with, believe in, and reenact. I was certain I could no longer be the standard-bearer of an institutionalized religion, but I couldn’t escape the fact that my faith seeped into my art.
Somehow, we were talking about the career I was trying to leave behind. I grew frustrated and tried to turn the tables to him. Internally agitated, I asked, “What about you? You’re a plastic surgeon. Your whole career is about making things perfect.” I gestured to the trappings of subjective perfection that surrounded us.
I suppose he could have rightfully taken my question as an affront. I was flat-out judging him. All I thought a plastic surgeon wanted was to make people into his idea of perfection. I imagined that he was probably judging my B cup as inadequate in some way, even then. How could this man talk to me about appreciating one’s best efforts and gifts when his entire world seemed built around changing anything deemed less than perfectly beautiful? His world made me feel stupid and poorly made. Another way to fail. I understood his idea of trying to be significant in the world, but I certainly wasn’t seeing it through the lens of plastic surgery.
“Let me show you something,” he motioned for me to come around to his side of the desk and look at his computer. In an unexpected move of intimate hospitality, I sat next to this stranger, elbow to elbow, as he proceeded to show me his heart.
On the screen, he pulled up a particularly gory slideshow of disfigured faces. I don’t know if he thought I was capable of handling such gruesome pictures, or if he was in some way disregarding their shock to my system as a form of punishment for my not-so-veiled judgmental inquisition.
“Here.” He pulled up a photo of an outback sheep farmer whose entire nose had been forcefully smashed and rearranged to the lower side of his jaw. Dr. Petros explained that the man had nearly died when an iron gate had slammed into his face. Truthfully, this before photo was an image of a man who was hardly recognizable as a human being. Of course, this man needed to get back into the form of humanity that made him somewhat socially approachable, but it was more than that; his nose was no longer a working nose. He couldn’t even use it to breathe unless Dr. P. helped him surgically. It was hard to imagine anyone being able to recover from the state that I saw, but then Dr. P. showed me the after photo.
I could feel his humble sense of satisfaction. It wasn’t arrogance; it was a profound sense of gratitude that he had used his hands and his skill to change that man’s life. I couldn’t help but share in his sense of amazement. The sheep farmer was a new man; he had his life back.
And so it was, picture after picture, of before-and-after photos whereby empathy forced me to recognize the challenge that many of these faced without the vision, skill, and passion of Dr. Petros. Not once did he brag about himself, nor did he present this display in a prideful manner. After nearly a mesmerizing half an hour, he closed down the screen, and simply and quietly said, “That’s what I get to do. And I love it.”
He was full. Not as a puffed-up man whose coffers were amply filled, thanks to the misery of others, but rather as a man comforted by the irony of living in a confusing world, that maybe, just maybe, he had something to give others that would help them in this life.
I exhaled a peaceful, “Wow.”
“Now,” he said, renewed and on task, “Let’s have a look at those moles . . .”
I had never felt such misplaced arrogance and vanity in all my life. It was starting to feel like there was a not-so-silent conspiracy happening around me that was forcing me to contend with the reality that I was missing my true calling. The hits kept coming.
All of a sudden, it seemed like half of America’s touring artists had inundated Sydney. Bonnie Raitt came through. Kelli Clarkson was on a tear. Ani DiFranco was making the rounds through some of the best songwriter festivals and winery venues. It was like I was waking up and I was surrounded by musicians. Lady Gaga was bouncing around the streets in her underwear and making all the papers, while some poppy chick named Katy Perry was making the airwaves singing some upbeat song about kissing girls and liking it. I tried to block them all out, as my thoughts began to join in the litany of others’ questions.
Why, exactly, am I not singing anymore?
One day I turned on the telly and I got the shock of my life. There, in living color, was the adult version of the young girl I had hoped to mentor back in the days of Alabaster Arts.
“Oh, my God, Karen, come over here, look. That’s little Katy Hudson!”
“Get out!” she said, as she came closer. The shoe had finally dropped. Katy Hudson had changed her name to Katy Perry, died her blonde hair black, harnessed her boobs into a perky short dress, and taken the world by storm.
Once upon a time, the feelings that would have washed over me would have been laden with guilt and shame, but what was happening now was unfamiliar and new. I wasn’t sad, or embarrassed. What I felt wasn’t grief. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I was feeling.
As the music played on and Katy strapped on her dainty Taylor guitar, it hit me. I was jealous! Mad, angry, climb-the-walls, stir-crazy jealous!
It came to me in a rush of adrenaline-fueled rage.
Your whole life you’ve always had music! My thoughts barked and howled.
You are the only one keeping it from happening!
It’s your gift!
Use it! Use it!
My eyes grew wet with tears. “I used to do that,” I said plaintively to Karen.
A pregnant pause, then she offered, “You still can.”
Through all my anger, all my tears, all of my self-loathing attempts to sabotage my own gifts, Karen never gave up on me. She had waded through years of silence, arguments, torment, excuses, and frustration propelled by the fleeting hope that, one day, I would return to the music that had fueled my soul. I had obsessed for so long about my own fate that it had never even occurred to me how sustaining her hope had been.
I began to soften.
I finally dusted off my old Taylor 810, twisted her knobs back into tune, and tempted myself to sing for the first time in what seemed a thousand years. I began to write. It was slow and awkward at first, but it was familiar. Like the old days, I’d wander around the house, guitar strapped on, singing this song and that. I let my voice open up and lead me, stringing nonsense words together until they formed a thought complete enough that I could chase it.
It was uncoordinated and cumbersome at first. My calluses held only a sliver of their former protective strength. My throat was weak and scratchy. I would fight my mind more than my body.
At times, the voices of the past would creep into fits of borderline schizophrenia.
You’ll never do this again.
God will smite you.
You suck.
I fought them.
I will.
Let him.
I don’t.
There were days where the exercises where less musical and more therapeutic sessions of reparative psychology. For every negative thought that entered my mind, for every good reason that I had to not proceed, I used my strength to counter with a positive reply. I took the idea of performing again off the table, trying to convince myself that all I was doing was just getting back to playing again for my own personal good.
I had joy in my life. Love. Energy. Hope. I couldn’t pretend anymore that I had nothing to sing about.
Music was the gift of my life, the one thing that had given me courage, peace, and purpose. I didn’t have to make a job of it; I just needed to sing again. Who cared what came of breaking out the guitar and writing a song or two? For the moment, all I had to do was let it fly.
Before I knew it, I had a decent handful of new songs. A door began to creak open, rusty though the hinges were. Maybe, just maybe, I could perform again?
With my partner’s encouragement, I quit my job and dedicated three months to setting up a small home studio, writing, and recording a demo. I couldn’t imagine where this was going to lead. If my mind wandered too far ahead, I got nervous and was taunted by the fear of failure. I had to block it all out and for now, simply play.
There were so many unknowable questions that challenged any hope for a comeback.
Would there be any interest? An audience?
What about being gay? Will it kill my chances?
Can a former Christian artist even have a mainstream career?
All those questions had to be put to the side. I put up a self-preserving curtain between me and any hoped-for future, dedicating my endeavor as a Christmas gift meant for my family. My Grandpa Gray had always said that he wanted me to make him a recording of just voice and guitar, and now was my chance to honor him. I had written a song for him many years ago that had never made a record. I had never dared play it for him, but now, I was finding that I finally had the courage to share it. The modest goal kept me focused and I completed the task in time to send it out for the holidays.
Facing the Music Page 21