Ever since I decided to take the audition, I’ve been having recurring nightmares. Can’t find my violin 2 minutes before a concert where I’ve been hired to play 1st and 2nd violin simultaneously; showing up to the audition and realizing I’ve forgotten to actually practice for it; and just a general sense of being places I don’t really wanna be, around people (or in one case, a music stand…) who don’t really want me there. Fuck you, music stand!

10 seconds after one such nightmare this morning, Ben busted into our bedroom in Vermont announcing that he’d forgotten about the appointment he’d made. He needed me to help him take his mom’s red Toyota Rav 4 in to get winter tires put on, in time for her Christmas visit from Florida. (She and her partner are snowbirds.)

Eyes barely open, post-nightmare, pre-coffee…I had to follow my boyfriend’s truck to the village mechanic, down our incredibly steep and curvy mountain dirt road—now covered in ice and snow—in a car that STILL HAS SUMMER TIRES ON IT.

Have I ever mentioned that I’ve totaled TWO cars in my lifetime?! As in, gotten into accidents that rendered them useless forevermore??

When I was 16, I was going a litttttle too fast around a steep bend on our rugged dirt road. I hit the brakes in the green Toyota mom had leased for me to make the 50-minute drive to high school, and proceeded to completely lose control. For a moment there I thought I was going straight into the ocean, likely crashing into one of the giant boulders on the beach first; but I somehow steered myself to the right, making a 360 degree sideways-flip off the right shoulder and into a swamp. I calmly exited my car as if I’d meant to park there, and walked approximately 20 feet to my front door.

When I was 22, I was driving my best friend home in my mom’s new car from a night out in the city when we hit black ice on the highway going 100km/hour. At first when we started gently fish-tailing, my instinct…sigh…again… was to hit the brakes. At this point, I was shocked to find that the more I tried to straighten us out with the steering wheel, the more we swerved—and the more we swerved, the louder we screamed. I’m talking, Carleton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air screams.

Within seconds, our car went catapulting across the road in search of a better life. In its final moments on earth, my mom’s shiny black 2009 Toyota Corolla performed another perfect 360 degree sideways-flip upon hitting the shoulder (this time to the left), making an Olympic landing as the windshield smashed in on us like celebratory fireworks. We found ourselves miraculously in a rare section of highway flanked by a fluffy bed of snow instead of trees. (Ironically, the last thing mom said to us before we left that night was, “Don’t crash the car!”)

Gravel, and ice. The two gaping holes in my Driver’s Ed training.

Combine these two perils, add in a mountain, and you get the road I have to drive on whenever I need to get somewhere while in Vermont during the winter. My sure-fire recipe for PTSD.

So. My tendency to crash Toyotas in mind, I snailed that red Rav 4 to the mechanic. My heart leaped into my throat as I went around that first turn, where the tree-line disappears for a moment and the most incredible vista of the Vermont countryside spreads out to the right. One false move on ice would have sent me loop-de-looping down the entire mountain—but lucky for me, the ice of yesterday was covered in a sheet of crunchy fresh snow.

At some point though, I’m going to need to face my fears, and learn how to not Freak the Fuck Out and hit the brakes when I inevitably hit some ice going downhill.

Somehow, in the moment when I start to slip, I must simply… let go. To understand, that contrary to my control-freak nature, the thing to do here is—nothing?!?

Obviously “one” should probably go slow enough in the first place as to not lose traction… but should “one” hit ice anyway, rather than clomping the brakes or wildly maneuvering the wheel, what you do is just allow yourself to slide until your tires grab hold of something solid again. (And maybe plan which ditch/swamp to gently flip slide into, if need be.)

It reminds me of a client I had the other day, who has been experiencing some sadness and grief, but isn’t quite sure what to do with it. The fear is that if they surrender to their grief, it will take over. They’ll get lost in it, never to re-emerge. A lot of their energy is going into trying to control their emotions, censoring themselves from expressing anything that might be perceived as “negative” by loved ones. They mentioned feeling restricted in a way, like they’re walking around with this giant storm cloud over them.

“What does the storm cloud look like?” I asked.

“It’s giant, gray, and almost…cartoon-like? It’s taking over the entire sky.”

“Who or what is aware of this cloud? What is it covering?”

“Just me.”

“And is this cloud actively raining right now?”

“No, but it’s full, like it’s ready to burst—it needs to rain before the sun can come out again.”

“It needs to rain before the sun can come out again. How might this apply to your life?”

This is one of those moments in a coaching session, where I feel the energy start to shift.

“…I think I need to let myself feel sad, before I’ll be able to experience joy again.”

One of my favourite tools to use in coaching, is metaphor—even though I was really skeptical of it during my coach training. We were taught that sometimes it is easier to approach an emotionally-charged problem by first dealing with it metaphorically.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Let your problem take on another form ie a person, place, thing, animal, etc. If you allow yourself to drop your thoughts and tap into the energy of the problem, an image will often pop into your head quite naturally, like a waking dream.

~the audition I keep having nightmares about feels like…an octopus…clinging to my body…

Step 2: Describe this image in as much detail as possible. What does it look like? What is it doing? What does it want? (In a coaching session, I’d ask questions intuitively, helping to create a really clear picture of what’s going on.)

~it’s a big purple octopus, with wide, fearful eyes—all 8 of its limbs are wrapped around my entire body. It’s super needy… it’s trying to seem like it’s just hugging me, but actually it’s sucking the life out of me. It’s making it hard to breathe, hard to move. It’s preventing me from doing anything, really, other than just surviving. What does it want? I guess it wants me to stay the same? It’s scared that if I keep growing, I’ll leave it behind… I’ll forget about it…etc.

Step 3: Now that you have a pretty vivid image of the metaphorical representation of your problem, explore metaphorical solutions to the metaphorical problem.

~okay how would I deal with a really clingy octopus? I guess I would call the local aquarium? I’d want to get it back to where it belongs. The ocean?? No, it’s definitely an aquarium octopus. Hmm, how did it get here in the first place? I think I allowed it to attach itself to me. Could I simply relax, and maybe then it’ll relax, too? Maybe, but the key thing here, is that I do not want this octopus ON ME right now. I want to get it off. Do I even want it around?! Like, could I gently ask it to climb off me, but then observe it? Maybe I could simply watch it being silly and ridiculous, from a safe distance? I could set a strict boundary around the time I allow the octopus to spend with me.

Step 4: Apply the metaphorical solution to your real-life problem.

~I could release myself of this pressure I’ve created to do well at the audition, in addition to writing a whole damn book about it; and just… observe the madness of it all from a safe distance? Whatever that means… Or I could decide, I will only practice for 1-2 hours a day, once the holidays are over. Would it be so bad though, if I just… left the octopus in the aquarium? If I didn’t do the audition at all? What’s the worst that could happen?

Oh fuck.

I think it is ME clinging to the OCTOPUS. I’m worried if I leave it at the aquarium, it’ll forget about me. It’ll make new friends. It won’t need me anymore. I’m scared that if I don’t do the audition, I won’t be hired anymore, which means I won’t be able to make rent. My colleagues will forget about me, my work crew will have no reason to hang out with me.

So now what???

Well…

That’s for me to explore, in a more private place for now.

But I think the solution here, whether I choose to listen, is the solution to all the things.

Slipping on ice, processing grief, a crippling fear of financial insecurity:

Let the fuck go of whatever you’re trying to control, and allow the natural force of things to carry you.

Take a few deep breaths, tap into that soft, wise part of you that knows solid ground is waiting up ahead—and let yourself slip around in uncertainty for a while.

Keep your eye on a really soft ditch to land in though, just in case.

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