I find I have separated, with fierce and implacable will, the things which matter most to me and the things I do to get through life with the least amount of trouble or attention. I have deliberately, steadily cut myself off from that which bring me the greatest joy, the most profound sense of spirituality, the deepest connection with life. I have known and yet avoided dealing with it, unsure of the cause. But now that I have decided I'm ready to look at the terrifying thing, the mystical source of the panic attacks, I see clearly and calmly that it's not a thing but a rift. The denial of selfhood is the root of all this trouble. I have never asked myself how I could heal it. I haven't wanted to even acknowledge it existed.

I don't want to go into every detail of how it happened; I know, mostly, and that's enough. I don't want to dwell in the past and agonize over why it all ended up like this. I accept that I made my choices based on what I needed at the time I made them. I need something else now. I can't live split in two. I think I literally cannot going on living like this; something worse than panic attacks will happen. I need to be whole.

That sense of no purpose in life? I've got it backwards. I do have a purpose, more than one, and I've known since I was a very small child. I am a musician, an artist. Whatever else I am and have become, this is part of my core identity.

The tragedy of my life, and I think it is a tragedy, is that I've spent years keeping that aspect of myself locked away in the attic like a madwoman. I've attempted to have a nice, quiet, sensible life pretending she's not there, but she keeps escaping and pumping my body full of adrenaline convulsively, begging to be freed, panicked at being denied expression. Panicked. Attacking. Because I won't listen, I won't, I can't, I couldn't. I convinced myself that I couldn't have the life I wanted, that I couldn't be an artist and also pay the rent, be creative and responsible simultaneously. I felt I had to sacrifice one or the other, and because I am a person who tends to see things in black and white that's what I did. The musician was shut away behind a door marked "No."

I think I am about to change that. I'm going to open the door, a little at a time.

Someone was trying to understand what music meant to me. He wondered about the entertainment aspect of it. I told him that was only a part of it, the less important part, really. I earnestly explained how singing isn't simply about performing for others, it's about making something bigger than yourself. You create the music by opening your mouth and singing, yet at the same time it already seems to exist so that you do not make music so much as express it as each note emerges, blends, rises. You step into a great river, I said. You feel the rush and inevitability and beauty of something huge, something much bigger than yourself, as you give voice to the song, creating and created simultaneously. What I love about choral music is you can't do it by yourself. You have to have a community to make that intense music. It feels like flying, like the soul opens up and rushes outwards, and a joyous lightness of being fills you.

I see, he said, it's spiritual. It's your religion.

It's not religion, I said hotly, it's my connection with life. Singing, playing an instrument, is not separate from life like religion is, it's not about the next world, not intellectual and artificial. It's nature, it's the sensation of being a part of everything that ever lived and ever will live. It's existing in the moment, floating on the river of sound and beauty, the song inseparable from being.

Well. Once I put it that way aloud I saw that in fact music is holy for me. It is how my spirituality is expressed and celebrated. And it is why not singing is like living in a dark hole, airless, alone. I realize not every religion falls into my black and white statement; paganism, for instance. But the important outcome of recognising what music means to me is the secondary recognition that I got confused somewhere along the line. I came to feel the holiness was profaned by the humdrum of making a living. I did not want to sully my spiritual depths with commerce. I stopped working as a musician and got a sensible, non-musical job.

I was wrong, though. Art is not diminished or tamed if someone pays for it. People support a musician's long, hard work by buying a ticket to a concert, and in return they are taken on a journey by an accomplished navigator of the river. The audience has a part to play in the communal spiritual experience of a musical performance. So that confusion of mine needs to be examined, and worked over, and let go. I don't think it'll be easy, unfortunately, but I am going to try.

The way I'm going to start is to go to a music store and buy at least one CD. It will be an act of freedom, whether anyone else thinks so or not.

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