Transitions: Messy, Painful, and Full of Possibility

Transitions are rarely tidy.

I know this in my bones—literally. When I gave birth at home, I learned that transition was the most intense, painful, and bewildering stage of labor. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t predictable. It was raw, overwhelming, and absolutely necessary to bring new life forward.

That moment imprinted something in me: transitions are the threshold between the known and the unknown.

Over the past eighteen years, I’ve been living another kind of transition—learning to trust my own voice through the practice of vocal improvisation. For a long time, opening my mouth without knowing what sound might come out was terrifying. My mind screamed for control. My inner critic whispered that I wasn’t good enough, polished enough, “musical” enough. But something in me wanted freedom more than perfection.

So I stayed. I sang. I let myself wobble and crack and make sounds that surprised me. Over time, I built chops. I learned how to listen, how to respond, how to trust myself in the middle of uncertainty.

And then there was the August of curveballs.

Just last month. One after another—work, home, friendships, my personal sense of footing—everything seemed to shift at once. It felt like labor again: messy, painful, impossible to get ahead of. Except this time there was no midwife coaching me through contractions, no tidy timeline for when the transition would end. Just me, in the thick of it.

That’s when all those years of improvisation came rushing back as medicine.
The practice of softening into the unknown.
The practice of quieting the mind and letting the heart lead.
The practice of removing judgment and staying present to what is, rather than what I wish it would be.

Transitions are brutal, but they are also creative. They are the edge where something new can grow. And if I’ve learned anything—from birth, from improv, from these past few months—it’s that safety doesn’t mean certainty. Safety is the trust we cultivate in ourselves to meet what comes.

This is why I hold womxn’s singing circles so close to my heart. In those spaces, we practice together what life keeps demanding of us: stepping into the unknown, voicing what arises, and discovering that our messy, imperfect, astonishingly human selves are more than enough.

Because when we trust our voices, we don’t just make music.
We make a way through transition.
We sing new worlds into being.

If this speaks to you, I’d love to know—would you be interested in an online group singing class for women, or in gathering for in-person singing circles? I’m listening for what’s needed, and your voice matters here too.

xo