Your Courage gives me Courage
NF the rapper, the power of vulnerable art, and a book cover sneak peek
“Why are you so excited for this concert?” My husband asked me as I sat down to Mexican Coke Carnitas Tacos from Illegal Petes before heading to Ball Arena in Denver for a concert.
I thought for a moment.
“This music has been with me through some of the darkest times of my life. And it was also there for me when I was deciding to truly embrace being a writer.” My husband nodded along, taking another bite of his taco. I’m sure he could hear the whirring of my external processor revving up.
We were headed to see NF in concert—the Hope Tour. Now for those of you who don’t know me super well, or who aren’t familiar with Highly Sensitive People, I feel I need to tell you that as an HSP, I don’t tend to gravitate towards events like concerts in general. They are loud, overstimulating, later at night than I prefer to be out, and the crowd…phew. As someone who is very in tune with the emotions with others (whether they want them known or not), it is a very challenging environment for me to be in a large crowd of people with so many feelings slamming into me. I am (gratefully) getting better at filtering out some of that ambient emotion, but crowds tend to be an anxious place for me for that reason even still.
So for me to be excited to go to a concert, and buy tickets to it month in advance, requires a level of intentionality that not every concert goer would ever even consider. I only go to concerts of artists that I’m really excited about. And even then, I know that I’m going to need to give myself some emotional space and time to recover from that experience. As I reflected about this concert and what had me so excited to go, a few things came immediately to mind.
NF is a true ARTIST, and his art is extremely vulnerable in a way that gave me courage to be vulnerable in my own art (no matter what others thought) at a time when I really needed that encouragement. Perception was the first album of his I ever listened to all the way through, and the spirit of rebellion and commitment to the art woven through the lyrics, truly gave me what I needed at that time in my life.
As an artist who has shared so much of his life with his fans, NF has been very authentic and vulnerable, in a way that has allowed the fans to weep with him when he was weeping, and now at the debut of his Hope album, to rejoice with him as well. I was excited to be with the fans who I knew had walked both their own hard roads, as we celebrated with NF the turn towards hope and healing made clear in his latest project Hope.
It was the right concert at the right time. I had been planning on going to the NF concert at Red Rocks in 2019, but I had a tiny one year old at the time who had a hard time sleeping so I told myself, “I’ll see him next year.” HA! But now as I look back, I know that of all the NF concerts I could have gone to (if there had been any between 2020 and 2023)—this was the right concert at the right time. Not only because we got to celebrate NFs positive turn in his mental health as well as the joy of his fatherhood journey, but because I needed to celebrate the positive turn in my own mental health after the darkest two years of my life.
I’m going to keep this table talk post a little shorter than some others—I’ve been running around like crazy trying to work through my final round of edits on my poetry manuscript, figuring out all the publishing things, and then of course there’s the farm, my kids and my other part time job doing copywriting. It’s a lot—but we’ll get through it!
But what I wanted to say to you today is this: your courage to be vulnerable and authentic will always give courage to someone else to do the same. One day NF was writing rap songs in his bedroom alone, and the next day he was singing with a crowd of thousand who connect with the way he felt—and in that connection, began to find healing in some small way. This dramatic turn of events will not be everyone’s story, but that’s okay. Even if your courage to be authentic is only seen and appreciated by one person—that’s enough.
You don’t have to be a writer or a rapper. You don’t have to be famous or well spoken or influential. You just have to show up in the world as yourself—it’s enough I promise. And your courage to bravely show up and offer the gifts you have with the world, whether it’s cooking or administrating or creating something with your hands—will always inspire someone else to dare to do the same.
For those of you that have been following me on social media, I posted a little sneak peek of my book cover earlier this week—but I want to share it here too. Because my artist friend Bethanie Pack did an incredible job with the artwork, and I am so grateful for her courageous vulnerability in her art that has always been so inspiring to me—and the reason I commissioned her to do the artwork for this project.
This book was a work of incredible courage and vulnerability—and I’m both incredibly excited to release it, and mildly terrified. I’m still hoping to launch it late autumn this year, but I’m trying to give myself grace for the season of life I’m in. But what I really want you to know is that work like this never happens in isolation—there are so many other artists who have inspired me, who have pushed me, and who have cheered me on during the past seven years that I have been pursuing publication. This isn’t the first book that I thought I’d put out into the world—but it’s the right one. And it’s the right time.
More soon dear readers—in the meantime, I hope you dare to live fully in your own life with your own gifts in your own sphere, knowing that someone, somewhere is watching and you are their inspiration.