It's Not That Deep. Or is it?

I've wrestled with myself a LOT while creating this collection, specifically about how much of my shadow to share with the world. Because yes, some of you may have noticed a feisty side of me poking her head out lately…and having some fun :) This song was the most difficult decision of them all, as I want sleeping dogs to continue sleeping.

Rest assured, I am still very much here, and still the same deeply tender, overly self-aware Caroline you have always known (and hopefully loved)!

From day one, I have been very clear that this artist project is a 100% honest expression of me. And honesty, unfortunately, cannot exclusively exist in the soft, dreamy, ethereal moments.

Sometimes…you have to get burned in the nightmare to appreciate the dream.

There is a joy & burden in awareness, and morality is filled with grey area and spaces-in-between. We're all humans trying to make sense of this weird and confusing human experience. I am firmly in the camp that believes we are all inherently good and genuinely doing our best with the information + life experiences we've collected. I am also known to chase a lesson in every interaction…often to the point of my own insanity.

Suffering…ugh! Christianity points to sin. Vedic and Ayurvedic traditions point to karma and the misuse of the senses. Aristotle found virtue somewhere between extremes. But this past year, I have gravitated towards Dante, who explains that love itself is not the source of suffering. Love misdirected, distorted, or disordered is.

The situation that inspired this song is a story of someone else's misdirected, distorted love. I walked away from it quietly, but not with my tail between my legs. Rather, with a genuine realization that this situation was not mine to heal, and that perhaps the answer was to simply set it down and walk away…and that there doesn't have to be a lesson in every interaction. For once...I chose my own sanity. 

And somewhere along the way, my own distorted love for myself started confusing choosing not to engage with something with losing my right to speak about how it made me feel. Those are not the same thing.

So this song is a bit of a reclamation: the period at the end of a conversation that ended a long time ago.

I don't regret walking away, I don't wish I had fought harder, said more, sent another text, won the argument, or gotten the last word. But I also don't believe that moving on from an experience requires me to hold back this ✨BOP✨ that I made (top to bottom, in the heat of a weekend. After the weekend, I closed my laptop and didn't re-open the project for an entire YEAR!!!).

It is angry, sarcastic, petty in places, funny, and yes, absolutely…a little mean 😏. It is also exactly how I felt for three minutes in the middle of a much larger story. If this project is going to be an honest expression of me…that version of me should exist here too.

I think everyone has encountered some version of this character before, whether it's a former partner who won't stop texting, the person who turns boundaries into a power struggle, or a person who can explain their behavior so eloquently that they somehow emerge from any situation standing on the moral high ground.

…and if you're endlessly curious and open-minded (as I am) and you genuinely seek to understand where that person is coming from, you can spend months or even years trying to understand them.

You can analyze their motives, examine your own, search for the lesson, consider the morality & impacts of your reaction, wonder what wound caused what behavior, which attachment style explains which decision, and what karmic lesson your eternal spirit might have riding on the tie that binds…

You can read all of the Seneca & Marcus Aurelius. You can attend therapy, church, meditate, or any preferred spiritual practice to understand (or signal 😜) your morality. You may genuinely do all of the deep shadow work and have tea with your own demons.

After much time spent reflecting, I'd like to offer my final thesis statement on the whole ordeal:

Sometimes it is simply…

not that deep.

It's Not That Deep is out now, and it's 1/12 of my album I’ll be sharing with you on 11.2. Listen here —> https://open.spotify.com/track/71jB5VCKrDSrjFnb56QsrM?si=138f37440d7d4fe2