It’s Over Now is a song about the all encompassing impact of trauma on every day life, how it can extend long into adulthood and the hopeful experiences of beginning to heal.
Josh and I have always written separately and then brought our songs to each other to be finished and to add our parts to them and I’ve always been amazed at how Josh’s songs seem to come out so fluidly in one go. His lyrics don’t go through phases they just pour out perfectly the first time, whereas I have pages of scrawls and scribbles that take usually a good week or so to formulate into a song that eventually gets transcribed to my neat lyrics book. It’s Over Now was the first time a song poured out of me whole.
Every now and then I like to take my banjo to the little church on our land and sing. The acoustics are incredible and every time I sing in that space songs come out, there’s just something about it. Knowing this I tend to turn on a voice recorder to capture anything that happens in there and that's how It's Over Now came into being.
One morning I stepped into the church, turned on my voice recorder, started singing and It’s Over Now came pouring out whole and at the end I burst into tears of relief. It was as though I finally understood that I was safe and that my life was ready for living beyond fear and struggle.
It took me until I was 26 years old, many, many years after the initial events took place to realise that I was still carrying trauma in my body and it took me until I was nearly 30 to realise that I was dealing with PTSD and Complex PTSD as a result. I’ve never personally been one for labels as I don’t want to become the issues that temporarily afflict me but sometimes understanding what is happening in the body and mind in the context of science can be hugely helpful and liberating. I finally came to see that everything I had experienced in terms of mental and physical ill-health was originating from the same place and that this was something that I had the capacity to heal now that I understood the root cause and this was a source of immense hope and the start of true healing.
For years I suffered emotional and visual flashbacks, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, panic attacks, agoraphobia, depression, addiction, hallucinations, eating disorders, pain during sex, fear of intimacy, an inability to feel my emotions, emotional shut down, speech issues, anger, emotional instability, emotional outbursts and crushingly low self-esteem, mania, low immunity and chronic pain and taking all of those as separate issues was overwhelming and often left me feeling full of despair and hopelessness. On recognising that every single one of these symptoms stemmed from the same root cause I was finally given the key to my freedom.
"On recognising that every single one of these symptoms stemmed from the same root cause I was finally given the key to my freedom."
I began to see that each and every one of these symptoms was an emotional messenger trying to get my attention to guide me towards healing and wholeness. All that I needed to do was let down guard and let them in, trusting that, although it would be painful to feel the fullness of these emotions, I couldn’t continue to repress, resist and reject because it was making me incredibly ill. And soon I began to meet them, reluctantly at first, and then to start to listen to what they had to say, here began the process of releasing and letting go.
There’s been a lot of tears, many days in bed unable to move, many cancelled days of work, lots of anger, fear and a few breakdowns but this life I have now is one that was previously unimaginable and I am free in ways I could never have envisaged being. I share this story not because it is a unique story but because it is a common but under-shared and under acknowledged one and because I know first hand how important it is to have a beacon of hope in the darkest hours of suffering.
Carly x
It's Over Now Single Out Today 30th September 2019
Buy single on iTunes: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/its-over-now-single/1480701096
Stream single on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2ZDJWAeYoqFRBMSkHQ1vRg
Physical pre-order packages available now:
£10 signed copy of album
£20 signed copy of album and high quality print of album artwork
£40 signed copy of album and handcrafted Bonfire & Pine necklace (made by Josh!)
£50 signed copy, high quality print of album artwork and handcrafted Bonfire & Pine necklace
Get pre-order packages here: https://www.fishrecords.co.uk/hopeinhighwater/
Pre-order digital links: https://smarturl.it/BonfireandPine
