To Launch Or Not To Launch by Kira Kenley

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Kira Kenley

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 15 Kira Kenley shares her creative dilemmas and decisions every Friday. You can read her earlier posts here

‘So when is the album launch?’ It is a fair question. ‘I’m not planning one,’ I reply. My friend looks at me as if I have just told her I am off to spend the rest of my life in a cave. ‘Why not?’ her inevitable question.

There are so many reasons I tell her. For one, I don’t have a band. Then there is the fact that the album has already been released and I’ve missed the boat. And a launch would mean promotion and I am so crap at anything publicity related. There are so many excuses but for the real answer to her question, I must travel deep…

I have for a long time claimed to not care what people think about me and the things I do but is that really true? I once had a singing student who claimed she didn’t suffer from nerves before a performance. ‘She’ was confident yet for some reason ‘her legs’ would shake uncontrollably.

So are my legs shaking uncontrollably? How much of my resistance is in fact about what people think? What they think of me daring to record my songs and then deeming the finished product worthy of a launch? And what if no one shows up on the night? Is that a reflection of the work or of me as a person? Will I look stupid, the worst possible thing imaginable to this part of me that likes to continually intercept and object to what simply shows up in my life!

Much of this ‘me’ is deeply ingrained and has been molded by the people and the society that grew me. However, can I take a closer look and question its relevance, for if I don’t, I may be forever lost in a groove, always reacting in the same way to differing situations.

How much of me is really how I feel in the moment and how much is how I have been conditioned to feel? How much is what I have worked out for myself and how much is what I have been told by my society, which is so full of contradictions and exceptions to the rules that somebody made up at one particular time?

Perhaps, if I stick with the facts and keep things simple what is conditioned will cease to matter and I will have a launch only because there is an album. There is something to celebrate. Something, which exists now that didn’t before. Nothing more. Nothing less. Perhaps…

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