Pains of Growing was a difficult project to write, not only because I was writing most of my emotions retrospectively, but because I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to say. More accurately, I was trying to figure out how the story ended. This is something I now realize is impossible to do when you’re writing a story about growing…because you never stop growing.

Pains of Growing is an EP and visual album I made for my senior thesis at Brown University. I wanted to combine my passion for music and film, but most importantly my passion for where they intersect. I was feeling particularly prickly about a year and a half period of my life I was still processing as I entered my senior fall at Brown. I had encountered a series of unfortunate events that all had the common through-line of me entering adulthood (whatever that means…).

As the opening monologue of the visual album will explain, I am someone who grew up with a purpose and a passion and a very specific plan to achieve that purpose. Then all of a sudden, the path that had always been so clear to me was nowhere to be found. My purpose and my sense of self have always been tightly interwoven, so to lose both at the same time was devastating. I had no idea how to get them back.

Pains of Growing takes you through the different phases of growing and processing I did during that year and a half. Each song was a different mountain I had to move (see what I did there), but each one got me one step closer to feeling like myself again.

I could go into depth about each of the songs on the project and the stories behind them but then what would I have made a whole visual album for??? Just go watch it…

SPOILER ALERT: In the end, I find my sense of self again. As the monologue preceding “In My Bones” in the visual album will explain, there was one particular moment when I felt like I was returning to myself. I was in Nashville for the summer before my senior year of college for an internship, and I was journaling at sunset in the backyard of a house I was renting with complete strangers. When I went to Nashville that summer (this was the tail end of that really bad year and a half), I felt like I had nothing left to lose. And so I just leapt.

And then I landed.

In building a new world and life for myself, even just for the summer, I remembered who I was outside of everything else. And I returned to myself.

(Fun fact: the journal entry I wrote in the backyard that day is what the lyrics of “In My Bones” are almost verbatim based on).

And now I live in Nashville!

I’ll leave you with some parting wisdom from 23 year old me—the version of me that is a year older than the version of me that made this project, and is almost 3 years older than the version of me that felt all the things this project is about. When I finished this project, it felt so finite and I felt so secure in my sense of self. I felt like I had finally won this seemingly never-ending battle of losing myself to growing up. I was very certain I finally knew who I was, and that it would never change. A year later, I can say with complete certainty that I will never stop changing, I will never stop growing up, and I will never stop searching for who I am. But the difference is that it’s not painful anymore, it’s an adventure.