Megan Nicole On Using Music To Get Through Self Doubt
Megan Nicole is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter, Twitch streamer, blogger and YouTuber. We asked Megan to share the story behind one of her new original songs, “Temporary.”
I had a brief 15 minutes before I needed to hop a call, but asked my husband to sit and write with me while we had a moment. He started playing this progression on his guitar and I began to hum a melody and that melody attached itself to the words “ I keep hoping that this is just temporary”. I had to leave to take my call, but I knew I wanted to go back and finish this song we had started. I still wasn’t sure exactly what I meant by those words. After all, we were in the middle of a pandemic, but it felt too on the nose to run with a song about that.
When we came back together the next day to finish what we started, my mind was spinning from a sermon I had watched while having breakfast. It was all about our thoughts, the power of them and how every little one that pops into our head is not always truth. I realized how heightened my anxiety had been and how I had really allowed myself to wade in these negative thoughts that had been seeping into my mind:
“What’s the point of creating?”
“Nobody cares”
“I’m not good enough”
“I’m not young enough”
“I have nothing to offer the world”
The more I allowed myself to recycle thoughts that weren’t true, the more I allowed them to become my truth. Then I would quickly find myself in a really negative space, a space I have been in many times before. I space that I hated, but would sometimes find easier to just sit in.
I knew what my song would be about now. It would be about all those moments I found myself in what felt like the darkest pits, but how it always managed to be a passing “temporary” moment once I began to intentionally throw out all the thoughts that don’t serve me and fill them with real truth.
“I am enough”
“I have a purpose”
“There is a plan for my life”
“It was a reminder that it’s not my fault that these thoughts slip in and that I have more control over them than I realize. ”
If you haven’t heard my music before, a lot of it is always feel good, happy go lucky, relationship driven, but for the first time in a while it felt good to write a song almost to myself. It was a reminder to myself that everything I was feeling was temporary, a reminder that it’s not my fault that these thoughts slip in, and that I have more control over them than I realize.
When I find myself in those difficult moments I like to journal and get all the yuck out of my head. I like sitting down to read in my bible and saying affirmations out loud no matter how silly I feel. “I am enough”. And I like writing or even just humming out new songs as a way to feel it all and move forward. I’m not the best when it comes to sharing my feelings, even with my own husband sometimes, so I’m thankful music is an easier way for me to express it all.
I hope my song “ Temporary” can be a reminder to people that they are not alone in some of the things they may be feeling. If anything I know it was a good reminder that I needed myself.