No Room to Waste
In 2016, I wrote a song titled “No Room.” In it, I dive right into the viciousness of self-absorption and drench myself in the thick tar of an unyielding ego + an unforgiving ethic. Much of it was a distillation of the anger + fear + loathing I had spent the previous decade decoding. It had all come bubbling up a few months before as so many things in my world was shifting. I was in the first few years of building a new family, a new company, and would soon be making my way to a new city. I was also living in what felt like a new country.
Video still from “No Room”. Directed by Aenl Media.
A year later, I recorded it as the second track on my EP “Burn,” just a few weeks after finding out (on the day of the Great American Eclipse, no less) that we’d be growing into a family of four.
Video still from “No Room”. Directed by Aenl Media.
The following year—four weeks after that birth and just days from packing up a few, final things and heading to the home we had just purchased right outside of St. Louis—I released that EP.
And two years after that release, the video for “No Room” has still yet to see the light of day. I keep telling myself that I need a better reason to share it, that I need to make a plan, to figure things out, to give it my best effort. But maybe this is it. Maybe all there is to it is just to do it.
It’s how I had gotten this far: doing what needed to be done because I didn’t have time to do anything else. Have you ever tried negotiating with a subcontractor with a baby at your breast? It ain’t pretty but it’s impressive. I had done that.
Video still from “No Room”. Directed by Aenl Media.
When I filmed the video for “No Room”, I was several months pregnant with my second son, Ellison, having recently relocated to Fort Worth, Texas for business. Life swirled around me, unsettled, a mirror image of the life that swirled inside.
Motherhood is a fickle thing. It picks you apart, revealing your cracks and fissures, laying bare all of the places where life never quite filled you up. But, in so doing, it also builds you up, setting you on top of a pedestal as it proudly proclaims to the world that you have come to do the good work of creation: intentional movement through life’s repetitive rhythm of reflection + expression + progression.
So, this is the official music video for “No Room,” brought to you a full 2 years later. In sharing it, I hope to put to bed this part of the path and move forward. I hope to do this with a better understanding of maintaining momentum, minding the method, and making room for more.
I’ve got no time and no room to waste.
