I’ve been writing to you since the year 2022, it’s the end of March, I’m in Quebec and spring is slow to come and say hello. The snow melts, revealing the battered earth of the last five months, then settles back on the ground, on the trees, on the cars, and I have the impression that we will never get out of winter, despite the efforts of patience and wisdom that everyone seems to do here.
If you had known that in 2022, at age 25, you would be here in Montreal often, in the snow and in the forests, I think you would have been happy. I’m here in Quebec where all the things you liked are found side by side: nature, soft music, mushrooms, magic, sun, summer, dogs by the thousands, and then calm.
The Quebec artists that you loved in secret, that nobody knew in high school, that you talked about around you without finding the little flame in their eyes, you met them and some even became your friends. You have also met a whole bunch of incredible humans on the road and dismissed those who broke your heart, after much questioning. The friends who remain can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but they are one of the foundations of my joy and my faith in tomorrow.
Many incredible things have happened in the last ten years, you have made almost all your dreams come true, so that today I am trying to find new ones, as beautiful, as wonderful and as sweet as those you had then. I know dreams were one of your reasons for living, so I don’t want to lose them. I force myself, in fact no, I don’t have to force myself a lot because I still dream as much, if not more than in your time.
After high school, I now know with hindsight that you went through a difficult period, long years of loss of self-confidence, hidden anorexia, questioning and confinement within yourself. I discovered, a short time ago, the consequences of certain traumatic events that I now store in drawers, drawers that I open and close when I feel the need.
You’ll see, drinking alcohol will make you laugh for a few months and quickly disgust you.
If I could, I would like a moment, a very little moment, to hug your tiny and broken body from the year 2014-2015, because you don’t realize it, but you are completely broken and you pretend you can face this alone, you don’t even understand what’s wrong. You always want to believe that you don’t need anyone.
Well, that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed too much.
But now I’m learning to respect myself, to accept the limits of what my body and my head can do, I try anyway. The perfectionism that was destroying you still lives somewhere in my stomach, but I know how to tell it to calm down, shut its big mouth, and sleep when I’m sick of it.
I would be lying if I told you that my relationship with food is completely healthy now, but I can tell you that I like to eat, more than ever, and that I find myself beautiful. It’s not been long, it’s fragile. And then it always depends on the period, but I find myself beautiful inside and that’s the first step, I think.
I always care about taking care of the planet the best I can, I know you cared, so know that I’ve had all my albums printed on recycled paper since 2019, when I released the second one, Loopholes. Thanks to my determination, my label, Universal, decided that recycled paper would be mandatory to print all the albums of the artists of the house.
I’m really, really proud of that and I hope you would be too.
I also had a vegetable garden built in the inner courtyard of the label, a large vegetable garden full of tomatoes, herbs, zucchini, squash. We inaugurated it in 2021 with a school of horticulture. I planted a lot of stuff myself, and now a lot of people from the label are doing it. I went there all summer, on Monday evenings. You had your giant vegetable garden. In January, we planted 300-year-old apple trees that will still be there for the teenagers of the year 2300 if all goes well, and that reassures me. In short, maybe you don’t care about all these details, but I realize while writing to you that these are not victories that I share on Instagram or Facebook and it makes me feel good to tell you about them.
There are so many other things I’m trying to fight against: sexism, racism, inequality and discrimination, but to be completely transparent with you, I feel overwhelmed by everything that’s going wrong in 2022.
Since Saint-Exupéry high school, we have (collectively) witnessed a lot of very ugly things in the world, such as attacks, wars, natural disasters, a pandemic, and other terrible things that would hurt you. So sometimes it’s hard to be on all fronts, but I try to do my best.
I assure you, there have also been beautiful things along the way.
You know, this feeling that you’re going to be completely abnormal, that no one understood you, well, I made it a strength. I made songs of it, entire albums which, I believe, saved my skin.
The albums themselves didn’t save my life, but the fact of putting all the things about me that you hated in them: anxiety, fear of death, of the gaze of others, that made me saved.
I also have to tell you an important thing: I fell in love, shortly after high school, two years later. Of a girl. Yes, there you go, maybe it shocks you. But in fact, it was the most natural thing that happened to me, the most beautiful and sweet, the most wonderful. I wish I could have whispered this in your ear in high school: ‘You have the right to like girls, you have the right and that’s normal.’ It would have saved you a lot of pain in your chest, grief, sadness and so on.
In the end, I loved the years I lived in your body so much that I wouldn’t change a thing, except maybe a little hug once in a while and a secret about the aftermath that might help you look at yourself. with more gentleness.
Either way, I think I’m who you wanted to be, maybe even a little better.
And then it’s not over
See you soon,
Clear.
Leave a Comment