This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing local musician Lauryl Sulfate. She is currently fronting her second band, called Lauryl Sulfate and Her Ladies of Leisure, and recording an album that's due out this summer.
She told me it took her years to allow herself to make music because she didn't have any formal training and therefore didn't believe she belonged on stage. She loved to sing and craved performance and yet talked herself out of it in high school because she wasn't in a choir like other friends.
Later, she found out more about punk rock and new wave and began to realize that anyone can make music. Anyone.
I can relate to all of this. I had the same thoughts as a high schooler. I wanted to be in a band but because I had tried out for a choir in grade school and didn't make it, I carried the misinformation with me for 25 years that I couldn't sing. Finally, when I was in my 30s, I caught a clue and co-founded a pop punk band. It was my most artistically satisfying experience to date.
The same thing, I realized, happened to me with art. I have been drawing since I was a small child, a quality I passed on to my son, and I took four years of art in high school which was an elective at my high school. However, I didn't move forward with it, even though it allowed me to experience a total loss of space and time (this is now how I identify the things that I need to do as often as possible).
I believed I wasn't as good as two other people in the class who were "known" as the best artists in the school. But even if I wasn't as talented, and I don't think that I was, why did I stop? Isn't there room in this world for artists of all skill levels?
I had started on what would become a long journey of telling myself I wasn't good enough without even knowing I was doing it.
How do we stop talking ourselves out of the things we really want to do? How do we help our kids not do this? How many times can we read "The Little Engine That Could" until they (we) really believe it?
Crap, we really are our own worst enemies.
Molly Snyder started writing and publishing her work at the age 10, when her community newspaper printed her poem, "The Unicorn.” Since then, she's expanded beyond the subject of mythical creatures and written in many different mediums but, nearest and dearest to her heart, thousands of articles for OnMilwaukee.
Molly is a regular contributor to FOX6 News and numerous radio stations as well as the co-host of "Dandelions: A Podcast For Women.” She's received five Milwaukee Press Club Awards, served as the Pfister Narrator and is the Wisconsin State Fair’s Celebrity Cream Puff Eating Champion of 2019.
