Nicks Mix: How Stevie Healed Me.

The healing room….if these walls could talk.

There are songs you know. Then there are songs that find you on a Tuesday morning on the way to work, and something inside you just... opens.

That's what Landslide did to me.

I'd heard it a thousand times. I knew every word. However, that morning on the way to work, something was different. I didn't just hear it, I felt it. In my chest. In my throat. In the places I had been holding things I didn't even have names for yet.

So I played it again and again.

The next day was my day off. I sat down and built a playlist. Just Stevie. Just Fleetwood Mac. I called it Nicks Mix.

I had no idea what I was starting. The first few listens, I cried. Then I got angry. Then I got REALLY angry.

In the corner of my healing room sat a drum. A Native drum. To this day, nobody has claimed it. Nobody knows where it came from. It was just... there. When The Chain came on, I picked it up and I beat the hell out of it.

I still do. To this day, if The Chain comes on and I don't have my drum, I'm beating the car console. The table. Whatever is in reach. There is something about that song, the build of it, the way it shifts, that pulls something out of me that nothing else can touch.

And Silver Springs? I screamed it. Every word. I screamed it until my throat hurt. I screamed it like it owed me something. Because it did. He did. They did. And honestly, I did too.

Some days I couldn't even tell you who I was angrier at; my current husband, my ex or myself. Looking back, it was all of it. Years of it. Decades of it. All that rage I had packed down so deep in my body, so neatly, so quietly, because I was trying to keep the peace.

Trying to keep the peace caused complete havoc on me.

Mentally. Physically. Emotionally.

My body turned on me. Autoimmune issues. Inflammation. A body that felt like it was on fire from the inside out. That's what holding rage in your body does. It doesn't disappear because you swallow it. It just sets up camp and starts burning you from the inside.

But every time I hit that drum, something shifted. Every scream, every tear, every time I twirled around in a fury, the anger got a little quieter. The tears came a little less hard. Something was moving that had been completely still for years.

I was releasing it. Song by song. Scream by scream.

So I built myself a healing room.

The room I always wanted as a teenager and never had.

Being foster and adoptive parents, we always had extras around. I had an extra bed. I turned it into a daybed with a canopy I made myself. I added plants in front of the windows. Pillows. Floor pillows. A rug. I even bought myself a long duster, the flowy kind. So when I danced, I could twirl. I twirled by myself in that room more times than I can count.

Every hour I spent in that room, every scream, every laugh, every ugly cry I had completely alone…was an hour I was putting myself back together. Piece by piece. Song by song.

That healed woman! The one who built herself a room and a playlist and gave herself permission to fall completely apart so she could come back together. That's the woman who was ready to leave Alabama after 47 years.

That's the woman who moved to Colorado.

And now? Now I have a whole room. A big one. With a skylight. I play Stevie on vinyl. I have suncatchers hanging from the skylight and when the sun hits them just right, they throw light all over the room.

They remind me that it's okay to shine.

And they remind me that it's okay when I don't. That my light can shine and it can also rest. Both are allowed. Both are part of it.

When I listen to Stevie now, I don't scream as much. I dance more. I remember how far I've come.

I am also reminded that I was always worth fighting for.

Even when the only person fighting for me was me.

-Mare