I know that sounds simple. Who else is there to be? But I haven’t been the real me most of my life. I’ve been the ‘me’ I thought I should be. The ‘me’ who wanted to please others. The ‘me’ who was too scared of rejection.

Forget the real ‘me’ and my opinions and who I am. That’s how I was as a singer in the profession when I sang in opera houses. Too caught up in how I thought I should be and such fear to achieve and get work all the time. It made me into a robot without my own interpretation of any song. I have been reading a book by a woman called ‘Iyanla Vanzant’ and one thing she says is ‘you only know when you know. Until that point you have always been doing your best’. I was surviving. That’s what I’d had to do for years. From the age of 13 I have worked. I had to earn money. Simple as that. I know how to work. I know how to survive but I don’t know how to be me. Well, I’m learning and I just sang in Halifax this afternoon at the ‘smallest music venue in the UK’. A place called ‘The Grayston Unity’.

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I chatted to a couple afterwards who had heard me a few weeks back in Hebden Bridge when I sang at a cafe there and they had come along (and was flattered they had now brought their friends). I was chatting to them in the bar before I left and the woman said she reads my blog. I said ‘I try to be as real as I can be so I don’t pretend everything is always ok’. I hope she reads this because I wasn’t sure about writing certain things tonight but when I said that to her I thought ‘I have to now’. So I turned up and saw the backyard and thought ‘bloody hell. It’s a car park overlooking a main road, dreaming of the time when I’ll be singing in theatres on a bigger scale’. It’s just fear really. It was empty and I thought ‘no one is going to come’. But they did. They kept having to get more and more chairs out. There was a lady too from the opera class I gave this week in Hebden Bridge. My first one. An opera group meet once a month and watch an opera and they asked me to go along, sing for them a bit and show them some opera. Once I’d got over the ‘I should show them this singer and that singer’ to thinking ‘actually I’m ‘just going to show them clips from operas that I love and tell the why I love them’.

Get away from doing things I ‘think’ I should do to doing things I want to do.

I loved singing in the backyard today. There were people today who I would never have expected to be there. Younger people. That shocked me as even I only expect older people to be interested, and singing in the backyard was great. I had sirens going past, the toilet just through the door, so we had guys chatting in the queue, hand dryers going and at one point a dog barking. There was a time when I was a serious classical musician who would have been mortified to have all that, but it was funny and people in the audience found it funny too. People popped out for a drink if they wanted. It was informal but it worked, and it lifted me. Got me back on track within myself. Singing on the streets can be hard at times. You have no real audience and people pass by, maybe stop for a while and move on. When you have an audience sat listening it’s just really nice. I took it for granted in the past but now I don’t.

It’s really about building confidence up to say what I want, do what I want and know I won’t be rejected for it. There’s a lot of stuff going on under the surface at the moment too. I need to heal. I am broken inside and there’s stuff from my past I haven’t addressed and have run away from and it’s time I face it now. The pain has built up in my body and I need to let it out. I haven’t been able to in the past. I have been in survival mode and fight or flight, just making sure I could keep a roof over my head or I just couldn’t deal with it.

I have a lot of anger I stored away. My childhood was very hard and I never really felt loved. It takes a lot for me to even say this in my blog. What will people think? Should I reveal what’s really going on? At times I have chronic pain from the pain I held in and I need to let it go and I am saying it because there may be someone who reads this who understands and then they feel they can share their pain with others. Vulnerability is strength. It doesn’t stop me from carrying on and loving what I do but it’s there and it’s stopping me from flying.

On another note, I also have my new CD, ‘Songs for the People’ which I am so thrilled to have. It’s taken a few months to get it done but I’m proud of myself for doing it. If anyone wants a copy I am happy to post it to you. Just let me know. Here’s a few samples from it.

I was meant to fly to Belgium last weekend to sing in Knokke again. I’ve sang there a few times in the last few years and was really looking forward to going back (it’s the place for the bourgeoisie of Belgium), but they cancelled me because it was an outdoor gig and a big storm was forecast, so that was the end of that. I went to Skipton to sing instead as people kept mentioning there and I got moved on first by the market guy who told it wasn’t allowed near the market. I then got told where I could go so went there, started singing and a guy came out of the O2 shop and took a video on my first song (not unusual), but he took it so he could call the police on me. Around 35 minutes later two police officers turned up to tell me they’d had a complaint from one of the shops and would I mind moving down the road. No problem nice police officer but just to let you know that nobody from the shop came to talk to me or asked if I could move somewhere else. They just went straight to the police. When the police had gone I packed up my things and then was really annoyed.

I marched into the shop and told him in front of a whole shop of people (I was so angry I didn’t care), to ‘NEXT TIME WHY DON’T YOU ACTUALLY COME AND SPEAK TO ME FIRST BEFORE YOU CALL THE POLICE? IT’S PATHETIC AND COWARDLY TO NOT EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO ASK ME YOURSELF AND IT’S A WASTE OF POLICE TIME’.

I got a nod from a woman at the till but there was a shop full and god knows what they thought. I was part ‘R E S P E C T’ Bridget Jones and part mortified, but I bloody stuck up for myself, went down the road and thought ‘bugger you all (because I am always thinking about the shops and not disturbing people too much), and sang my heart out. No more apologising for myself. It’s not like I stand there all day. It’s 90 minutes at the most.

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It was also my birthday on Thursday so I went to York, had a sing, met my brother, sister in law and nephew and they took me to a Van Gogh digital experience. I loved it. It was great. I went to the Van Gogh museum with my friend Joe years back when I lived in Amsterdam and I love that he painted the ‘real’ people and didn’t follow the trend of painting portraits of the rich like Rembrandt did.

Van Gogh did ‘Van Gogh’ and refused to sell himself and what he thought he should do and I so relate to that. Listen to your heart and do whatever you need to do to live that. There is no other way. Even though he made no money in his lifetime and was branded crazy look at the legacy he left. He never stopped believing in what he had to do.

And even now as I am in this ‘why am I in Hebden Bridge singing in backyards (no offence to backyards out there) and not doing my mission in America as a know I will, of singing to the masses (I know this is my future), I know it is all working out for the best. I am in Hebden Bridge because I need a home for a while and I need to find a better balance and I need to take care of ‘me’ and heal the broken parts of me so that when I do get back to America there is nothing holding me back or weighing me down.

I’m pleased I can create opportunities wherever I go. I’m singing back in Belgium, in London, at The Piece Hall in Halifax and on the 27th I go over to Nice to start working on the music medleys for my Julie Andrews show. I’ve already had interest from The council for Music in Hospitals’ to get in touch when it’s ready to arrange some concerts down South in Surrey where Julie is from. I know this time next year I won’t be where I am now. I hope I am back in the US and working out a way to stay. Who knows? I flipping don’t. I wish I didn’t even care. It would be a whole lot easier…..

For more info check out my website at http://www.iamnicolamills.com and follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/iamnicolamills/ and Instagram at Nicola Mills Opera for the People.