At this month’s Mixer, special guest Sharlese Metcalf shared her talk entitled “Self Care and Activism: Ways of Living and Surviving in the Music Industry.” Whether it’s through her roles as Education Coordinator and DJ at KEXP, as a member of the TUF collective, or her work as a Music Commissioner, Sharlese has been a leading advocate in Seattle’s music scene for years. If you couldn’t make it to the Mixer, you can watch the full talk here, and we have also included Sharlese’s written script below.

During her talk, Sharlese shared her 26 ways of self care while working in the music industry:

1. Wake up and don’t look at your phone. Take a walk instead.
2. Don’t answer emails right away, they can wait.
3. Take walking meetings at work, if you can. Don’t sit in a room with walls.
4. Pack your lunch with healthy yummy things and eat your lunch away from your computer. They can wait.
5. Write fan mail. Write a short letter or text to someone that you love or that inspires you and tell them you appreciate their work.
6. Compliment someone. I have found that when I tell someone something nice, the impact is that it makes me feel good and them.
7. Journal thoughts of gratitude.
8. Meditate and breathe.
9. Exercise. Do yoga. I do and DJ yoga quite often. You should come!
10. Listen to your favorite songs and dance alone. Like DoNormaal’s ‘Ego Slave.’
11. Massage your creativity, like make a mix of your favorite songs.
12. Eat with intention. Cook your favorite meal. Plan ahead to do so.
13. Address positivity at your organization. It’s easy to frustrated at work by things that happen. Make sure to talk to your co-workers and find ways to be happy.
14. Find the good work of others happening in the world, especially in Seattle community and send them to people. It can inspire and motivate positivity.
15. Find ways to turn the upside down, right side up. Meaning if you found something that’s sad or bad, find a way to bring people together to amplify your voices.
16. Keep educating yourself. Take a class!
17. Learn to say no without explaining yourself.
18. Acknowledge yourself and your strengths and consider your value.
19. Know peace.
20. Respect, be kind and forgive yourself. You’re great!
21. Be intentional and always know where you’re trying to go.
22. Use your intuition to navigate better. Always trust your heart.
23. Support live music! Going to show can mean the world for an artists and that in return will make you feel good. To be more real, support the arts! There are so many great artists in the Northwest and if you need help finding cool things to do, Artist Trust has a great calendar of full of statewide events to support. You can also find out about grant applying workshops and more there as well.
24. Clean your space to your favorite album. It can be a trip to experience actually how an artist creates an album from start to finish.
25. Spend time with friends and family. These people are some of the most important people in your life and they provide epic support.  
26. Look up. Everyone looks down, but have you ever tried looking up? A teacher in college recommended that to me and it changes your perspective and you might learn something!

You can find Sharlese Metcalf on Twitter, Soundcloud, and read more about her on our blog. Read below for Sharlese’s scripted speech. 

 

How many of you wake up and think about what you have to do that day? How many of you find it a challenging to find time for yourself and almost feel frustrated by the fact that there just isn’t enough time in the day? I find this to be a constant conversation between my friends and colleagues and today I am going discuss ways you can incorporate self-care while also caring about about the immediate music industry world around you.

“March on, march on, Everybody need to step front, And I’ma be the only one to take a step back, right now, I bet on everybody think I’m whack, right now, Ego Slave she cleans up on the mic, somehow.” These are the words of DoNormaal’s Ego Slave. A song that I listen to often because there are themes throughout the song that explain my thoughts and feelings on self-care,

I started listening to KEXP on the cusp of KCMU. I remember listening to the morning show with John and finding it unbelievable that a radio station was playing Cibo Matto and Built to Spill at 6 AM. My career started at KEXP in 2005.

Started out volunteering. Working the front desk as a receptionist. Answering phones and greet people. I also reviewed CDs and worked as a hospitality person for Audioasis. I came from Green River Community College where I had taken the broadcasting program and had hosted the local show Local Motion for three years. Working at KEXP was a huge event for me. I knew that this was the place I wanted to be! I wanted to work at KEXP forever and I was inspired by the people that worked here. I saw their passion for music and the organization and I felt like I fit right in! KEXP fostered my career. They gave me opportunity! While working on Audioasis other opportunities fell into place. I never actually went to school for the jobs that were given to me at KEXP, I had people that believed in me and I was lucky and honored to have that. Working at KEXP, I was ambitious! I knew that I wanted to make a living in the music industry. When I started interning and volunteering at KEXP, I was still in school, trying to make ends meet. At one point in time, I was working three jobs. I worked at Jones Radio Networks, a syndicated radio station, and a community radio station where they broadcasted Spanish speaking and religious programming and at a coffee shop. I was tired, but I needed to survive and reach my goals. Because of working three jobs, I was fired from one of the jobs. I fell asleep while monitoring some programming and woke up to alarms that were too late to control. A teacher in college once told me that you’ll never make it in the music industry unless you’re fired from at least one of your jobs. That was almost thirteen years ago and I’m still at KEXP, so I guess in a way I’ve made it.

While on my road to discovering the music industry, I still just kept working a lot. I was just always busy. I worked at the High Dive booking local shows.  I worked at Kill Rock Stars setting up an online radio station for them.  I started managing bands and setting up shows for them. At one point in time I thought I was going to start my own management business!

I kept pursuing my dreams at KEXP. Opportunity at the station came slowly, but surely.  My first real job at the station was working three hours a week on the Audioasis Community Partnerships shows. I was able to book bands and coordinate logistics for the shows and work closely with local nonprofits.  I remember thinking, wow there are a lot of cool people in Seattle doing really good things and I was amazed that there was a connection to music in all of it and that was something that I never forgot.

Next came DJing. I knew that I always wanted to be a DJ at KEXP. There was a day that a DJ called in sick to Audioasis and I was given my first opportunity to host half of the show. I remember the very first song I played on air was Shy Town by Lois, and that same evening, I did my first in-studio with Gabriel Teodros for his album Lovework. It’s interesting how things come full circle as now Gabriel is a DJ at KEXP and one of my biggest inspirations for survival and activism here in Seattle and at KEXP.

I wasn’t full time at KEXP for years! I kept volunteering and working small hours here and there. I worked my butt off to move in and around the organization with patience… and I wasn’t patient. I was ready to get started! I was ready to take the bull by the horns and make noise, but to be honest, I didn’t even know what that meant and in the end, I was just really busy.

I started to become impatient and frustrated. I didn’t know what I was doing! I was working a lot, I had no money and my boyfriend at that time was supporting me. My skill set was all over the place. I was all over the place, I was tired and I knew I needed to hone in on my direction.  

I had mentors along the way that would offer up the best advice, a couple of them being Cheryl Waters and Riz Rollins. Stay strong, be patient, work hard. 

At one point in time, I realized where all this came from. I am a child of a single black hard working Mother of two kids. We lived in West Seattle, High Point projects. We were poor, but my mom was really good and not letting us realize we were poor. We did things like go to the laundromat and we made the best of it! We waited at the bus stop when our car broke down, for hours and we made the best of it! We would go to work with our mom and play on the floor at her office and we made the best of it! We would go to support groups coordinated by my mom for abuse survivors and be taken care of a volunteer and we made the best of it. We had to, we had no choice.

My mom is a survivor of spousal abuse and has worked ever since as a Domestic Violence Abuse advocate and now a survivor of breast cancer. She has worked hard my entire life and I guess I learned it from watching her.

Stay strong. Be patient. Work hard.

Today, I am the Education Coordinator at KEXP and a rotating DJ of the show Expansions, started by Riz, Kid Hops and Masa. The trip to get to where I am at has been long. I recently retired as host of Audioasis, KEXP local show in September of this year. I also let go of working in events at KEXP, my original career direction as I was the long time booker of Concerts at the Mural among other events and I decided to make a major career change. As of this year, I am part of KEXP Community Programs team, working almost a year in starting Education programs at the station. I have since joined Northwest Film Forum’s Board and become a Seattle Music Commissioner while being an active member of the TUF collective, DJing in clubs and promoting above and underground events in Seattle and I’ve realized that while I’m still ambitious, passionate and charismatic, I care a lot and that sometimes I get really tired.

Stay strong. Be patient. Work hard.

I have come to face many challenges. I don’t go to bed at the same time every night, my schedule is all over the place. Eating can be challenging, I sometimes eat on the go and it doesn’t make me feel good. People ask you for things and that can be tiresome and sad because sometimes you don’t want to talk about their music though you realize that it’s important to them that you give them your opinion on their creativity and you stay polite but the feeling of them asking about an in-studio or if you could recommend them for a show or to a DJ can feel like that’s all they want from you though it’s your job, can feel sad. It’s hard to disconnect. I want to work all the time! I’m always thinking about work. Whenever I go out, I represent KEXP. I was at goodwill once shopping for yoga pants and a person came up to me and asked if I worked at KEXP. She was very nice and told me she loved my show, but it startled me because I was in the zone of looking for yoga pants and listening to Pavement on the overheard speaker.

I care a lot. I care about people and how they feel. I care that people reach their goals and aspirations. I care about amplifying POC, femme and non-male identifying voices. I care about young people and amplifying their voices. I care that organizations I represent reach all of their goals.

But along the way, I had forgotten to care about myself. Deciding to let Audioasis go was one of the biggest changes I did in my life! Audioasis was my identity. It was my everything! I will always love that baby, it will always be part of my life, but I had to let it go so that someone else could have the opportunity to be a voice for the local music community and I felt like I needed to use my voice  in another way to help the local music community in areas that need help.

Total career change! Everything this year has turned over! The opportunity to work on KEXP community programs team was real! It meant that I could be part of changing the culture at KEXP through empowering youth voices and working with artists in a different way, through equity and accessibility. I’m still reeling from where I’m at right now and that fact that I have a wonderful team of individuals that I work with. Susan James, Community Programs Manager, Alina Santallian, Outreach Coordinator and JeeYoung Dobbs, Volunteer Manager. I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, most recently… and while that could not mean anything, it was a huge heartache that I’m still dealing with now and affected my performance at work. I broke down… I thought the only way that I could survive was with work distractions and I cried a lot. I was depressed, I disliked myself and I just didn’t know what I was doing and I started to treat myself bad. I couldn’t stop, I just didn’t know how to stop. My friends and colleagues were there for me, but it didn’t matter because what they were saying went through one ear and out the other. I just didn’t like myself and I just kept going… it was the worst!

All while dealing with the challenges of life. I kept going. What is self-care? Self-care means different things to different people, because we all take care of ourselves in different ways. We all have had different experiences that have led us through our lives.

To me, self-care is taking care of your mind, body and soul while still elevating your passion and creativity. What does that mean? It means finding self-sustaining practices: 

1. Community
2. Being physically active
3. Saying no
4. Delegating
5. Meditation
6. Asking for help
7. Allowing yourself to develop
8. Allowing yourself to cry
9. Advocating for yourself
10. Being grateful
11. Breathe

How did I learn these things?

1. Through trial and error
2. Being open to making mistakes
3. Understanding my emotions and my responses to life’s challenges
4. Becoming more aware
5. Breathing
6. Friends and family
7. Colleagues

The Dhamma says: “Vipassana is a science of mind and matter: how the mind is influencing the body and later how the body is influencing the mind.” Macklemore says in his song Vipassana: I don’t control life, but I can control how I react to it, Student of the breath, brick beats and balancin’, Desire versus truth until I finally find happiness.”

In September of this year, I let everything go. I dropped it all for ten days and went to Onalaska, Washington for a silent meditation and it was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life. To give an idea of what it was like: I woke up at 4am everyday to a bell to go meditation. We meditated 7 times a day for 10 days. The bell told us when to eat, sleep and meditate. I hated the bell. We ate two times a days at 6:30 AM and 11:30 AM. At night new students could eat a piece of fruit and have tea or milk. Old students could only have tea or milk. Women were seperated from men. Meditating all the time gave me headaches and made me feel like I had drank a ton of coffee. I felt wired and we were supposed to go to bed at 9:30 PM every night and I couldn’t get to bed until almost midnight.

We couldn’t talk to each other, only the assistant teacher that you had to schedule time with and could only talk to for 5 min at a time. We couldn’t even look at each other. You had no one to process your feelings with. You couldn’t even hold the door for someone. I remember being in the meditation hall and getting up and I wasn’t looking at what I was doing when I was folding a blanket and hit someone in the face. I couldn’t even say sorry. I remember another time in the eating hall when I had decided that I would always sit in the same place and one day during the breakfast someone sat in my spot. I was mad at the person and thought to myself that I would get to eating hall early for lunch so I could get my spot back. I got there and someone else was in my spot! Suddenly I had conflict with people I had never spoken to in my life! That was a changing point to me! I realized that I needed to become more aware, open up my surroundings, get rid of the ghost conflict and accept. They keep telling you, “Accept the teacher, accept the practice”. I didn’t accept the practice until Day 4, I remember waking up that day and being mad. I had scheduled time with the Assistant Teacher and I told her that I woken up on the wrong side of 4am. Day 5, I was like what?! I have the same amount of days to stay here, than when I came here, but “Accept the teacher, accept the practice” and I did everything I had to do to do that. I worked hard, got up, practiced, listened for the bell, took my 5 min shower at 9pm every night and tried to sleep the best I could. I should also mention that you can’t exercise either. The only thing you can do is walk these paths that were designated. So, I walked and walked at the break times in hopes of staying on point for energy and tiring myself out for sleep at the end of the evening.

I am not a grassroots organizer. I’m not even sure when I started to become ‘Social Justice’ Sharlese. I just remember the feeling of wanting to take care of people, of all ages and their art and I needed to find a way to be a voice for them. I wanted people to know that someone was looking out for them in a cool organization and that one day they could be there too. I didn’t want them to move away from Seattle, I didn’t want anyone to feel like KEXP was inaccessible and I realized that the only way I could be that voice was through my work.

I’m going to read you some mission statements.

TUF – TUF is a collective that focuses on uplifting marginalized folks including people of color, women, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming identities. We challenge white-cis-male power structures within electronic music, art, and media by creating spaces to connect and collaborate.

KEXP – Commitments to the Community: We pursue our mission by relentlessly pursuing curatorial excellence in our programming, and remain relevant to music lovers of all ages by producing one-of-a-kind content and experiences that we’ll deliver by world-class distribution methods.

Seattle Music Commission – The Seattle Music Commission and the Office of Film + Music work toward the realization of the City of Music 2020 Vision by cultivating partnerships, developing policy, and facilitating connections between the community and the music industry to make Seattle a place where musicians thrive, communities are strengthened, and music businesses flourish.

Through these organizations I have been given a voice. I have been able to care about the community and to find equitable, accessible opportunities for the Seattle music community to embrace, find opportunity and take action.

My work is important to me: Sexual Assault and Anti- Harassment prevention, affordability, equity, youth voices and opportunity, accessibility, body positivity, trans rights, opening the on-going conversation of creating safer spaces. I am KEXP’s Education Coordinator, Workshop and Panel Manager for TUF, the only female DJ on the Expansions crew. I represent a small piece of what the Seattle Music Industry can look like as a WOC in radio, representing leadership and I have to take care of myself so that I can inspire and motivate.

Awareness comes from experiences. Awareness comes from culture. Awareness comes from your friends and family. Awareness is self love, self care. I’ve always said to myself that I want to make an impact on the Seattle music community, I don’t need an award for it, i just want to see change and I always want there to be support.

When I was on the meditation retreat, I went crazy! I didn’t know what to do! I had no phone, no access to email, I was nuts! I actually devised a plan to get out of there! I thought, yah if I call my best friend Annie and Dane they would come get me and then I can go back to my comfort… then I realized oh yah, then I’ll have to check email and also those unwanted feelings of sadness will creep back and I don’t want that at all. So I stayed for the 10 days and at the end of it, there was a feeling that came over me of true happiness. I don’t know if you have felt true happiness, but when I felt it, I started crying. I’ve never felt that before and then I realized that doing something for yourself is the only way to do something for other people My heart is my work. My heart is creating programs and making the community more aware. My definition of activism is caring for your community and being open to making mistakes and listening to people. That is how I serve the community, that is how I serve you. I have learned to say no… to some things =) but I have definitely become more aware… of myself and my what my community needs. I urge you try some of the following, I’ve come up with 26 ways of self-care while working in the music industry or honestly just in general:

1. Wake up and don’t look at your phone. Take a walk instead.
2. Don’t answer emails right away, they can wait.
3. Take walking meetings at work, if you can. Don’t sit in a room with walls.
4. Pack your lunch with healthy yummy things and eat your lunch away from your computer. They can wait.
5. Write fan mail. Write a short letter or text to someone that you love or that inspires you and tell them you appreciate their work.
6. Compliment someone. I have found that when I tell someone something nice, the impact is that it makes me feel good and them.
7. Journal thoughts of gratitude.
8. Meditate and breathe.
9. Exercise. Do yoga. I do and DJ yoga quite often. You should come!
10. Listen to your favorite songs and dance alone. Like DoNormaal’s ‘Ego Slave.’
11. Massage your creativity, like make a mix of your favorite songs.
12. Eat with intention. Cook your favorite meal. Plan ahead to do so.
13. Address positivity at your organization. It’s easy to frustrated at work by things that happen. Make sure to talk to your co-workers and find ways to be happy.
14. Find the good work of others happening in the world, especially in Seattle community and send them to people. It can inspire and motivate positivity.
15. Find ways to turn the upside down, right side up. Meaning if you found something that’s sad or bad, find a way to bring people together to amplify your voices.
16. Keep educating yourself. Take a class!
17. Learn to say no without explaining yourself.
18. Acknowledge yourself and your strengths and consider your value.
19. Know peace.
20. Respect, be kind and forgive yourself. You’re great!
21. Be intentional and always know where you’re trying to go.
22. Use your intuition to navigate better. Always trust your heart.
23. Support live music! Going to show can mean the world for an artists and that in return will make you feel good. To be more real, support the arts! There are so many great artists in the Northwest and if you need help finding cool things to do, Artist Trust has a great calendar of full of statewide events to support. You can also find out about grant applying workshops and more there as well.
24. Clean your space to your favorite album. It can be a trip to experience actually how an artist creates an album from start to finish.
25. Spend time with friends and family. These people are some of the most important people in your life and they provide epic support.  
26. Look up. Everyone looks down, but have you ever tried looking up? A teacher in college recommended that to me and it changes your perspective and you might learn something!

Know that the world revolves around each other and without self-care there is no activism and that’s how you make an impact.

“March on, march on, Everybody need to step front, And I’ma be the only one to take a step back, right now, I bet on everybody think I’m whack, right now, Ego Slave she cleans up on the mic, somehow.”

Thank you to the Office+Film and Music, most especially Kate Becker and my colleagues on the Seattle Music who are fantastic! Thanks also to KEXP, TUF, the Northwest Film Forum, Artist Trust, and you for coming!