When I was in first grade, my teacher asked me to sing for Family Day at school. I remember really practicing my song day and night and memorizing each lyric, hoping that the kids at school wouldn’t laugh or make fart noises or anything. When I got up in front of everybody, I went completely blank. I forgot what I was singing, really, and I wished the microphone would just slip off from my pasty palms, so I can die already.

But it didn’t and I just stood there and waited for the multiplex song to stop winding. Some kid came up to me and said, “Hey, you really did swell.” Yeah. Talk about sarcasm, now.

It’s one of those things that you swear you won’t forget even in your gramma pants, and I still don’t know what compelled me to sing and humiliate myself in public. Maybe it’s this annoying little poking on my shoulders. Something inside of me that tells me I could do heavy musical things.

I started writing songs when I was 9, but it doesn’t really matter, because these are the songs that I keep hidden in a much safer place where no one else is aloud to hear, or read it, or even know they ever existed. By the time I was 11, I took interest in picking up the guitar just because I thought that for once I could be popular at school. But that never helped. My then major crush who now has truckload of pimples never liked me back. (Good.)

But growing up pains make me realize everyday that growing up teaches you a ton of things. You can never grow older, and you can never learn much. These things have traced me to become who I am, and I’m forever grateful that I have been given a wonderful chance to write them down, tie them around my finger, and sing.

I don’t know what’s out there. I don’t know if people, upon hearing the music that created me, will dance their socks off to it, chew on it or throw it in the garbage can. But there’s a whole generation out there who could still stop believing that holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in the other is cool. And start believing that they could actually do something so ridiculously awesome in their lives. It’s a risk that’s worth a shot. A heavy musical risk I’ve got to take.

And though I may not understand a lot of things, there is one thing that I can be sure of myself: It’s that the music—every letter of every word of every line of every song—that I want to play, goes ultimately back to Jesus. He’s the very point of all of this.

Love and cowboy hats,

Kira.