How big is your brave?

A letter to Sara Bareilles

To: Sara Bareilles, New York, NY

From: Alicia Bonner, Atapuerca, Spain

Dear Sara,

I’ve been walking the Camino Frances for two weeks now and I think it’s safe to say that your music has literally been keeping me alive.

Preparing to walk 500 miles in the third trimester of pregnancy, I made my best efforts at meticulous preparation. I trained. I researched packing lists. I compared products and slowly and carefully amassed all the things I would need on my journey. But somehow in all the planning, music never made the list. I guess I thought a pilgrimage was supposed to be about quiet reflection and the sound of the birds. But it turns out, there’s only so much of the sound of trekking poles clack-clacking on pavement, stones, and gravel a person can take before she starts to lose her damn mind. On my second day of walking, making my way up a seemingly never-ending Pyrenees mountain, I decided it was time for some tunes.

I pulled out my phone and opened Spotify to the devastating realization that I’d lost nearly all my saved music when I had upgraded my phone a few weeks before my trip. I’ve spent a lot of the last seven years relying on Spotify’s mysteriously excellent Discover Weekly curation to regularly discover new music. Unfortunately, in recent months, listening to both the Hamilton soundtrack and She Used to Be Mine on repeat has confused the algorithm into thinking all I want to listen to is new, undiscovered (mostly mediocre) musical theatre. This was not the vibe I needed on this 3,000 foot ascent.

The only album I had downloaded on my phone was your latest record, Amidst the Chaos: Live from the Hollywood Bowl, an album I think I originally found by way of my Discover Weekly. I opened it and hit play.

Listen to the album here:

I may have previously listened to it once from beginning to end, but it’s rare that I listen to two hours of straight music. In the last two weeks, I’ve easily listened all the way through it more than a dozen times. Every time, it helps me go the next four to five miles.

I love this record for a few reasons.

First, it’s so wonderful to get to hear and know you, Sara the person, on this record. I feel like I learned more about you in those two hours of listening than I had previously known. I love hearing your expressions of gratitude, your explanations of the origins of songs, and your lovely interactions with your fans, from the marriage proposals during I Choose You to the hilarious diversion over the Winter Song request.

Second, it’s completely intoxicating in the masked Covid world we’re now living in to listen to 17,000 fans belt Love Song at the top of their lungs, and scream and cheer, and generally be loud, vocal humans together without being encumbered by the concern of spitting on each other.

The last thing I love about this record is the music selection. It’s perfect. It captures the very best of your work from the last decade and a half and seamlessly weaves it in with your new hits, some of which, released in 2019, feel ahead of their time. (Orpheus was written for a Covid world.)

More than any artist I know, your music has provided much of the soundtrack of my life.

My senior year of college, I listened to Love Song and Little Voice on repeat as I tried for months to end a relationship with my longtime boyfriend. Later, in a different relationship, I listened to King of Anything, and cringed, thinking to myself: Oh my God. I married that guy. Several years later, the Twisted Measure rendition of I Choose You found me via my Discover Weekly and helped me decide to finally leave that marriage for a man I’d fallen in love with. But it’s your song Brave that has had the most profound and sustained effect on me.

In 2015, I had an affair with a colleague and an (unrelated) abortion, both of which demolished my psychological and physical health. (As the affair was ending, I listened to Gonna Get Over You on repeat, like a mantra.) Both my personal and professional lives were in shambles and I knew I needed a reset. So I quit my job and went to Florida to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I remember vividly her walk-on to Brave for her de facto nomination rally in June 2016, as I imagine you do, too. I’m pretty sure I cried. Later, as the general election heated up, that song became a hype song mainstay for all of her rallies and events. As field organizers, we kept asking people to be brave and volunteer, commit to vote, motivate a friend.

The only night I remember more vividly than that speech was the night we lost the election, the downward slide into realizing we had lost Florida, and without Florida, there wasn’t a path to victory. I remember waking up the morning after to the New York Times push notification that Donald Trump would be the next president and rolling out of bed onto my knees, pressing my face into the carpet, and wishing I would never have to get up.

Now, walking the Camino, I still cry listening to this song. It makes me remember the long days I spent sweating in the sun, knocking on hundreds of doors, handing out bottles of water to lines of people waiting to get into a stadium or an auditorium to hear from Hillary. We worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week without stopping. And we lost. After the campaign, pundits liked to criticize Hillary for running a “bad campaign,” something I took very personally. We didn’t run a bad campaign. We ran a flawless campaign with a terrible strategy, which I guess amounts to the same thing, but when you’re the cog in the machine, it’s easier when people point the figure at the top instead of the whole mechanism.

It turns out, we don’t just want to see people be brave. We want to see them succeed.

Maybe there's a way out of the cage where you live

Maybe one of these days you can let the light in

Show me how big your brave is, you sing.

Don’t you really mean, show me how you’ve been brave enough to overcome whatever it is you’re facing?

Three days ago, a polar vortex storm descended on northern Spain, predicting that anywhere from five to nine inches of snow could fall over the next three days. That day (April 1), I planned to walk 15 miles, my longest day’s walk yet. When I finally set out, it was whiteout conditions, snowing sideways. It seemed foolish to think that I could walk so far in such a storm. I went back to my hostel to tell the owner I’d need to spend another night. She immediately called the backpack transfer service to tell them I’d need to postpone my transfer, mentioning that I was seven months pregnant. Without hesitating, the woman managing backpack transfers offered to drive me and my pack to my next accommodation.

Did I want a ride? the hostel owner asked.

Had I come all this way to walk 500 miles only to shortcut 15 of them? Then again, attempting to walk 15 miles in a whiteout snowstorm while 31 weeks pregnant didn’t seem like the smartest move either.

I accepted.

An hour later, when my ride finally came, the snow had cleared and the sun was shining. I felt like a wimp. I arrived at my hostel, got into bed, and fell asleep, feeling defeated. When I woke up an hour later, it was snowing again.

April Fools! I felt a small sense of validation, like I’d made the right call. The weather continued that way for the next two days, alternating between snow and sun, and sometimes both at the same time. But by the next day, the snow had diminished enough in intensity that it felt safe to walk again.

I found myself pondering the fine line between brave and foolish. Was it brave to accept that free ride? Weak? Or stupid?

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be brave because I’ve internalized the idea that it’s necessary for a “successful” life. But so much of that “trying” feels like wasted effort. Or worse—failure.

Choosing to have an abortion was one of the most harrowing decisions I ever made, one that devastated me in ways I never would have imagined, yet one I still don’t regret. Choosing to leave a marriage that was perfectly adequate, though in many ways underwhelming and underserving us both, was also incredibly difficult. But it felt at the time like the bravest choice. And it’s one I’m so glad I found the courage to make.

But abortion and divorce aren’t choices we celebrate. They’re ones we shame and grieve, the dark side of courage.

I didn’t march in January 2017. I didn’t have the strength. Trump’s election wasn’t my wake-up call. I had no energy left for protest. I love your new song Armor musically—it has gotten me up and over too many hills to count in the last 150 miles—but philosophically, I’m not sure I agree. I sometimes think if we spent more time bearing witness to the emotional pain most of us are living with instead of gearing up for a fight, we’d be facing a different human reality.

As I’ve gotten braver about talking about my abortion (something that still feels hard to do in “public”), I’ve been surprised by the number of women who confide in me that they, too, have had one. I know that talking publicly about my choice potentially makes me a target for anti-abortion rage. But instead of arming myself against that, I accept that risk because my vulnerability invites other women to express their own. And it’s only in sharing the painful experiences we’re holding individually that we can finally start to heal ourselves and feel whole.

After the campaign, I started a business in hopes that working for myself and becoming an “entrepreneur” would give me the springboard into success I hadn’t been able to realize as a machine-cog employee. I wrote a book about a branding model I developed and even found someone to publish it. I recorded an audiobook. I spent so much time and effort trying to get people to give a shit about changing the world. Changing politics. Changing nonprofits. None of it ever seemed to amount to anything. At a certain point, I wondered if I had blown my lifetime’s supply of victories and I just needed to submit to failure becoming a permanent part of my life. Maybe it would feel better if I stopped trying so much and just let things happen, come what may.

I came to think of this as the open-door strategy. I’d keep an eye out for doors opening in my life and do my best to walk through the ones that did, but I wouldn’t hold myself accountable to needing to pry so many open.

In 2019, I finally got to see Waitress, and I cried with the empathy I felt for the main character, Jenna. The way the show expressed her unplanned pregnancy, her disappointing marriage, and her extramarital affair all felt poignant and relatable. I felt less shame for all of those things knowing they were common enough to become a Tony award-winning Broadway trope.

While I wasn’t a waitress in a diner, Jenna’s song She Used to Be Mine shook me to my core. I had always thought of myself as someone who dreamt big and took risks and somehow my life had landed somewhere disappointingly boring and safe. Where had I gone wrong? Of course, Jenna lived the alternative history to mine in deciding to have her baby (we’re not yet ready for that alternative reality on Broadway), but I still felt the same small flame of hope that I could find the courage and strength to claw my way back to the person I once was. I’ve been singing this song ever since.

Over the last three years, as I’ve actively worked to shed my attachment to professional achievement, my shame about both my affair and my abortion, and my failed marriage in exchange for a love that lights up my life, I’ve begun to see the shadow of my former self emerge. But she is still holding the scars of successive failures.

Now, at almost 32 weeks pregnant, I’m passing the 150 mile marker on a 500 mile walk. I can’t claim the timing of this endeavor to be especially good, though it’s an exercise in faith that things happen when they’re meant to.

The Spanish hosts and hostel owners I’ve met always use the same word to describe my pilgrimage—valiente—brave. Most are people of faith largely accustomed to the idea that God calls us when both they and we are ready. Not one Spaniard has questioned my decision to walk now. But they all acknowledge the strength it took to start, and the commitment required to keep going.

Of course, deciding to walk El Camino in my third trimester is one thing. Given the current state of the world, choosing to have a baby is an even scarier choice. Without the privilege of wealth or employment protections, not to mention inflation, Covid, and climate change, there are plenty of good reasons not to have children. But I’m doing it anyway.

I know that becoming a mother will change my life in profound ways, one’s that I’ve looked forward to for a long time. And I want to be strong enough—brave enough?—to hold and grieve these broken pieces of my life that have unnecessarily shaped my path for the better part of a decade. I want to birth my son into a new chapter, not one laden with failure and grief, but one full of hope and love. I hope that here, in the pastoral yet desolate countryside of northern Spain, I can find the strength to find my way out of the cage and into the light.

Thank you for your music, and this record. You are a bright light in the world.

With affection and appreciation,

Alicia