{"id":11,"date":"2026-06-04T05:28:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T05:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/?p=11"},"modified":"2026-09-20T23:33:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T23:33:20","slug":"6-4-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/2026\/06\/04\/6-4-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"6-4-2026"},"content":{"rendered":"Music has always been a part of my life.<br \/><br \/>I wrote my first song when I was twelve years old. It wasn&#8217;t very good, but my mother didn&#8217;t seem to care. She would have me play it for neighbors, family members, and sometimes complete strangers on a cheap guitar that wouldn&#8217;t stay in tune because it was all she could afford.<br \/><br \/>My mother was a divorced woman raising four boys while working two jobs. Looking back, I realize how hard that must have been. She encouraged me when there wasn&#8217;t much reason to. She believed in me long before I believed in myself.<br \/><br \/>But belief is a strange thing.<br \/><br \/>Sometimes someone can tell you that you&#8217;re worth something, and you still don&#8217;t see it.<br \/><br \/>That was me for most of my life.<br \/><br \/>Music was always there. It was the one thing that never really left. Through every version of me, every city, every success, every failure, music remained. But confidence never did. I spent years convinced I wasn&#8217;t talented enough, wasn&#8217;t good enough, wasn&#8217;t enough.<br \/><br \/>Then I met her.<br \/><br \/>She wasn&#8217;t Essence then. She was just a woman who appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed her, though I wouldn&#8217;t understand that until much later.<br \/><br \/>If you&#8217;ve read the rest of this website, you already know the story. What you may not know is what she truly gave me.<br \/><br \/>She saw me.<br \/><br \/>Not the person I pretended to be. Not the masks. Not the bravado. Not the insecurity.<br \/><br \/>Me.<br \/><br \/>And for the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to be understood.<br \/><br \/>I don&#8217;t think I realized how much that mattered at the time.<br \/><br \/>When you&#8217;re young, you assume the people you love will always be there. You assume there will always be another conversation, another chance, another tomorrow.<br \/><br \/>Life has a way of teaching you otherwise.<br \/><br \/>Thirty years later, I can finally see what I couldn&#8217;t see then.<br \/><br \/>The music I make today exists because she believed I had something worth saying.<br \/><br \/>The creativity that survived all these years survived because she helped nurture it.<br \/><br \/>The person writing these words was shaped by her influence.<br \/><br \/>People talk about soulmates as if they&#8217;re some magical thing. I don&#8217;t know about any of that.<br \/><br \/>What I do know is this:<br \/><br \/>A woman walked into my life thirty years ago and changed it forever.<br \/><br \/>Not through grand gestures.<br \/><br \/>Not through miracles.<br \/><br \/>Simply by loving me, believing in me, and helping me become a better version of myself.<br \/><br \/>I lost sight of that for a long time.<br \/><br \/>Maybe we both did.<br \/><br \/>But life, for reasons I&#8217;ll never fully understand, brought us back to each other.<br \/><br \/>And now, after all these years, I find myself in the extraordinary position of being able to tell her something I should have said a long time ago.<br \/><br \/>Thank you.<br \/><br \/>For believing in me.<br \/><br \/>For inspiring me.<br \/><br \/>For helping me find myself.<br \/><br \/>For helping me find my way back.<br \/><br \/>I love you.<br \/><br \/>I always have.<br \/><br \/>And I suspect I always will.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Music has always been a part of my life. I wrote my first song when I was twelve years old. It wasn&#8217;t very good, but my mother didn&#8217;t seem to care. She would have me play it for neighbors, family members, and sometimes complete strangers on a cheap guitar that wouldn&#8217;t stay in tune because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slavecamlive.com\/desk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}