We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anna Schulte a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Anna , so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Developing self-esteem will be the work of a lifetime for me, and I think confidence and self-esteem are actually really different.
For me, confidence is just about doing the thing, whether I’ll be good at it or not. I get on stage to teach myself that I can. I go after opportunities because I know that I have to. I’ve wasted a lot of time wondering about whether or not I was capable of creating the life I dream of for myself, and I’ve learned it’s an undermining question. Confidence is an action for me. I teach myself what I’m capable of by doing it.
Self-esteem, which I understand as self-worth, is much harder for me. In the act of creating, I am entirely whole within myself, I am safe, I am known. But there is another separate part of me that needs to be seen and loved for who I am, and for better or worse, a part of me that wants to be admired. That desire for admiration particularly creates vulnerability and room for feeling like a failure, when you expect another person to play out a role that isn’t necessarily theirs to play. I think anyone who wants to be in the spotlight needs something from the people around them, and there’s a bravery in being so honest about it. I think performance is both a prayer and a question. Do you see me? Do you see you? Can we stand in this sacred and vulnerable place together?
And then confidence steps in, and I know the answer doesn’t need to matter so much, it’s the being there that matters.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m the songwriter and frontwoman of the band Wedding. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska, and my hope is that when you listen to my music, you can tell. Growing up in the Omaha indie scene has shaped the kind of music I love and want to make.
I’ve been writing stories and poetry since I learned to hold a pencil, and I studied creative writing in college. My love of the craft of writing plays heavily into my songs. I know a lot more about literature than I do about music, so I’m coming at it from a different angle than most.
I was raised Catholic and am still very spiritual, and for me, singing is a form of prayer. When you listen to my songs, I want you to feel like you’ve reentered a room within yourself that is sacred and safe. I want my songs to feel like a mirror you can look into and not shy away from. Life is complicated and painful but also beautiful, and honesty is one of the only things that helps us make sense of it. When I sing, I want people to feel held, because this is how I feel when I’m writing the song.
In 2022, I released the EP Dream Car, and the single and music video Bright As A Star in 2023. My upcoming single, The Bird and the Bug will be released with a music video this October. I have plans to record a full-length album this winter, so be on the lookout!
I’ve also recently started a writing project, The Good Luck Prayer Book, which I publish every Sunday on Substack.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The most important part of my journey as a person and as an artist has been cultivating a spiritual life. I regularly take time away to just sit with God, with myself, with what is. Sometimes this just means accidentally talking to myself in my own head for 25 minutes while I try to meditate. Sometimes it’s going for a walk and hearing the flowers talk. Or writing a letter from the divine to myself. Or reading a poem. Or just sitting in silence, and letting it all melt away, and knowing I am one small part of something large and beautiful, and that within this invisible network, I am beloved, and can share that love with others.
The second part ties into the first, and it’s simply showing up. On the very first page of Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook,” she talks about how Romeo and Juliet never would have had their great romance if Romeo hadn’t shown up for the first date. She uses this as a metaphor for your relationship with your creative practice. You have to show that shy, sacred part of you that is the artist that you can be trusted to hold her and let her be known. It’s easy to want to jump to the beautiful end scene in my brain where I have it all, but that isn’t real life. Life is built of tiny moments every day, tiny dates that you keep. There is a note on my desk that says, “Don’t skip any steps. Focus on where you are today and you will build your tomorrow.” Everyday I forget this and then remember it again.
The last part is gentleness. My friend once sent me a letter with the quote, “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.” People are always telling me how hard it is to make it as an artist, but I think they’re imagining a scenario in which you lose yourself and have to step on other people in order to attain something bigger. But when you meet people with gentleness, you change the footing. I’m not trying to get a result–I’m trying to build a life that feels like my own.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
When I was 16, I was sent Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet out of the blue, from a creative writing professor in Montana who’d come across one of my poems in our high school lit mag. At the time, I was struggling with severe depression, and I felt so isolated from the world that even now, half a lifetime later, I can’t look back at my journals from that time. The book was a lifeline, a garden I stumbled into blindfolded. It was a gentle beckoning to walk through the darkness with hope, and provided lesson after lesson that my walk was not in vain, but that in fact, this dark night would someday give birth to a beautiful life. It taught me the importance of incubation, of winter, of a life focused on living rather than obtaining a set of results.
On the inside cover of the book was written, “Anna–‘Live the questions now.” It was an excerpt from the book, one which is too beautiful to paraphrase, and has shaped how I approach my life. The older I get, the truer it becomes.
Rilke writes,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/notmywedding
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/_notmywedding
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@notmywedding
- Other: https://notmywedding.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Images 1,3,4, and 5 –Marco Flores
Image 2 –Kandi Petznick
Cover imagea and Images 6,7,8–Johnny Gembitsky
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
