Meet Gelina

We were lucky to catch up with Gelina recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gelina, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Music has been a major part of my life since I was in the womb. My father would play me all kinds of music, hoping I would be born with a love for it all. I like to think that it’s why I love music but also why I’ve always had a knack for creating interesting melodies and writing pretty good songs. What I didn’t know, up until maybe 2 years ago, was that I was also born with ADHD. Everyone has their own opinions on this mental illness, even having doctors debate its existence at all, but for me it was very real. ADHD affects everyone differently, but I know for me it played a very big role in every aspect of my life, in both very positive and negative ways. When I was in high school we stopped by an outdoor market and I asked if they wanted any live music and, after showing them a few ‘home recordings’ of me and my sister, they said yes. They asked if we could play the next weekend and I told them we could. So, we went home and started practicing with only 6 days to learn way more than the 3 songs we had. That weekend we ended up playing our first gig, which would give me the love for performance to keep playing and gigging. This impulsivity that stems from my ADHD, to jump into something without taking the time to think about the actual logistics or qualifications, was the reason I booked my first show and has been the reason for a lot of my success. My thoughts are rushing fast in a whirlwind in my mind that I can’t make sense of them fast enough, and this has been the very reason why my songs are able to creative and vulnerable and I owe it to ADHD that I was able to find myself in songwriting. These wonderful positives, these successes, have been very important in my journey as a musician and I would not have found them so easily without my neurodivergence. However, these characteristics are not where I found my resilience.
Sometimes, like in songwriting, the whirlwind of thoughts would be going so fast that I could not critique myself and interrupt the creative process that leads to good songs. Other times, the whirlwind of thoughts was rushing so fast that I would emotionally abuse myself over every possible little thing, even things that weren’t true, and I would not interrupt that process either. I would miss deadline because of my faulty memory(ADHD) and I would tell myself that it was proof that I was a pathetic person who would grow up to be nothing and that I would never get better and I should give up altogether and the list would go on and on to much worse solutions. Somehow, despite this onslaught of emotional torture, there was always this voice in my head that said “there has to be a way out, I just know it.” Then the cycle would start again. This destructive delusion and spiral of thought wasn’t just a symptom of being a teenager, when everything felt like it was the end of the world. It was a norm in my life since I was a child and continued right up until the moment that I took my first ADHD medication and it entered my bloodstream.
As a medicated professional musician I struggle with confidence and scheduling and booking the same as every other musician. I have low days and I get discouraged, but I don’t spiral the way that I used to. The resilience that was a necessity for survival when I was unmedicated has now become one of my greatest strengths as a creative. To fight every day for 22 years to convince myself that tomorrow will be better and that I will try again, despite my own mind telling me every reason to give up, was the most practice I got in building resilience without me realizing it. Now that I am no longer defending myself from my own thoughts, I can finally go and conquer the world!

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a singer-songwriter based in San Antonio, Texas and I have the insanely cool privilege of being able to play covers I love as well as my own songs as my career! I love songwriting on a personal level because it truly does help me understand myself and my life and sometimes I just love writing stories in my music. The other half of this love for songwriting is that moment when people listen to these songs and either find comfort in listening to them or find themselves in these songs and learn a little more about themselves. Right now I’m getting ready for Fiesta and will be playing all over town in April, so I won’t be putting out any songs just yet, but I will after that so stay tuned!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think the big 3 ‘things’ that have helped me the most is practicing emotional intelligence, visualization, and creating small habits. My advice, which I still have to remind myself most of the time, is that your vision of where you’re going has to be so clear in order to know how you’re going to get there. What will you be wearing? How will you be speaking? Do you wake up early and get coffee or do you go for a run? Knowing even the smallest details of how your life will be in the future that you want helps you make every step intentional and thus one step closer to what you really want.

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?
Atomic Habits by James Cleary. I know that when a lot of us are looking for ways to be more productive or more successful, we tend to run into this book a lot, either through ads or pedaled out by influencers. However, this book is truly worth the investment of time and money. Every 6 months or so I go back to it because it reminds me of all the big moves I could end up making if I just try to go back to the basics of building little habits that are aligned with the things I want to do and the person I want to be.

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Anna Ovalle Carly Amaya

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