I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds right now, and I have full body chills, the kind that make you stop what you’re doing because something inside you just got tapped on the shoulder. In my early 20s, I was deeply into this album. Especially the song “Wot’s… Uh The Deal.”
I didn’t know why at the time.
I didn’t have the language yet. I didn’t know about alchemy in the way I do now. I didn’t know how much of my life would become about turning pain into meaning, confusion into wisdom, and shadow into remembrance.
I just knew something in that song felt like mine.
There’s a line in it:
“Turn my lead into gold.”
And today, hearing it again, I swear something in me cracked open.
Because that’s it.
That’s the whole thing.
That’s what I’ve been doing this whole time.
The younger version of me didn’t know she was praying through music. She didn’t know she was singing along to her own future initiation. She didn’t know that all the heaviness she carried, all the shame, the longing, the confusion, the strange sense of being outside some invisible door, would one day become the very material of her work.
She just knew the song hurt in a beautiful way.
And sometimes that’s how truth first arrives.
Not as a fully formed answer.
As a lyric.
A chill.
A song you can’t stop playing.
A feeling you don’t have a name for yet.
I think music does that. It smuggles messages from our future selves into the places we’re not ready to consciously look at yet.
Early-20s me was still in the lead.
She didn’t know it, but she was carrying raw material.
The grief was lead.
The confusion was lead.
The feeling of being too much and not enough at the same time was lead.
The ache of wanting to be seen but not knowing how to let herself be seen was lead.
The strange homesickness for a life she hadn’t built yet was lead.
And now, sitting here all these years later, listening to the same song, I can feel the gold.
Not because everything is perfect.
Gold is not perfection.
Gold is what happens when the wound becomes wise.
Gold is when you stop hating the part of you that suffered.
Gold is when you can look back at your younger self and realize she wasn’t lost in the way you thought she was. She was gathering fragments. She was holding symbols. She was surviving the pressure that would one day become the medicine.
I wish I could sit beside her for a minute.
I wish I could sit with that younger version of me, the one listening to this album with no idea why it meant so much, and say:
Keep listening.
You’re not crazy.
This is speaking to something real in you.
One day, you’re going to understand why this line makes your soul ache.
One day, you’re going to know that lead doesn’t mean you failed.
It means you were given material.
Heavy material, yes.
But sacred material.
And one day, you’re going to learn how to work with it.
That’s the wild thing about remembering who we are. Sometimes we don’t become someone new. Sometimes we finally catch up to the person who was already whispering to us through songs, dreams, symbols, and strange little obsessions we couldn’t explain.
So today, I’m listening again.
Not as the girl trapped in the lead.
As the woman who knows the furnace was never punishment.
It was transformation.
And maybe that’s the deal.
Not to escape the heaviness.
Not to pretend it didn’t shape us.
But to turn toward it with enough honesty, love, and fire that it finally reveals what it was carrying all along.
The gold was never somewhere else.
It was hidden in the lead.