Carried Away

On October 13, 1981 Olivia Newton John released her 12th studio album, Physical. It was her most controversial yet most successful album to date. It was a revolutionary pop sound for its time, utilizing synthesizers and digital music, and covered broad topics like love and relationships, sex and environmental protection. It received world-wide critical acclaim. Its lead single, Physical, was banned and edited by many radio and television stations due to its sexual suggestiveness and gay undertones. 

            I was 8 years old at that time. Somehow I got my hands on that album and I was hooked. There was just something about it that felt like home to me. I actually wrote out the words to the songs so I could immerse myself more in the music. I eventually learned all the words and would sing at the top of my lungs, until I literally lost my voice, to songs like “Love Make Me Strong”, “Strangers Touch” and “Make A Move On Me”!

This perhaps was not as enjoyable an experience for my older sisters and brother and my conservative parents, who were from a small town on a small Caribbean island. Yet I wanted them to experience this music the way I did. I would corner them, any moment I could, and have them listen to these amazing songs with me to try to give them the spiritual awakening I had. At that time my favorite Olivia song was a slow, romantic, touching love song called “Carried Away”. I thought the words we just so beautiful and my favorite lines were “And suddenly you appear. I'm carried away”.

            Eventually I would come to learn a very difficult and painful lesson that my love of all things Olivia was not the most acceptable thing for a young boy. I learned to keep my love of this inappropriate music for a boy confined to the four walls of my bedroom. As I slowly let go of this music I loved, I did not know that I was also letting go of the fantastic, flamboyant, dancing and singing artistic kid inside of me.

            The beautiful loving words of “Carried Away” were quickly replaced by sad songs that I wrote to myself in my room. There is one song in particular that I wrote called “I Belong” that I believe speaks to the heartbreak I felt around not quite fitting in. The words to that song include “You never loved me for who I am. I was something you did not understand. But I know that I will break free of this needing you to love me. When I come upon the place where I belong, I will fall into loving arms. They will hold me high. They will dry my eyes. And kiss my tears away.” 

            I am learning that my experience of not quite fitting in is not that unique. In fact most people, perhaps many of us here tonight, have given up core, vibrant, unique and invaluable parts of ourselves because someone told us it was not appropriate, or acceptable or good enough.

            The psychologist Brene Brown has spoken about the negative impact of numbing and hiding ourselves. She suggests that we cannot numb parts of ourselves without numbing all of who we are. By doing so, we essentially shut ourselves down and suppress the joy that we can bring into our lives, and into the lives of others. To be whole, expressed and fulfilled, is to be vulnerable and declare who we are regardless of what people may think.

            One of my biggest idols, the world renowned drag queen RuPaul, says that “we need to learn to navigate around other people’s threatened egos, particularly when we do not buy into their small, limited view of the world”. He says that “if you can’t love yourself how are you ever going to love someone else?”

            I recently purchased that Olivia Newton John Physical album again on iTunes and was amazed by how quickly I was reconnected to those parts of myself that I thought I had lost forever. When I listen to these amazing songs so many years later, it’s almost as if I had never let them go. Rest assured I will not break into song for you tonight, I would like to share however that “Carried Away” is still my favorite song from that album. The words still touch me so deeply. For me, they speak to the beauty we all hold inside that is enduring, timeless, unbroken and breathtaking. As the words to that song say, “Here we are walking against the crowd, calling our names out loud. And suddenly we appear. I’m carried away!”