Sometimes, real change begins when we stop, listen, and allow ourselves to face what we’ve been avoiding.

Ever noticed how deeply satisfying a good intellectual conversation with your significant other can be? Not small talk, not logistics — but the kind of conversation that touches the things that actually matter in life. I had one of those conversations with my partner recently, and it led me to a few unexpected insights about how my perspective has changed over the past years — and how that shift quietly serves me in my day-to-day life today.

For performing artists, one skill is absolutely essential: the ability to disconnect. We learn to separate life offstage — which can be exhausting, lonely, and frustrating — from the characters we present to the public onstage. It’s not optional; it’s survival.

For most of my early years as a performer, this skill saved me. Especially while navigating a new environment in a foreign country, I learned how to tune out undesirable emotions for the sake of my performance. No matter how lonely, sad, or frustrated I felt privately, I shut it down, stepped onstage, and promised myself I’d deal with it later — after the curtain call. It was never comfortable. But it was part of the job description no one ever hands you.

Sometimes, when emotions ran especially high — fear being a frequent guest — I tried to channel them through my performance. Not ignoring them entirely, but also not allowing them to take over. Some might call this “authenticity.” I’d call it: this is the best way I can deal with this right now.

As time passed and challenges multiplied, the transition between “private me” and “performer me” became harder to manage. Distractions crept into my artistic work in ways that could no longer be ignored. What once felt like a controlled switch slowly turned into a short circuit.

An overload of unresolved challenges led to an identity crisis — one that stirred deep inner conflicts. I was trying to untangle them while simultaneously delivering art as purely as possible. You can imagine how gracefully that went. (Spoiler: not very.) Eventually, my entire system went into a spiral, and my body began sending increasingly clear signals that something was seriously out of alignment.

The peak arrived in October 2023, when I lost my voice for more than two weeks. My vocal cords were physically fine — but my heart was shattered. The result was a complete shutdown of my most important instrument: my voice.

That silence turned out to be the most important thing that had happened to me in years.

Because in that silence, I could finally hear all the other voices that had been screaming in my head for far too long. And there, quietly waiting beneath the noise, I found it — my encore.

It was rooted in care. In giving. In listening. In reconnecting to my roots, and to myself.

Only when I was denied the very thing that defined me did I truly discover all of me. And only then did my voice finally find its way back to me.

Into my blue-suitcase:

• Silence is not empty- Sitting still allows buried thoughts and emotions to surface — often the very ones we were too busy avoiding, and the ones most in need of attention.
• What we ignore doesn’t disappear. Unaddressed challenges don’t fade with time; they quietly grow, draining focus and energy until they begin to interfere with everything else.
• You are never just one thing. No one thing ever defines you entirely. At any moment, you carry the potential to shift, expand, and become something more.
• Without an inner encore, we lose direction. Clarify what truly matters to you — your values, principles, beliefs and the person you aspire to be — and let them guide your choices, focus, and sense of purpose.

What would you hear if everything else went quiet?

Yours

Shachar