I wrote this after experiencing devastating wildfires in Northern California. I was with my family in Napa on the farm where I grew up. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. Even though our house survived, everything around us was burned and the fear and trauma of that devastation stayed with me for a long time.

Months afterward, the chorus- “Is this how it feels to make it through?” came to me and it was like a floodgate opened and I could finally cry for all of the loss that our community had experienced. I finally was coming out of survival mode. Singing and writing this song helped me so much, but it was so emotional that I didn’t finish recording it.

When the fires broke out in LA in January, the song came back to me and I had the realization that it could help people to move through all of the trauma that I know so many are still feeling months later. After surviving something so traumatic, I think we feel like we should feel better than we do sometimes. We made it, but are we really OK? I didn’t realize how much I needed to cry and to process until I could sing this. That’s what music can do. It can help us all heal.