Hemorrhaging Awe
Finding healing with a leadership a rupture
Recently, I stumbled upon a surprising use of AI songwriting tools: processing something I don’t think we have clean language for yet—interpersonal leadership trauma inside immersive social systems.
Not “stress.” Not drama. Not a disagreement. Not even burnout.
I mean the kind of rupture that forms when two leaders are holding safety, culture, boundaries, and out of profound fatigue and overwhelm high-risk conflict is erased inside a space where people bond fast, project hard, and fracture faster.
There was one leader in particular. The final rupture between us was severe enough that our connection went completely quiet for nearly two years. Before our connection crumbled, I once asked what they needed from me. Their answer surprised me: awe—not necessarily toward them, but toward what they had built. I tried to offer that. But over time, I noticed something sobering: when someone asks for only one kind of emotion from you, it can start to feel inauthentic, like you’re being recruited into a role rather than met as a whole person.
I grew enormously from what happened during the high-conflict night in their community, mostly because I had to. My nervous system didn’t give me another option. But nothing between me and that leader was ever repaired.
A few months ago, being a founder of my own community group prompted me to break the silence and offer an olive branch. I didn’t anticipate how hard that would hit. A few days after exchanging diplomatic invite and declined attendance to a flagship event, the old memories returned: several sleepless nights, and a lot of journaling helped me land, but it took weeks to feel like myself again.
Since then, I’ve seen signs in a few shared circles that suggest more conversations with this leader may eventually be needed. Before reaching out again, I wanted to find a way to lower the emotional cost. I needed something that could help me stay steady while still doing my job.
So instead of drafting arguments or rehearsing defenses, I wrote loose prose. Raw language. And then, on a whim, I fed it to Suno (an AI music generator).
After a few days of song drafts—and many hours of edits—Hemorrhaging Awe was born.
Content note: the song contains themes of suicide.
This week, while urgently working on building out policy docs for BridgeMakers on Assessing and Addressing Interpersonal Violence, I listened to the above music (and variations of it) on repeat for several days.
And something strange happened: the psychological and somatically felt wound/ache in my chest metaphorically cauterized.
Not healed. Not erased. Not resolved.
The song’s slow-burn playing in the background while I was hyper-focused on my document creation mythologized the memory enough that I could show up again in dialogue with this leader without hemorrhaging horror and getting lost in arguments.
As I fell asleep on those evenings, I also found myself zooming out more than I had been able to previously, and considering how the wider systems outside us were contributing to this conflict. Like a heavy fog rolling in after a firestorm, I found myself settling into a somber acceptance of how this leader had (and hadn’t) handled the conflict in their group.
Reflection
When grassroots community leaders are steeped in community debt, they can eventually start seeing each other through lenses of fear and worst-case frames. The connections can quickly become brittle. They can resort to posturing, moralizing, and protecting identity instead of relationship. The bridge, especially between the leaders, can become an icy or molten battlefield, where projective fatigue leads to blocking and silence.
This leadership rift was one of the more heartbreaking versions of community-debt I’ve encountered in 6 years in this field. Not because anyone was cartoon-villain evil, but because the system outside us and within their community didn’t have grounding for crisis processing, repair, or shared accountability. So the rupture became a fractal mirror of hurt and rejection until we just stopped trying.
The song didn’t repair the bridge between us. But it stopped me from requiring justice, and helped me let go of the repair I thought I needed on a human level to dialogue with them about current day conflicts and offer collaboration on risks threatening both of our groups.
And that, quietly, changed everything.