Best Behavior: The Last Cotillion

I love to raw dog back in after an 8 month ghost

Ya know, writing my one and only Substack May of last year was such a cathartic, enjoyable, natural moment for me that I, in the name of brand consistency, never did it again. Alas, I woke up this morning, the eve of my next single release, and suddenly felt like writing in my digital journal.

I’m sitting under a blanket at my favorite spot in my house, a little nook near a big window off the kitchen. I just lit my pumpkin candle that’s been hanging around since this past Fall. I know there are people out there who switch candles with every season and that level of life-detail attunement completely confuses me. Also on brand, instead of staying here in the flow, I keep picking up my phone, blacking out, and ending up on TikTok. Normally, a place where there’s something “for me,” is a place my body wants to avoid. Resistance, FFS.

At midnight tonight in NY, my song “Best Behavior” comes out.

I’ve been in therapy for 8 years now. I see a woman, a soul teacher in Nashville named Kim, and I’d like to say she’s changed my life, but she would edit me to say “I’ve changed my life.” My super sexy list of struggles since the beginning of our work together includes but is not limited to an eating disorder, anxious attachment, crippling insecurity, performative people pleasing bullshit, failure to launch, and seasons of substance abuse. Wow. I’m both lighter and horrified to put that on paper. I look at the girl I was when I began therapy in the Fall of 2017 and the girl I am now, and I am nervously and irrevocably proud. Wholehearted. Whole. Happy. And yet a grandly imperfect, sometimes reckless, nonlinear work in progress…that is how I feel. Everyone should have access to the privilege of therapy, more on that later, but I was given a second chance at living the life I wanted and I don’t know what would have happened to me/for me without it.

As I live in Memphis these days and work often in Nashville, I typically plan therapy with Kim right before a work session. 10 am therapy, 11 am album cowrite.

This second record I’ve got in the can, y’all - I needed it. Maybe you do too? It’s fun, it’s wild, it’s a departure from the underbelly of my tenderness and a step into my power. Cy vs C$. More on that later, too. But I wrote this record (to be released in 2026) with Amie Miriello and Johnny Black. I got to tell my secrets and fears, but wrap them in swagger and armor. When I’d go too far into the valley, Amie and J would bring me back to the grounded zone of the project. “Don’t puff, don’t cower, stand your sacred ground.” (Brene Brown)

So this 10am therapy session started like most these days. I don’t go in with an activated “issue” on fire and tears ready to rip like I once would. I go in calm. We shoot the shit for a second, I compliment her incredible outfits (she’s honestly unreal and possibly too good to actually be), and then she helps me “drop in.” I started to tell her about a present day insecurity. Something seemingly silly, but grand inside. Self consciousness is a son of a bitch for those it chooses. What I thought would be a lighter day took a fast turn (brand). We often use the modality of EMDR to trace a present issue back to its origin. Through a series of tapping, processing, and remembering, this current day internal bully was linked to the voice of a 3rd grade classmate of mine during recess at my elementary school in Millington, TN. What intellectually seems long gone - the body often keeps score of far beyond our understanding.

EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is classified as a “treatment for conditions involving traumatic memories.” Have you ever done mushrooms at a party and remembered that social anxiety is a lie and you’re actually free and light and funny? No? Ok. Have you ever had wild, insanely connected sex and then felt both reawakened and hollowed at the same time? EMDR is like that.

So anyways, the 50 minutes were up and I got a coffee at Star Bagel off Murphy Road and headed to Music Row with a swollen cry face.

Off the top, Amie opened with “I think I want to write a track called ‘Best Behavior’.”

Our opening verse fell out: “Remember when it was so simple, good girls don’t die young. I’m still back there on the playground, with your poison tongue.”

As Johnny and Amie churned away building a super sick track which you’ll all get to hear at midnight, I sat and churned away unpacking layers of lowercase t trauma.

The pre-chorus says, “I didn’t know I wasn’t beautiful until you told me so. I didn’t know I wasn’t beautiful until you told me so, until you told me so.” I’d argue most all young girls are born sovereign, wild, and free, and there is a specific turning point where the needle turns towards self consciousness. A specific moment, sometimes a series of moments, when we go from just “being” ourselves, to “looking” at ourselves. Looking, as in assessing, questioning, valuing and devaluing, comparing, right-sizing, and often - particularly in southern culture - shrinking. Buffing edges, dimming lights, and editing ourselves for another’s comfort.

But the voice of the 3rd grade classmate bully is in great company, and such is the case for probably all of our deeply held negative beliefs.

Adjacent, and likely more important, is that I grew up in the First Baptist Church, a ringleader of the tried and true Southern Baptist Convention - where all young feminists go to die before they’re reborn and re-emboldened. ;)

“I didn’t know I wasn’t beautiful, until you told me so, until you told me so.”

The worldview of the Baptist church is that we are born sinful and ask Jesus into our hearts as a means of “salvation,” which really doesn’t sit well with my observation of the human soul. It resonates for me, rather, to believe that we are born beautiful, and our work is to remain intact with that essence, in a world full of reasons to lose grip of it. The FBC suggestion is that we’re born bad, and we effort towards good. We’re born into a deficit model, and by “steps,” we can attain purity. Efforting for worth seems like a bit of a slippery slope, but, who asked me.

Anyways, as a sensitive, earnest, “good” young girl, I listened to my elders, go fn figure. They said that my Broadway dreams were of the devil - so I doubted but internalized. They said that my jeans clung too closely to my thighs and would cause the boys around me to “fall,” so I burned them at a youth group revival weekend (look up D-now). They said “decorate the room, don’t dominate it.” They said good, ladylike, charming but non-threatening, warm, obedient, submissive, calm, sweet, and therefore - “saved.”

But in time, inch by inch, self sovereignty can reemerge, and on a different timeline for everyone. There were always parts of us that they tried to tame that couldn’t sit still. We start first with the reclaiming of those parts.

The Chorus goes as follows:

Cross your legs and bat your eyes

Daddy worked hard to pay for that smile

She’s so pretty, we all hate her

Better be on your best behavior

Broke out with the windows down

Pink Champagne all over this town

Even Jesus couldn’t save her

Tired of living on your best behavior

Unless I peace out again for another 8 months, I hope to show back up when the muses strike to unpack more of this song. Or to unpack the state of the world and how we find joy in the midst of it. Or my present day experience of Spirituality, Mother Father God, and the Universe, and how that is my greatest gift in this era of my life. Or, just to scream into this digital vortex together and see if anyone can hear us. I’m not sure. But I love you. If this is for you, my new song might be too.

PS I don’t really f with apostrophes or punctuation - they kill my vibe and my flow so let a girl live, ok.

“Best Behavior” is out tonight, 11CST, everywhere you listen to music.

Pre-save/ Stream

XO,

Cy

Another PS, I’m pretty sure anyone on this platform is already heady and curious and this is old news, but I mentioned early in this read the idea of “resistance.” If you haven’t read “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, go peel that onion. I’m going in for a revival soon, as well.

**Just 2 of the thousands of golden nuggets I love from Pressfield:

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

&

“Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt.”