I love that movie – Leslie Mann makes turning 40 feel so much better!

My mid-life crisis started five years earlier than it should have and it involved a guitar and newfound love of Mexican food, which Nashville does so well. Of course, this was before the fish taco craze hit Toronto.

Speaking of the place with good-but-not-as-good-as-Nashville Mexican food, I was born in Toronto, at Mount Sinai Hospital. It was quite an uneventful birth, but not an uneventful life. I’ve had ups, and downs, and even lowers, but I’ve managed to survive – maybe even thrive.

In good times and bad, I’ve always been “sensitive”, which as a child meant lots of stomach aches, my mom picking me up from the nurse’s office every week, and a serious case of mono at age 14 which left me hospitalized and out of school for months. The doctors attributed my condition to mostly stress, but I knew otherwise. It wasn’t stress, it was the emotional turmoil of my first love: George Cross. He was the one…for three weeks.

Since then, I’ve been married and I have two great kids that are now almost teens (oh, G-d…). My marriage ended, and I fell in love again. It was complicated, it was confusing, and often times it was heartbreaking but it was “a love as true as mine” to quote George Strait.

But in my mid-30s all of that miraculously translated into music and lyrics – Taylor Swift was on to something with all her ballads about her ex-lovers: this whole putting-your-feelings-into-song thing is really helpful. Though song writing didn’t change the past, it did give me somewhere to channel all the pain instead of keeping it bottled up inside of me. Truth is, I didn’t fall in love with just song writing, I fell in love with country, and I fell in love with Nashville.

To be honest, Nashville saved me.

In Nashville, I found a part of myself that I had lost… or never even had. I found a place where doing what I love, song writing, just felt right… but more on that later.

I do really like the South, oddly enough. Okay, I LOVE the food in the South, but I actually feel really comfortable in the Bible Belt of all places. I don’t know, maybe there’s something about being surrounded by people who have faith that is so comforting. Maybe faith isn’t about the Bible at all, but hoping that one day you can heal from all the pain you’ve experienced…

Not that I know too much about the Bible to begin with. I should add that I’m Jewish, which hasn’t exactly helped me in country music, then again, neither has living in the Little Israel of Toronto, Canada. I grew up the intersection of Bathurst and Lawrence, surrounded by bagel shops and lox mongers. Clearly, I haven’t been on too many dusty back roads, which sometimes means I have trouble with the basic vernacular of country music. Exhibit A: “90 proof”- I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded cool (which in Nashville is pronounced coo – silent L, quick).

Before Nashville, I had never played an instrument or written any poetry, but I did have a few big blips in my adult life and that might be why I had so much to write about and why I needed to let my words out somehow.

So now, here’s the Nashville Diaries, another outlet just like songs, to share some of my thoughts on song writing, on L-O-V-E love, on following dreams you didn’t know you had, letting go of dreams you shouldn’t have had, and also sharing some of the aching lulls that come with any kind of creative work….but more about that in a future blog. For now all I will say is this: somehow, and I’m still not sure how, I found something in Nashville. I hope this blog can help you find something, too.

Love, Dayna

Songwriter and musician, Dayna Shereck, has just released her new EP Suitcase Full of Dreams and has a song featured in the upcoming family flick, On the Wing. Previously, Dayna has co-written songs with Marcum Stewart on his album "Put It In Drive" and Canadian country artist Barbara Lynn Doran for her upcoming album. She has also been placed on the Nashville Songwriter’s Association “Ones to Watch” list and was a finalist in the “Great American Song Contest” and a semifinalist in the “International Songwriting Competition” for 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Dayna will be returning to Nashville in October for more song writing and to find that inexplicable something we’ve all been looking for.