Kyle Wesley from City of Enoch: There's Joy (Even When You're Stressed Out!)

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City of Enoch member Kyle Wesley shares how we can find joy even in the most stressful situations.

Like the other two members of City of Enoch, my wife, Katelyn and I welcomed a new baby into our home during the process of writing and recording our new album, Sweet Redeemer”. 

There are some things that have surprised me about parenthood and other things that haven’t. I wasn’t surprised at how much I loved my daughter from the moment she was born, but I was unprepared for the sleep deprivation. I mean, everyone told me that my wife and I would never sleep again when the baby finally came, and I thought, “Yeah, it can’t be thaaat bad!” Oh, it’s thaaat bad! But, I’m happy to report that it’s gotten a lot better since the beginning . . . for me. I bet many of you would identify with my poor wife. I sleep like a rock, and I think she would like to hit me with a rock. 

One of the most surprising and hardest things for me to adjust to as I’ve started my new family has been the high level of stress that has come into my life.

About a month before my daughter Brooklyn was born, I was dealing with a lot. In addition to my work as a musician, I’m a business owner and my role in that business is administrative. It can be fairly demanding of my time and patience. The closer we got to Katelyn’s due date, the more pressure I felt to provide, and the more unstable work seemed to get. A lot of things seemed to be going wrong, and on top of that, we had to get quite a few songs written for this album. I started to feel really buried, discouraged and maybe even depressed. Every time something went differently than I had planned, it seemed like a huge deal and my first reaction was always a negative one until it got to the point where negative was all I could really see.

Lead image from TOFW
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