A Sense Of Hope – OLIVIA LANE

A Houston native, Lane spent time in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of Southern California before settling in Nashville in 2013. Her sweet, soulful voice and insightful songwriting helped Lane earn an enthusiastic following, but all her hard work came to a screeching halt in 2017 when stress and anxiety caused her to lose her voice.

“Honestly, I was just so tired of carrying the weight of feeling like I was in control of everything,” she says. “It was just too much for me to bear being in control of my career. Being in control of so many outside factors was weighing me down so much and it infiltrated my whole life. I started to over think everything because that’s what you do when you are trying to strive for perfection and over singing, overcompensating, over sharing my feelings. Ironically I just got to this place where I felt very out of control striving to be in control and I just had to let go. It was letting go emotions in therapy, letting go of my voice in my vocal lessons, letting go of a toxic relationship, which I did during that time, and also letting go of control of my life. That led me to Jesus.”

During therapy, Lane’s therapist taught her that each life is made up of four spheres—spiritual, emotional, physical and logical. “Ideally you want all four of those balanced,” she says but admits she was caught off guard when her therapist asked about her spiritual life. “My spiritual was basically nonexistent. She said, ‘If you want more, you need to figure out what your connection is to the world. What is your purpose? What are you doing here? I was like, ‘That doesn’t sound fun. I don’t want to do that,’ but she gave me a couple of books and she gave me all the options from Buddhism to Christianity. I read this book by John Eldredge called ‘Walking With God’ and it was just so unbelievably clear to me that Jesus was the path. I was an atheist. I was not looking for God, and my path just led me to that. It was like I’d been living in the dark and dust. That’s truly what it felt like. Once I knew there was all this on the outside, it was like this two or three year period of just crushing, changing, shaping and stripping away and ripping people out of my life who weren’t good for me. It was not an easier path, but it’s a path that makes more sense to me.”