Touring is really beautiful and fun. I see so many different places, meet so many amazing people, and share so many moments and smiles. But indeed, it can also be really daunting and exhausting. Sometimes the show isn’t that good, sometimes the logistics can be a mess, it can be really stressful... Very often you are sleep deprived on tour. I’m rather prone to anxiety, though I control it rather well. But when you don’t sleep enough for various days, it can take a toll on your mental health and also changes your perception of the world around you, in a negative way, giving way for fears and anxieties to surface. But it’s not just touring. As an independent artist, there are so many things to do, from negotiating deals, logistics of touring, promotion of your music, drafting agreements, social media presence, content creation, in my case the label launch, artwork and infinite background things people have no idea about. And of course, composing, and producing music, which I haven’t been able to do properly since April this year. This is extremely overwhelming, and I don’t know many artists at my level that do everything by themselves. I’m doing like 10 jobs in 1. So, the way I deal with touring now is by making sure my health and sleep go before anything else. In India for example, I made sure to have only afternoon flights to ensure a proper night of rest. And despite being in a beautiful country with so much culture and diversity, this time I didn’t go out to explore. Because that would have meant shortening up my night of sleep which was already quite limited considering I had a 20-hour trip to India, with three late-night gigs in three cities with three national flights every day and a 20-hour trip back home three afterwards. Had I tried to wake up earlier to see anything, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyway and I would probably have crashed. This happened to me already in Colombia: I once fainted in the hotel corridor, woke up blind with one eye and blurry with the other, because I had just done 4 shows without little to no sleep, dehydrated and in a heatwave. The next day in the clinic I really realized that this is not the way to tour. So now I drink a lot of water, make sure I can maximize my sleep, and don’t cheap out on flights anymore. The way I deal with all the other things on my agenda is still something I’m working on, and I am starting to look into building a team around my project for 2023, otherwise, it will hinder not only my growth as an artist but more importantly it will burn me out.