Finishing Up (Part 2)

I recently made a blog post about how I feel a sense of dread and nervousness coming up on the end of anything that I do, and I’m here a month later to tell you that I’ve finished several things that I’m proud of in that time. I finished my business plan and presented it for my Master’s program with Full Sail University. I finished several  songs that I can actually listen to happily. I spent some intentional time at the beach, some intentional time with friends, and I feel like with all of those things combined, I don’t feel that same sense of dread and incompetence. I finished a master’s program, and I passed with flying colors the whole way through. 

For once, it feels like I actually believe in myself and my skills, because looking back, I’m able to see the progress I’ve made. I spent a little while in every class questioning if it was something that I still wanted to do, and I think that’s normal, but that questioning made me reassure myself that I can complete something that I set my mind out to do. It pushed me to work hard in every class so that I could complete every assignment on time, and to better organize and manage my own time outside of my classwork time.

I don’t fear endings anymore. I can face things that challenge me, and I can handle them head-on, and I can get things done, and this Master’s program proved that to me. Now I actually feel ready to go out into the world and apply everything I’ve learned, and that’s a great feeling.

Finishing Up

There are a lot of things that I struggle with, but one that really bugs me is the fact that I struggle to finish anything. With any assignment I do, I get all the way up to the very end, and then I get the worst writer’s block, and my motivation virtually disappears. With meals, I get all the way to the last bite, and then leave it on my plate. With songs I write, I get two verses and a chorus banged out, and then a bridge is what I get hung up on. I’m wondering why this is, but I don’t fret too much about it, because I know that when I get to the end, I have to step away. I need to take a break so that I can come back and finish strong. It’s been a process of unlearning strategies that worked for me previously. As a swimmer, I was always taught to sprint, and all my life has felt like a sprint, but learning to pace myself has been one of the hardest things to learn.

As I finish up the Master’s program with Full Sail University that I’ve been in for the last year, I feel myself nearing the end, but surprisingly I don’t feel myself slowing down. I don’t feel myself losing interest like I did in undergrad. I’m instead looking on the horizon of something great. I’ve been applying for jobs, but even if I stay unemployed, I can see my studio work helping me survive. I want to be able to use everything that I’ve learned in a job environment, but I also want to see myself flourish creatively, and I feel like once I get the job half of that, then I will be able to flourish more so creatively as well. Maybe I’m being ignorantly hopeful, but I feel like I’m just one big opportunity away from greatness. And I don’t think that’s a bad way to view life, but if opportunities don’t present themselves to me, I have to go out and make them myself. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. I’m still young and full of potential, I don’t want to let that putter out into nothing, but I do want to take that potential and turn it into something amazing.

I don’t think that I’ll ever be truly finished with anything that I make, or anything that I record, but that comes from a never-ending sense of perfectionism that flows through my veins when I make music. Though I feel unbalanced still, I know that things will become more balanced in time, and that I need to allow myself to have a little grace. Learning how to live a life on my own after my mother passed away has been very strange, and I need to remember that the life I live isn’t ordinary. Not everyone is thrust into adulthood like I was, but to be finishing up a Master’s program, I’d say that I’m doing alright.

Reading List

In whatever context you found my blog, I thought it would be fun to let you know some of what I’ve been reading over the last year. 

The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

To Shake the Sleeping Self - Jedidiah Jenkins

How to Make Friends with the Dark - Kathleen Glasgow

The Woman in the Window - A. J. Finn

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

The House We Grew Up In - Lisa Jewell

These are all in addition to various textbooks I read for my Master’s program with Full Sail University!

NJ to LA at 25

Moving out to Los Angeles was one of the biggest transitions I’ve made in life. If you don’t know a lot about me, I was born in Philadelphia, and grew up in New Jersey my whole life. I went to college in Pennsylvania, but I hadn’t had many opportunities to travel. The summer before I moved to Los Angeles, I had traveled all over, from east coast to west, even to Greece and Italy! That gave me a bit of a taste of what it would be like to live outside my comfort zone in New Jersey. So about a year and a half ago, I packed everything that I knew and loved into a moving truck, and I drove across the country. Sure, it took me a few days, and maybe I rushed the travel process, but I traveled without even second-guessing myself, stopping here and there to see some major landmarks. That, for me, was huge. I’ve always been someone that reconsiders my options often, but ever since then, I’ve learned how to make carefully calculated moves to activate my life.

Moving out to Los Angeles turned out to be one of the most beneficial things in my life. That might have something to do with the fact that it’s almost always sunny in Los Angeles, but I think it’s more because I’m finally able to be completely and unabashedly myself. While my friends in New Jersey loved me and supported me (and continue to do so), I still felt limited by my home town. I felt limited by my location, my skills, my reputation, the people I knew, job opportunities, etc. It just wasn’t something that was conducive to my own personal growth.

Moving to California allowed me to let go of everything that I previously thought bad about myself, and the move also gave me the opportunity to flourish and do what I love. I’ve written over 30 songs since moving here, not to mention the song snippet ideas i’ve produced since being here. Plus, I’ve had the chance to work with other artists because there are so many out here. For once I feel like I’m actually doing what I enjoy, and if that doesn’t clear up some mental blocks, I don’t know what will.

It’s not like it has been completely easy living out here - I lost a good portion of time to COVID-19. I didn’t get a whole lot of time to thrive before the Coronavirus, but I’ve actually found that I’ve been working around it to thrive on my own. This means picking up lots of online and digital work, in place of ordinary things like a stable job or consistent recording. There are always work-arounds if you’re adaptable, and I’ve found that living in Los Angeles during a pandemic has made me more adaptable than I’ve ever been before. I’m not necessarily someone that thrived on rigidity, but I’ve always had a sense of consistency and stability. I feel like you have to adapt in order to survive out here, because from what I’ve experienced in California, every day brings new opportunities, and you have to be able to grasp them when they present themselves, and I love that. New Jersey didn’t bring me many new opportunities, and as I traveled more, the more I realized that there were in fact places that would benefit my life by visiting, and I wanted to be able to grasp that feeling and own it - not by visiting, but by taking up space in those places, which is what propelled me to make my move.

Yes I could have stayed my whole life in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, doing a job I hate, around all the same people I grew up with. But I wanted something more, and I wanted more opportunities to grow. And by moving to Los Angeles, I did exactly that: grow. Do I miss my friends from back home? Yes, every day. But I’ve been able to make new friends, and create my own unique story with my own unique experiences, and that’s something I wouldn’t trade for the world.

Writing Music During a Pandemic

At the time of writing this, the entire world has spent more than 10 months in a state of pandemic. Many of us have taken steps to quarantine and isolate in order to keep the most vulnerable safe. In the wake of a global health crisis, we’ve been forced to re-learn how to operate on our own, socialize in different forms, and do what we can to lead fulfilling lives despite the pandemic. Musicians are not strangers to change within their field, as music has evolved drastically over the last 10, 20, 30 years (you could go on and on to the beginning of time if you wanted to). But just because musicians are weathered against change, doesn’t mean that making music has been easy during the pandemic… or has it been?

It is SO much easier

The nature of self-isolation means that more people are working from home, or not working at all. Many people have turned to their hobbies, and for some people that might mean picking up their guitar, or sitting down at the piano, and playing something that they haven't played in years. Many people are rediscovering their passions simply because they have more time on their hands.

Many other creatives are working tirelessly to create music and art despite the limitations of COVID-related restrictions. People are building out their network to expand beyond their local vicinity as people discover new artists that they can work with around the world. Digital Networking has become something that we rely on as an essential means of communication, at least if we’re trying to find and maintain work.

Some people might feel a sense of relief as they have more time to create without pressure. As many artists can attest, hardship also tends to create better work. Many artists are also turning to livestreams and online concerts as a way to supplement lost income from the loss of live music. There are still ways to work around COVID, we just need to get a little creative.

It is SO much harder

Lack of inspiration is something that every artist faces at some point during their career, and for some people, the pandemic didn’t bring a wave of enthusiastic work - it brought on a depression. More people are out of their regular jobs, and while some people work away, some people (especially extroverts) find it challenging to muster up the strength to be inspired to create something amazing, especially if these people now work from home. A change in scenery and routine can help reinvigorate ourselves, but what do we have when we’re forced inside, with no social lives to speak of? Well… personally, I tend to get depressed, but I’m not alone in that feeling. Some people have a restless nature that is suppressed by COVID restrictions. It’s hard for those people to draw inspiration from an uninspired environment, and when they have no choice in the matter as COVID-19 would have it, their spirit dulls, and their work suffers because of it. Some people refer to this as “cabin fever.”

Communication plays a huge part in writing music, because writers want the message of their music to be communicated eloquently or otherwise to their liking, and the communication between writer, producer, mixing engineer, mastering engineer, and everyone else is essential. Because of the need to quarantine, we find ourselves stuck in zoom meetings all day, and when one person isn’t communicating something properly or fully, it can cause a huge issue down the road. When the level of communication drops from in-person communication, there are bound to be loose ends in conversation. There is an entire feeling of body language that is effectively lost when you’re looking into a computer all day. When the method of communication is degraded, the quality of the work produced is often degraded in turn.

COVID-19 related restrictions mean that we can’t be together as we once were. Entire industries have collapsed. Live music literally stopped in its tracks. We can’t have more than 25% capacity in any area of business (for the safety of the clients, ourselves, and the public), which changes the way we do studio sessions. There are many things that could affect the entertainment industry, but nobody predicted a pandemic of this nature, which means that many people are still learning how to readjust.

Whether you feel that writing music in pandemic is easier or harder, or a bit of both, it can’t be denied that there are two sides to the coin, and just like with any business, we have to learn to readjust and adapt to new circumstances, or we suffer. No matter what happens to us as a society in the future, music will always be around, and as we grow from this, we will have developed a greater appreciation for the moments that we are together in person, operating as we normally would.

On Being 23

Being 23 has, without a doubt, been the scariest, most confusing time of my life. Now, as a disclaimer, I just want to put this out there: I’m not a good writer. I mostly write from a stream of consciousness, and I guess it’s a good thing that I can type relatively quick, because otherwise I’d be lost and completely unable to get my thoughts out. But that, to me, is the purest form of “me” that I can be - not necessarily constructed and crafted, but raw and natural, as if I were speaking, because that’s essentially what I’m doing, just on my computer.

Anyway, my goal is to chronicle my life, my opinions, and my mentality as I grow older, mostly as a way to keep track of myself and leave something behind for the kids I’m not having. But obviously the goal is to make this public, so if other people enjoy it or can relate to it, then that’s great too. I honestly hope to create a video series to accompany everything that I write, but I’m currently in a manic high and I’m not so optimistic about what I can produce when that crashes. I’m honestly sick and tired of feeling like I’m leaving nothing behind and that I’m not producing anything. I make music but I’m not confident about it, I paint but it’s mediocre, I take basic photos, and I honestly don’t feel that great about anything that I do. BUT I don’t want any potential readers to worry about me, because I know a lot of people that feel this way, so therefore my lack of self-confidence is justified. I guess. I just don’t want to feel like the only thing I’m good at is creating things... and then create nothing… So I’m trying to write, because I have a lot of ideas and opinions, and I want to keep track of them for my own sake.

In these blog posts I plan to examine several different topics, including happiness, friends, religion, music, and a bunch of other topics. There might be times when it may come across as sounding almost “self-help-ey” but that’s because it’s something I’m working on, and it’ll be fun to re-read in the future. I’m not a therapist, I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m not an expert on anything - like I said, I’m hardly a writer, but as long as I’m getting it out there, there’s no real harm in doing so.

So back to the main point - “being 23 has, without a doubt, been the scariest, most confusing time of my life.”

Since I was a 3 I’ve been in school. I just graduated at 23. That’s 20 years of school. TWENTY LONG years, and I know I looked forward to graduating, but… honestly, what the hell comes next? Some people jump right into jobs and god bless them, but I know I needed a bit of a break. I took a couple months off, and while it was nice to finally sleep regularly for once in my life, as every day goes by, I get more and more worried about the future. The future holds literally “everything else” and nothing is guaranteed for me or for anyone, and it’s difficult to know that I could potentially be sleeping under a bridge somewhere begging for food some day, OR I could pursue my dreams and become successful. But at 23, I know I have time, but there’s this weird contradiction where I know I have that time, but there’s also SO much pressure to succeed, get a full-time job, move out, and become a full-fledged adult, and it’s honestly so scary. A lot of the pressure comes from within - like, my parents don’t put this immense pressure on me, but I put it on myself. I guess that society applies the same pressure too, but that’s mostly a personal introspection as well, because I’m only comparing myself to other people who are the same age as me. And that’s why when I see people that jumped right into jobs, I just feel more shitty about myself. It’s not their fault, and it’s not mine either, it’s just the societal expectation that what they’re doing is what I should be doing, and that’s not a realistic or healthy expectation to hold. It’s not realistic because at 23, there are tons of other college graduates that have no idea what they’re doing in life, so it’s actually relatively normal to take some time off, or hop between part-time jobs in a search for something better. It’s not healthy because people can’t be expected to follow in paths etched out by others, and because people shouldn’t be comparing themselves to others either. I know that it’s only natural to compare yourself to others, but it’s really not good for you when you know you’re not the one succeeding, because the only thing it’s going to do is bring you down. There really is no “right way” to do life, and the sooner I understand that, the sooner I’ll be able to accept my mediocrity, and live satisfactorily rather than in a state of paranoia.

So what is it that I’m doing now? Right now I’m working at starbucks, making music at home, taking photos and videos when I go somewhere interesting, and now apparently writing whenever I can. I’m trying to date, but I’m a lonely, hopeless romantic, and nothing is working out for me. I’m trying to meet new people, but I’m an awkward noodle that can’t manage to spit out words in social settings. I’m trying to find new jobs, but I’m a music major trying to stick his nose into photography and videography (unsuccessfully - shocker). Basically, I’m a barista with a number of passions and a shit ton of untapped potential. But all of this is stuff that I want to explore in other blog posts, so I don’t want to give everything away and then have nothing to write about later.

I want to write more, but I’m sure there will be a part two coming at some point. I hope that this served as a decent introduction to my blog, and I hope that you enjoyed reading.