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.