a habit of demonizing the past

and whether to demonize demonization

I’m sitting at my kitchen table at 4am, wondering if there will ever come a time when I can fully embrace a creative endeavor without having to demonize whatever I was doing before.

It annoys me when clients do this (read: I annoy myself). When they/I discover an inspired new path, and then speak badly about the path they/I were/was previously on. 

“THAT wasn’t it, but THIS is!”

Why does THAT have to have anything to do with THIS, actually?

Well, because it’s the narrative, and the narrative is running things.

But I don’t want it to. Even as I speak my new narrative, about how music creation came with too much friction, never enough resources, or drive. A future vision that kept getting blurrier and blurrier until it disappeared. So THAT’S why writng fiction is a BETTER idea.

I know I’m full of shit.

Look… there are many factors that make life as any kind of musician difficult.

That life does not need to be demonized in order to sit there, unchosen. It could simply not be the path I choose.

But the insistence on demonization is telling. Or maybe it’s just a stupid habit and I can knock it off without spending thousands more on therapy or traveling to another country to have some Mesoamerican 6D demon purge me of my self-loathing.

It’s funny, I went looking for that post I just linked thinking the word was “god” or “spirit” but then it was “demon” and now that’s messing with the flow of this post because I feel like I have to work it in somehow and I don’t want to do so any more eloquently than I just did. So there. 😝

Now that I write this all out, I don’t think this thing I do is really a problem.

Perhaps instead of demonizing the habit itself, I will simply look at what’s working…

I can see and hear myself doing it now, whereas in the past I needed it pointed out to me. And even then, I often wouldn’t hear it.

I’m hearing AND listening now.

Speaking of listening, I was just doing so with this track

Thinking “wow this bears resemblance to a Janet Jackson song” and then as the notes progressed, I realized it was a cover.

That actually brings me back to what inspired this writing to begin with. I was sitting here listening to random piano tracks on a playlist called “music for writing” and I kept noticing things about the recordings. Many of them tend to include not only the musician’s breathing, but also the sounds of the piano keys and hammers, thunking along with the notes.

These are things I would always lament being unable to remove from my own recordings, thinking that it was strictly wrong and bad to have these sounds in there.

Well… not entirely, but mostly. Like, a part of me found myself enjoying little things that made recordings more human, but nothing technical like that. Instead, my narrative of “I’m not a real musician and I don’t know what I’m doing/don’t deserve acknowledgement for this” won out, and I agonized over perfection in order to prove that I am worthy of calling myself a musician.

This is something I, of course, do with writing as well, and it will get in my way once the fiction euphoria dies out.

Any endeavor will come along with narratives that hinder. Subconscious, insidious narratives you don’t even notice you’re being run by.

I am grateful that my eyes are open. Grateful that I can see. Not that that handles the issue entirely, but it’s at least half the battle.

Aaaand I’m back to this realization once again…

But thanks to a friend’s suggestion, I turned this tweet into a meme that makes it even more poignant…