Here we go again

4 months since I graduated again and became a master of music. 3 months since I started my job as a care worker. 2 months since I turned 24. 1 month since the start of the new year.

I feel lost. I feel that I don't have any good options. I feel stuck. I feel incapable of doing what I want to do. As cathartic as it is to blame capitalism, to blame the government of my country, to blame corporations (all of which are to blame, by the way), all that materially does for me is sap my energy and spend my time.

I don't miss being a student. I miss the ability I had as a student to allow teachers to provide a structure within which I could do well. And let's be clear: I did well. I am not comparing myself to anyone else, only to my own standards, and while my standards are high, I have also learned (sometimes) to recognise when I have done good work.

It's harder for me to do well when I have to motivate myself to do everything. This is why I know I cannot survive as a freelance performer; I will get bogged down in administrative details and I won't have any energy left to create. Of course, this is happening now in a different way, as my job is taking all of my time and energy (and sometimes more than all of my energy) and leaving me with very little with which to create.

At the end of 2018, one of my undergrad ensemble directors wrote me an email including the following paragraph:

"It’s so great to witness your development as an artist. You clearly have unique and important things to tell the world and to contribute to this field; I wish I had had half your wherewithal when I was in college. I would say that I hope you continue on your path, and you continue to develop, but I don’t think me hoping has anything to do with it; I think you’re going to regardless, and I’m glad I get to see some of it. That’s truly one of the great pleasures of teaching; seeing an artist develop sort of how you expected but sort of not, seeing them go inevitably in their own direction and towards their own original, maybe unexpected, things."

It's hard not to feel as though I've let him down.

This fucking pandemic . . . I will not apologise for swearing here. This pandemic has taken away one of the greatest joys I have ever been able to find in life, that of making music with other people. Earlier last year there were a lot of projects that involved people recording separate parts that an audio engineer would then mix into a performance. I never saw the point of that on a personal level. If I'm not able to share space with you, to breathe with you and feel the music with you and hear your part at the same time as mine, then we are not playing together. I'm happy for those who find this medium of music-making more accessible. I am not one.

Hell, I would even sight read Mozart quartets, I'm that starved for musical connection. But what I really want to do is get together with a group of people and make super weird, super noisy music and revel in that weirdness and noise with them. And I don't want to have to make money from it. Being in school gave me the freedom to do exactly that, and now that I've left school, I no longer have that opportunity in the same way. The pandemic merely adds another layer of isolation.

Objectively speaking, I've grown since the end of 2018. I have a full-time job and am paying my own rent and living on a different continent from my parents. I'm also on antidepressants and have developed significantly better coping mechanisms. I've been sober for about six months and haven't physically self harmed in about three and a half years.

Why does growth feel so much like loss? Why, now that I am financially independent and, for all intents and purposes, an Actual Adult, do I feel as though I'm missing part of myself? As usual, I don't have any answers. Feel free to speculate.