I realised why I haven’t been feeling the same amount of satisfaction on my music account lately (as I used to earlier). It’s not about the validation or the lack thereof. It’s about the fact that I’ve been holding off, a bit. I enjoy the freedom I have on this blog, I really do.
But I think because more “known” people follow my music account, sometimes I tend to hold back. I should accept that my style is verbose. I’ve been trying to “play” a part. I wanted to appear a certain way. But I think I’m happiest when I’m posting as much as I want and in the ways that I want. That’s always going to be the primary purpose. Even when I have secondary and tertiary purposes (ie connection, more engagement, good “quality” work etc) the primary purpose is still sharing your art AND YOURSELF in the ways that YOU WANT. This is my account and it’s only tracking my journey.
Being verbose actually helps me a lot. It helps me free my mind of the clutter. I also have really fresh learnings from yesterday about how new ideas sometimes only come to me when I make space in my brain from them. This actually literally means thought-dumping in all the various ways I need. Yesterday, it looked like finishing a song (even though I didn’t end up happy with the “final” result— more on this another time), making a couple of covers, journaling a few times, going over some of my older stuff and taking it a bit forward (even when I couldn’t reach too far), and then going out and sharing some of my thoughts on all this with a couple friends too. (Luckily there were people around me who like talking about stuff like this.)
I think about my first really great software engineering internship experience. I had a superb mentor. He was great at most of the things I needed help with— code reviews, technical advice, prioritisation stuff, debugging— all the jazz. But do you know what he was excellent at? Teaching me how to get the fuck over myself. He didn’t phrase at this way. He was gentler about it, and I’m glad. One of the questions that I would ask him on a recurring basis was, “Oh should I just ask other people for help directly or should I spend time by myself on the thing before that?” As an intern or a new grad, some of us tend to be very afraid of bothering people. We tend to be afraid of looking stupid. And yes, there’s a balance to be struck with all this, I’m not saying you want to be the person who’s walking up to one person 20 times in a day. But here’s the thing: You want to get over yourself because the work that you’re doing is more important than you. If you zoom out, everyone you’re sharing the space with has a common purpose, and you have to trust that everyone around you will remember that as well. (I’m going to write more about this in a more structured way).
But the point is, my social media accounts are currently PRIMARILY there to serve me. If they can serve me, I can get better. If I can get better, I can perhaps come up with and share more ideas with the world. Maybe there are people who are naturally able to directly serve others. But for me, serving myself is the only way I’m able to serve others.
So, I’m going to do this. I’m going to post more on my music account in the ways that I want to. Not hold back, because I don’t want to follow a template. I want to be my verbose, journey-loving, process-loving self on there. Whatever people think about that, I’ll leave that up to them.
Because if I really had to be succinct about my goals on my music journey (and really all creative journeys) at the moment, they’re just:
- Making a lot of things
- Understanding myself better
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Anyway, that’s that. I’m a little hungover from going out (and drinking a lot) last night so that’s going to be it on all that. I’ve been feeling a few unpleasant feelings since I woke up today so maybe I’ll just share those and get rid of them.
- I don’t like this feeling that comes when you’re hungover. I don’t want it. So I’m going to make it a point to stop at 2-3 drinks OR if I really do cross my limits, I really need to make sure to hydrate before I go to sleep. Definitely don’t want to be doing the early 20s kind of drinking anymore.
- I also get triggered when I see too many couples doing couple things and I want to find a better cope for this.
- I got a rejection from a portal for online tutoring that I’d applied to. It’s only a small bummer by itself but it opens up a bigger question. Obviously, part of me wanted this perhaps a bit “easily”. If I want to apply to a few places (or a few times) then I really need to decide whether this is the thing that makes the most sense for me to “try properly”. [for part-time paid work]
- There’s a friendship I’m lowkey struggling with. We’ve been sufficiently close friends since college and this is perhaps one of those friendships where I feel close and intimate enough with the person to share a variety of stuff and we have a good amount of fun together and yet there’s something missing. Maybe I just want more quality time. Or more attention. I don’t know what it is exactly, and this is quite interesting. I gotta come back to this.
untitled atm 