I started this blog in January and didn’t post between the 31st and the beginning of March. Is anyone surprised that I took on an artistic endeavor and inadvertently abandoned it?
I’m not.
A friend of mine who also blogs wrote about how at the beginning of the year every year, his gym fills up. A month down the line, he has access to all the free weights and benches again. I’m weirdly proud to say that my blog was not a New Year’s resolution; I just happened to start it at the turn of the decade because that’s when inspiration hit. But, like with many of my passions, I lost faith in myself quickly after starting.
And I know that’s a part of the process. Gene Fowler once said, “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” But the truth and ubiquity of fleeting confidence doesn’t make it any easier to grapple with.
I’m an avid composer. I’ve been writing music since I was 12. It started with jazz standards, moved to piano solos, and full wind ensemble pieces… and at the moment, I’m trying to compose a full symphony. The rate of my confidence with regard to time could be represented by a graph of y=10sin(x). Real high, then real low. And the period is around 24 hours. If I don’t capitalize on my brief moment of self-worth for the day, I’m screwed. And when I listen back to what I wrote the day before, I often wonder why I even bothered.
Omar Thomas is a teacher at Peabody Institute of Music in Johns Hopkins University. He wrote a wind ensemble piece titled “Of Our New Day Begun” to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attack on Mother Emanuel Church in 2015. He told me that not only was it the first song he had written for a wind ensemble, but that he completed it in around two months, because the ideas just “came right out of him.” Where is that for me? Where is my outpouring of art and music and emotion?
This existential-rant style of writing doesn’t make me sound like Nora Ephron. There’s no journalistic flair. But I suppose that’s not the point. Sometimes I just want to voice my self-reflection-induced dread, okay??
I’m doing the best I can.
(P.S. The blog I referred to earlier is called My Nebulous Life. It’s lovely, even though he also hasn’t posted since January. I still recommend it.)