The Dream...?
I've had a complicated relationship with music for the past several months.
This thing that was a large, central part of my identity for almost as long as I can remember is...in hibernation. I pick up a guitar once every month or so, and play for 5-10 minutes just to remind myself of what it feels like.
That's weird.
That's the first time since I started playing....at 10 years old, mind you...that I've had this kind of break. I'm not purposefully not playing…but I'm also not actually playing very much.
I’m not in a rush to work through it, but I am trying to take some steps to assess what’s going on.
None of these things are The Cause®, but these are definitely some of the ingredients in the broth:
I’ve wanted to be a professional musician for as long as I can remember. In some ways, I became a professional musician. I succeeded! And…yet, not in ways that were sustainable for my family in the long term.
I used up a significant portion of my Post 9/11 GI Bill going to Berklee College of Music to become an Official Musician® (OM). But in every context where my OM status would’ve mattered, it didn’t. The music industry doesn’t inherently care about education, except in certain limited contexts. Berklee got their pound of flesh, but I had very little to show for it outside of my own efforts.
I had a wide variety of soft skills that people seemed to appreciate. I felt like I helped to solve problems on teams at least some of the time. I think I was hoping that the combination of hard and soft skills would pay off after almost a decade of pursuing it in some way. It didn’t.
I thought of the video game industry as a subset of the tech industry, and I thought my skills would be valuable. As you may have seen over the last few years, the game industry has quite a few problems just under the surface. My skills were not inherently valuable.
I’m friends with composers that are better musicians than me. They work their asses off. They do not get compensated fairly. They are barely hanging by a thread in some cases. Unless, of course, you already had some financial independence. Those composers are doing fine. But there’s a really toxic expectation that their financial independence comes from composing music, and in many, many cases…it doesn’t.
You know what? I really enjoy being in demand as a software developer. I don’t ever have to fight for my worth. I have to routinely turn down wild job offers. And you know what? That feels really good. I’ve never had that before. Being an enlisted Bubba in the Air Force is an exercise in seeing how much shitty treatment you can endure. That’s great when you’re young and don’t know any better. I’m tired of it now. I thought that as a lifelong musician, my value would be apparent. It wasn’t. I still had to fight for my value, and to be honest, that was frustrating.
Many of these things are flaws in my own expectations of what I thought it would be. Some of it comes from the fact that becoming a professional creative later in life, with a family, might just not be doable. The sacrifices that it takes early on is best done when you are the only one being affected by them. A few of the things probably come from the fact that “competence” does not guarantee success. I’m a competent musician. That probably wasn’t enough.
<Deep Breath>
Ouch.
So, what happens when you achieve The Dream® in some capacity, and it turns out to be a source of pain, failure, and frustration?
I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I figure out the answer to that question.
But I would like to enjoy playing guitar again at some point.
I do miss it.
