I was overwhelmed with emotion reading the comments to last week’s blog post.
Someone very important once told me to ask myself: “does it matter how MANY people you are significant to, or is it more important HOW significant you are to the people who matter to you?”
I’ve had the ambition of becoming a “rockstar” since I was about eight years old. Looking back, yes I believe I was always very excited about the idea of fame, and knowing that wherever I’d go I could make heads turn. But at the core of it, I was so enamored with the power that a single song could have over me. Music was magic. I never stopped writing songs and recording them throughout all of high school, and I’d dreamed that maybe one day in the future, some other kid on the bus ride to school might be listening to a song of mine, associating it with a significant time in his life.
I’m at a point that always felt like a “someday” away. (“Waking Up At The End”) I don’t know, maybe I’d always envisioned life as a progression through a table of contents, and just never realized that there are actually no chapters. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve battled demons in the last several years, and yet somehow continued to clamber for that elusive plateau of self-accepted success. I’m talking about an incomprehensible amount of sleep deprivation, manic work obsession, and the constant anxiety that if I stopped for one minute, it would be the minute that would cost me my future. It was only recently that I began to consider that the best future for me might be different than the one I dreamt up at eight years old.
On a daily basis, I read comments and receive messages from some of the most thoughtful and caring people, (the majority of whom I’ve never met in person,) sharing stories of how my songs have had a significant impact in one way or another. It’s amazing.
It’s that kid on the bus listening to my song on the way to school.
The future, my present, has manifested itself in a slightly different way than I had planned, and why should there be a damn thing wrong with that?
I have a lot of plans. There’s so much more music to be made, and so many cool things I want to do. There are so many wonderful people to meet, common views to be shared, and souls from across the globe to embrace. I continue to strive to take pride in personal victories, and to learn to identify them. We’re all easily capable of wrecking ourselves, sprinting up the escalator as if we’re late to our own denouement, and yet equally capable of living life in a different light, of enjoying the pace, and being pretty proud of the strength it took to turn some of those particularly unique pages of our individual lives.
N