To say that it was scary to put my music on YouTube is a bit of an understatement. I was pretty well terrified when I first had the idea.
"What if people don't like it?"
"What if I get shitty comments from people?"
I hummed and hawed about it. At least I think I did, because I'm not really sure what hawing is but it sounds more like something a horse does, than a human 🤷🏻♀️
I hummed and pretended I was horse and then I remembered - I kind of also just don't care.
Yep.
I simultaneously feel terrified and I don't care.
We never know if we have a tomorrow
Life is seriously short. There are times (usually in the dreaded days of middle school) when we think life is far too long. But the older we get, the more see, the more we know - the shorter it all seems.
It's cliche as fuck, but it's true: Tomorrow is not guaranteed.
And while I might have used that a reason to stress myself out about making my mark on the world - I have learned to use it to motivate me to do the things that scare me.
Because:
- I might never get another chance.
- If it doesn't work out, I won't care when I'm dead.
- If it DOES work out, I will care while I'm still alive.
You might never get a chance to do it perfectly
I spent a lot of time thinking that I needed to perfect something before I could show it to anyone. This goes for music, artwork, and every new skill I learned.
I can dive into the underpinnings of my anxiety and psychoanalyze the roots of these fears (and trust me, I have). Or I can just look forward instead of backwards, and ask myself, "For however much time I have spent on this planet, how do I want to live?"
Because I sure as shit do not want to live in fear.
I don't want to live waiting for perfection (spoiler alert, I will never find it anyway). Even to wait until I think the thing I have created is the absolute best it can be - might not always be possible.
I wrote this song and I'm proud of it.
I learned to (barely) play the guitar and I'm proud of that.
I recorded myself playing/singing it with a chest infection and a shitty microphone and I'm OK with that.
I fuck it up a little in the middle, and I'm OK with that.
Because the feeling is there. The purpose of the song is there. The emotion is there. And maybe that emotion will matter to someone. And if I die tomorrow and hadn't put this out there, that impact would never be felt.
So, it might not be perfect. It might not even be complete. It might have sounded better if I owned an acoustic guitar 😆
But I put it out there anyway. And I'm proud of that.
OK, wanna check out the song? 👇
