How Music Shaped My Life (Part 1)

From as far back as I can remember, music has had an incredible impact on my life, the choices I have made and my personality. We all know that songs and lyrics can tap into our deepest feelings, there's something truly magical about music but my story goes much deeper.

As a kid from the age of about 2 or 3 I can remember being in the living room and my dad sat at the computer making trance music which was his preferred genre at the time. Something about what he was doing stood out to me though and over the next few years of my life I became more interested in what he was doing, I liked the idea of being creative and used to sit on his knee while he'd do it just watching and absorbing what I could, trying to understand (but not able to at that age)

When I first started Primary School it wasn't a very pleasant experience for me. I made some friends but I was a very quiet child a lot of the time but my brain was very active, this led to me suffering with anxiety from a young age due to getting bullied for reasons I still sometimes struggle to understand but from what I can gather now at nearly 22 it's because my energy is different to a lot of people and they sense it. The bullying didn't stop there but only escalate and continue from then to when I graduated Secondary School in Spring of 2015 so you can imagine the sort of impact that had on my mental health.

I started really getting into Hip Hop and R&B. My mum has always been a big lover of 90s music as is my dad, so I grew up listening to a lot of music that I'd come to relate to in the future like Eminem, Tupac, Lauryn Hill, Coolio and many more. At 12 years old Eminem was my favourite artist, he was the person I was relating to most at the time and I used to love listening to his stories through his raps and his own experiences about being neglected, even though in different ways a lot of it was relatable. At that time, what I took most from his music is that he was using Rap as a way to express his feelings which (with me being a quiet person) spoke to me deeply, I had found a way to put my anxieties, depression and anger towards people onto a page instead of letting it build up. I remember once at 13, even though I felt anxious and nervous about it I asked my head of year if I could perform an original song I'd wrote during assembly, it was my first ever performance to a crowd of around 200 students and It didn't get the best reaction but a lot of people did give me a level of respect for having the confidence to get up there in front of everyone.

So I became known around School as wanting to be a Rapper and I won't give myself any credits here because looking back to where I'm at now, back then I wasn't very good and didn't have the right voice for it (squeaky teenager) but one thing that I did have a talent for was rhymes and the English language. Teachers were always praising my poetry and skill to input feelings and emotion into the words that I wrote down. Me and a mate called Owen I was close with at the time sacrificed many dinner times and breaks to go into the Music department of our school by ourselves and I'd be writing and rapping while he recorded me all in the very early stages but still nevertheless a fond memory.

I was a good student up until I was about 14 and that's probably when I started letting everything get the better of me. I'd been in a few different schools, 3 primary and 2 secondary so it felt like I'd moved around a bit over the years and I have really but the stress of life, being bullied and living on a council estate pushed the teenage me to rebel like most. I skipped out on a lot of classes in my last two years because I couldn't bare to be in the same room as people that we're trying to wind me up and torment me so I used to just go find some mates who also weren't going to class and try not to get caught from teachers, a few times we'd walked out the front gates without permission to go somewhere and be smoking but I felt like I needed to escape the reality I was living in, my teachers used to just brand me with the same label as the naughty ones.

Music is the only thing that really kept me from going completely off the rails however at the same time it has influenced decisions that I've made in my life that might not have been the wisest though we do learn our lessons from making mistakes. After I finished school the only thing that I wanted to do was be a Rapper. Obviously my Mum and Dad have time and experience behind them and they was advising me to go to college and study something that would give me stability. I probably should've seen the course through but only a month into studying I became extremely down and didn't like the people around me so I decided to drop out which inevitably created problems so I decided to leave home at 16. I'd been hanging about with my mates on the streets for years anyway at this point and felt I'd be pretty okay on my own but as the universe has taught us over the years not everything goes to plan and that really was the start of my real trials and tribulations that brought me to the path that I'm on now but we'll get to that in part 2...