Music Killed My Passion

Your junior and senior year of high school are ones of excitement and "lasts." Last first day, last prom, last concert, last home high school football game. It's exciting and looking into the future is intimidating but also simultaneously rather inviting. Perhaps the most intimidating part is trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life at the age of 17.

Of course, if you were into the fine arts like I was, and still am, one of your first options is to want to do music education or music performance. Just getting to do music all day, every day and earn a degree for it. Sounds easy enough, right?

Most people think it is. I'll admit, a part of me thought so as well. But everything that goes into a fine arts degree is exactly everything they don't tell you about. If somebody had told me I would end up crying almost everyday for a year, I probably would've opted out and chose something more realistic, like a business degree. But nobody tells you just how many courses you have to take in a semester in order to graduate in that expected four year time period. Nobody tells you about the countless hours you have to put in to practicing only for your professor to tell you that you still suck and that you should've practiced more. And nobody tells you just how critical you'll become of yourself because of constant fear of displeasing or falling short of others' expectations. It becomes over bearing and you end up trying to do everything that's asked of you while drowning in your thoughts of "I need to practice," only for none of it to be for yourself.

None of the activities that use to give you a thrill bring the same pleasure anymore. Instead it's a constant cycle of feeling helpless or bogged down by the fact that someone is always going to be better than you or no matter what you do it's never enough. The feeling of being strung out between classes, work, and making sure I practiced enough for my lessons to be mediocre at best, drained me. It killed my passion for music at all.

I get it, teachers are supposed to push you to want to be your very best. But when their expectations of what your very best is becomes exceedingly high and unrealistic in the time span they expect, it can become difficult to really enjoy music at all. It makes you want to shut the radio off once you realize you're analyzing every interval and chord instead of listening to unwind. It spins you into this cycle of constantly wondering why you're a music major, or why you're in the fine arts spectrum at all, and makes it hard for you to want to give your best. Why try? It causes me so much stress and someone is already better than me anyways.

So I dropped out.

I don't think it was necessarily stress and lack of passion that was the main reason for me dropping out, but it were definitely factors. I sold my soul to the military and left for boot camp. Honestly, having a steady job and free health care was appealing on its own to make me want to leave school. I couldn't afford school the way it was. Of course, like any unfortunate experiences that people will face through life, I was turned away from the military because of issues with my feet and sent home only a month into boot camp. Not knowing what else to do and kind of at a dead end, I returned back to the thing that drove me away to begin with. I only had a year left of my degree anyways so why not tough it out and get it over with?

In that semester off, and especially during that month of boot camp, I became oddly depressed. Not in the way that I felt overworked, tired, or stressed, but in the way that I was simply bored. Not to say that the military is boring by any means, but it didn't spark my interest like I hoped it would. Something felt like it was missing. It wasn't until I came in contact with a radio and heard one of my favorite songs again for what felt like the first time. I bopped my head and smiled which felt strange, but relieving to me since I hadn't been able to smile in over a month.

This made me realize that I really don't hate music. I thought at one point that I had grown sick of it, but really it was the environment of which it was being thrusted onto me that made me hate it. Once I realized just how miserable every one of the other music majors were, I discovered it's just school, stress, and competition that was killing everyone's drive. Most people gave me shit for dropping out of school, but it was honestly one of the best things I could've done for myself. Taking a step back from music and classes for a while reminded me of why I really love music. It made me remember why I went into music in the first place. Not because I thought it would be easy, but because I don't know what I would do without it. Music killed my passion, but taking a step back from it fueled it even more.