Writing Forever

Music did not begin as a passion. When I started high school I learned to play "In The End" by Linkin Park faster than my classmates, so I moved on to the guitar portion and learned to play whatever basic chords they set for us faster than my classmates as well. My parents bought me a cheap guitar and I just fiddled with it.

Throughout my teen years I played in a church band, but at high school I was too lazy to learn properly, so instead I would just write riffs. I was stubborn, so I always wrote guitar parts too hard for myself to play, then kept trying until I could play them. This set the tone for the next decade and a half.

I wanted to be a film-maker. I also loved writing prose, and graduated with Honours in English (Creative Writing), so that was a big part of my life. But after university, I struggled to do the things I loved because I didn't know where to go or what to do with them. I fucked up my biggest film project because of what I now realise was a mixture of technical and mental health issues. An awkward combination.

Music allowed me to have an instant sense of accomplishment. I was too clueless to know how bad the production and mixing was in my music, so I got a sense of pleasure listening back to whatever I recorded, and just kept chasing that. It was still procrastination, but it was a creative pursuit that allowed me to express myself in some way or another that I could do by myself.

During my honours year, I was at my worst. I wanted to edit my film project, but my computer tended to just freeze. No blue screen of death, no real crash. I would just open one of the hard drives and for some reason it stopped the computer. I had no control over it, and I didn't know how to deal with it.

For most of the year, my main source of procrastination was Minecraft. My friend subscribed to the "Realms" feature, which allowed multiple people to access the same world without the host having to be online. It started off so innocently: I built a house. Then I saw the tower my friend had built, with a pretty impressive platform at the top. I thought to myself "I can make some levels on top of myself.

So I built an upper level, which was four times the diameter and twice as high. This was something of a cathedral. Then I built another room of the same size above it, which had an elevated garden in the middle. Then I build a rooftop from which you could view the entire surroundings.

Then I decided to build a floating desert. This was more out of stubbornness than anything. I thought "Imagine that." Then I just got pissed at the idea that I wasn't capable of it. Then I did it. It was not easy. Then I made a floating forest. To be clear, this was not creative mode: I had to collect every single resource.

This was a cry for help.

The other source of procrastination from both my degree, and my editing, was picking up my guitar and playing. It was the same as ever: I'd write music that was too hard for me to play, then learn to play it. But this time I added a new challenge: singing whilst playing a way-too-complex guitar part. I was no good at singing, but no one is at the beginning.

I wrote three songs, all about mental health. One was just a string of nonsense lyrics because I couldn't think of anything that I turned into a song about procrastination because that was the truest explanation of not only the existence of the song, but the reason for the lyrics being the way they were. I was happy with these songs.

I had an idea. I would create an entire acoustic set, then start performing live. After all, most people who get up on a stage with a guitar in hand just strum chords, and I had something more involved to play. There was only one problem: this was now a priority, and the pressure that comes with that was the sort of pressure that I still had not learned to cope with.

Over the next four years I would slowly write bits of music and even more slowly write bits of lyrics. I would go months without playing anything. But somehow, I never forgot what I had written. The idea did develop: I knew that had to be played without pauses. I knew that it had to loosely track my mental health journey, starting off with arrogance, then confusion, then hopelessness, then the bittersweet realisation of what true mental health improvement is. The final song, which musically subverts the third song in the set (and the first song that I wrote), is built around the phrase "I'm not happy... but I'm fine."

Oddly enough, I became better at singing because I wanted to try making metal music. I loved metalcore as a kid, and I wanted to return to my roots. Turns out those sorts of vocals require vocal warmups and exercises, and careful control of your diaphragm. So I became more disciplined, and found something resembling the centre of my voice, and became better at singing, not just screwing up my throat. There's still a ways to go, but I can't believe it's come this far in a year and a half.

There was a point last year where I talked to a co-worker about my music, and I just felt frustrated that I couldn't say "It's finished. I'm doing something with it." I decided it was time to kick into gear. I've decided that many times before, but this time was the one. I finished writing the songs within a week, and started learning them in earnest.

It still took time, but that was okay, because I was genuinely making progress. In fact, I'm still in that mindset, except it's much closer. I recently decided to perform just to a camera to test my performing under pressure.

Still a bit shaky, but some of that is nerves and will be fixed through experience. Some of it is that I just need more practice. But that's easily fixed too.

In the immediate and ideal future, I'd like to keep challenging myself musically. I've pictured collaborating with an audience to determine styles, subject matter, maybe even stories to tell through music. Perhaps all of the above. So long as it challenges me and makes something exciting.

Recently, I've just been doing whatever I can with what I have. I wanted to film a music video, but had no way to film what I had wanted because it was raining. So I just came up with a silly concept that we could film on a rainy day.

The great thing about this is the ability to just make something, then let it go and move on. It's taken so long to learn the mental fortitude to constantly improve, and to be inspired rather than demotivated. My ideal future, at least in the next five years, involves a string of musical ideas guided in part by an engaged audience. I want to be both fluid, as well as bringing my own voice to the table. But this will only happen through experience.

Every week I make a new plan, and when I look back at the last decade of my life, I only wish I had realised what I had to look after in my own mind before I could do the things I love. If only I had let out an actual cry for help instead of building a fucking desert.