sabotage

I can’t stand it, I know ya’ planned it…

For someone who’s spent more than his fair share of time sabotaging himself, I certainly had a smug and mired view of the people around me doing the same. My lack of experience (something I can’t blame myself for) and lack of self awareness (something I can blame myself for) allowed me to hear people say things like “I just need a drink to calm my nerves” and think “that’s so cliche – they’re just doing that because they heard somewhere that they should” without ever realizing that I was; in fact wrong, and that really what they were doing was giving themselves an excuse to drink that had nothing to do with the calming of the nerves at all, and everything to do with justifying the remedy.

I’m not here to pick on drinkers so much as I am here to expose my lack of awareness.

I come from a community; a scene, if you will, that was largely populated with GenX’ers and although I am technically not one, I was certainly born during a strange time between the GenXer’s and Millennials that allowed me to plant one foot in each camp – both fairly nihilistic for different reasons. This scene was special in many ways, but it was not unique in it’s collective attitude towards commercial success. The idea of ‘selling out’ was ultimately tantamount to treason, and I believe that my need to belong prevented me from pursuing a level of success that I believe I always had the chops to achieve. Many of us did, but many of us talked ourselves out of it. Now, at 41 years old I am chasing my teenage dreams once again… but that’s probably a topic for another day.

A stronger version of myself might have told all of those people to kick rocks, but I wasn’t that. I was me, for better or worse. And honestly I’ve been sabotaging myself for decades – this is just the most friendly, and possibly pivotal example of it.

This all does lend itself to a fear I developed, or maybe always had. Hell, maybe all of us had it – the fear of success. We’re all aware of the concept of fear of failure and the workoholism that tends to follow suit, but fear of success is much, much stronger and far less often acknowledged.

What if I succeed and I have to keep doing this?
What if I become known for the wrong thing?
Imposter syndrome often follows, with “what if they find out I’m actually not remarkable?”

As a musician, the thought of both alienating my old-school, cool fans while simultaneously not being able to sell what I’m doing to a larger part of the populous meant living in “insincere loser purgatory” for what could be the rest of my life. My personal concerns included:

• not being punk enough for punk rock fans
• not being pop enough for the pop crowd
• not being heavy enough for the rock/metal crowd
• not being a good enough guitar player for the guitar geeks
• not being interesting enough to be interviewed… or handsome
• What if I never write another song?
• What if I actually suck, and nobody is telling me?

It devolves into an embarrassing series of notions from there, I assure you. This line of resistant thought kept me starting and cratering bands every few years for a couple decades… except for the ‘what if I never write another song?’ which kept me pen-in-hand and riffing constantly for my whole life.

I’ve released over 125 songs in 8 different bands, have co-written singles, and have composed music for commissioned works, as well as writing my own parts for a couple hundred songs on other people’s recordings and/or performances… and wondered if I had what it takes to be a consistent, solid, good musician pretty much the whole time.

In the end, I tend to think that these types of failures of self; for lack of a better term, come down to manifestation. We speak hard things over ourselves, and we receive them. We also say enough contrarian shit about ourselves and we’ll inevitably start to believe it – and we do that because it’s EASIER to say “I could have accomplished ______” than it is to actually set our sights on something and go for it.

If I have anything to bestow on anyone who read all the way to the end of this, it’s that (a) it’s okay to daydream, and you should do it without remorse or embarrassment, and (b) be kind to yourself, even when you don’t want to.

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