I was thinking yesterday for some reason.
I was thinking about how much more inspired I felt to write to nobody/everybody this time last year. I was remembering how it felt effortless to expound upon the music business and software as if I had anything of worth to say. Interestingly, I think I did. Interestingly, now that I ostensibly know a lot more what I’m talking about I feel a lot more reluctant to blather about it. Less confident. Why is that?
I think it has a lot to do with not making my living on a stage anymore. Getting up in front of people and doing a confident, creative thing for a living has a lot of side effects that are good and bad. Playing music was a fairly easy skill for me to pick up, and gave me much needed confidence in my teens that I might actually be a talented individual. It helped me to cast off some of the negative side effects of non-jockdom in high school. It gave me a very clear and immediate feedback mechanism as to whether or not I was doing a good job. This feedback is kind of like fertilizer for the ego. Fertilizer can obviously help plants grow stronger than they ordinarily would, but if you don’t use care in the feeding it can take over the whole side of your yard, just as letting the ego grow unchecked can lead to a lot more serious problems (and seemingly uncontrollable side effects).
I think this experience thus far has been a -little- lot like taking the pruning shears to my ego. It kinda sucks because I feel a -little- lot less productive and open right now, but I think that it’s going to be a good thing for my long term spiritual health. Besides, I’m actually doing a hell of a lot more than I ever have before. I just doesn’t feel that way because there’s no crowd cheering when I do something halfway right. Strange, mostly because I disagreed with my shrink when he said something like this to me a few months ago. I didn’t consider myself the attention craving type, which has turned out to be not-the-case.
When you prune back that bush, it looks a little ugly at first.