Thoughts of “impossible” were winning and I began to think maybe I was in over my head. I decided to let the project take a rest from writing, but I kept it tucked safely away in the confines of my delusions. The Jupiter tattoo was doing it’s job, though, and I continued to notice it several times a day. Each time I thought I might just be a little too outside the box, it reminded me to go big. There was no going home. I started this project and now I’d even told a couple people about it. I couldn’t look like a fool. I was a marketing specialist, for God’s sake. Was this project simply going to prove that my imposter syndrome was right all along? Was I simply bluffing my way through the years with smooth sales talk and big ideas that produced nothing more than paychecks? No, I had clients all over the world with successful results stemming from the work I did… and it was time I treated this project like it belonged to one of them.
I decided to take things one day at a time and explore all open doors without trying to continually seek their presence. I wasn’t going to worry about writing. I knew I’d have more to write when life played out a bit more. I focused again on the present and tried to build up some side income to fund this project. I gained some new marketing clients and was invited to author a course for another university. I was definitely building things and making progress. I even went out on a limb and talked to a few more people about turning this project into a movie or possibly a TV series. I was met each time with the same response… either nothing at all… or impressed ears that didn’t have the ability to act on anything. Somewhere along the way, I heard a new song by my favorite guitar player of all time. Though I’d listened to my favorite album of his regularly over the years, something about this song took me back to being 13 again. I had found another piece of my past that had been buried in my soul for fear of feelings finding their way to the surface.
I hesitantly allowed myself to explore those feelings for a minute. I shut it down, and decided maybe I really didn’t like the song after all. Every few days I’d play it again. I’m not sure if I was trying to punish myself or convince myself that hearing his voice and guitar were no longer going to take me back to the days when it started hurting to feel so deeply. Just like the celebrity actor that pulled me out of myself, this musician was starting to do the same – but this time I was confused. I thought I had already discovered my hidden feelings. I thought my creativity had been rekindled and I was already experiencing feelings to the fullest again… but hearing those familiar tones unlocked a new level, and I wasn’t sure where it would lead. To understand why this person was chipping away at another level of my emotional burial grounds, I had to go back in my head to where this relationship started.
I was 13, in a band, and I had a crush on a guitar player in our band. He was 18, though, so I knew it wasn’t smart and it also wasn’t going to happen. I settled with him being a “big brother” figure, and he took on the role effortlessly. Up until that point, I had primarily listened to country music. I lived in a small town where we had 4 TV channels and 2 radio stations – both country music. I’ll never forget the day I was outside playing basketball at my house and my jambox was playing the usual songs I was accustomed to hearing. It was an exceptionally clear day, and the radio started picking up a faraway station playing a different type of music. I heard Mariah Carey sing “Hero”, and my perception of music expanded torrentially. The vocal moves were impressive, the chords were complex, the melody moved more than I was used to hearing… and my appetite for more was insatiable.
This “big brother” friend noticed my cravings and began feeding me albums that would change the way I thought music all around. He brought me three CD’s – all progressive rock bands. I loved them all, but one album grabbed a hold of something inside me and wouldn’t let loose. I guess I had never thought about each piece of a band being so complex – it was always just “band” and “singers”. I remember listening, and thinking this was the coolest drummer I’d ever heard. Then the bass jumped out at me and latched onto the drummer’s heels so hard I felt like I was playing it. Then there was the lead guitar guy. That’s where it all changed for me. His guitar playing had energy, scales I hadn’t even imagined yet, and feelings so intense in each note I didn’t have words for them. That’s the day I discovered my love for guitarists. I played the album over and over – drooling over the harmonies and remixing the guitar licks into vocal moves in my head. The album was so complex that I fell deeply in love with a different part of it every time I listened. I would come home from school, turn on the Tascam 4 track tape recorder, and try stacking their style of harmonies on any song I knew. I searched desperately for signs of other albums that had this kind of feeling and this kind of guitar player. While I found many new bands I loved, nothing ever compared to this one.
I had no way of foreseeing that this would become more particles of my teenage era that I would soon sweep into a big dustpan and throw away when feelings became more than I could handle. I think I would have held on much harder if I had known. Now, though, I was hearing this artist again… and it felt like finding my first love but with a new set of eyes and ears. I tried to dodge it and chalk it up to a teenage fantasy world, but this was really good stuff. This wasn’t some boy band from the 90’s. I allowed myself to submerge in the music and sink all the way to the bottom as it surrounded me. What I felt was a renewed love for music that I didn’t even know I had lost. Music never left me… not once in my life… but this corner of the box had gone incognito. My mind opened up to notes I had forgotten, tones I had been missing, and beats that would power my soul for the next few months. I found every album I could find that this guitar player was on… solo albums, variety albums, even cinema style albums that featured him on some songs. Just like my celebrity obsession, this wasn’t about the person… it was about the rediscovery of my own missing pieces of myself. I realized once again that in the comforts of marketing, I had lost the vision of where my creativity first started – music. Marketing had provided a good living and stability, but music still fueled the deepest parts of me. I had just been slowly running out of gas without the light coming on.
So now what? How could I find time to put music back on the front lines without losing any of my marketing attention? I had to start saying “yes” to music opportunities again. Maybe those would be some of the missing chapters in this project. Music gave me creativity… maybe it would give me the path to this project too.