On Change.

 

 

It's Friday. It's starting to rain outside. It's been on and off all day. It's been a difficult week. Hell, it's been a difficult month. Xavier and I split at the end of March and I feel like I'm still processing the loss of a friendship. So many conflicting feelings of anger, grief, etc. But when it happens, it happens.

Which has left me re-considering a lot about my life. Who am I? What do I want to do with my time on this Earth? What do I value? It feels like this is the big "reset" everyone talks about life throwing at you sometime in your 30th year. ("Saturn Return" for you astrology peeps out there.)

I've tried to cope by going back to my old life. As we tend to do when we experience tectonic shifts like these. Obviously, the safety of what's worked for us in the past should work for us again in the future, right? But it's like going back to your ex after 5 years. The same things that didn't work for you back then, are only even more exacerbated now. You can't go back. You're only wasting energy and time.

Times like these are a good point to reflect on your life, and what's gone wrong so far, what's gone right, and where you want to go from here. Going forward, I think I want to live a more nomadic life. I spent my 20s trying to play the balancing game of being a "responsible adult" and an "up-and-coming DJ" and I think in a lot of ways it lead to me floundering both. I didn't know what I wanted, so I settled for cheap imitations and what other people thought I wanted, without stopping to focus on if it was getting the results I wanted.

Of course, maybe the real issue is all this ruminating instead of going for what I want. I'm not good at that. But hey, part of why change is needed is cause it gives you the opportunity to get better, right? I've never really understood the mentality that by the time you graduate college and get your first job, you're supposed to be done learning for life and have it all figured out. Isn't the opposite true? Shouldn't you have learned twice as much at 60 as you had at 30? Shouldn't you be out in the wild, collecting life experiences like they're Pokemon?

 

In my 20s, I wanted to have a lot of expensive stuff to show off for social media, to impress friends, and play a lot of big gigs to let people know I was important. I've learned those types of people aren't really your friends, and the people at those gigs will move on as soon as some other DJ becomes cool and trendy. You will get nothing out of trying to appease that crowd. Now, I'm moving towards cultivating a smaller group of friends and a smaller DJ following- I'm not as interested in being a superstar as I am forming meaningful relationships that have a tangible impact on myself and others. Growth.

Looking to my 30s, I feel in a lot of ways I'm already on the path I want to be. I have a record label and a radio show, and I'm slowly but surely cultivating that kind of following I want.

But that's where... We get to the real reason I sat down to write this article.

There's one decision in particular I know will be the catalyst between holding on to the last vestiges of my old life, and completely and utterly committing to starting over and going after the life I want for myself. I don't want to disclose the particulars yet, but you'll hear about it on here soon enough.

It's like at the start of Metroid, where Samus loses all her fancy armor and armaments. Some ways, it feels like I'm already there.

And yet... I feel myself chickening out every time I get ready to pull the trigger. 

Why?

I know where I'm at isn't any good for me. And I know the longer I put this off, the more I'm going to stagnate, which will be bad for everyone involved.

And yet... I still don't do it.

Why?

 

 Because there's still that part of me that thinks this is too risky, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary and that it's clearly a guaranteed failure to stay where I'm at.

 

Because I'm afraid I'll dead end. Even though where I'm at already feels like I've dead-ended pretty hard. (Didn't I just say I'd already dead-ended in the last paragraph? lol)

 

Because I don't trust myself enough to accept this could lead to long-term happiness.

 

And that last one's been a pretty big issue most of my adult life, I feel. The last 3 years or so I've been really focused on the negative. Some of it's just been a string of bad friendships, but a lot of it is a refusal on my end to accept my blessings and just enjoy life. That needs to change.

 

Starting today, I'm making a choice: that is going to change.

Björk said in an interview we change our energy every 3 years or so- our clothes, the color we view the world through, so on and so forth. 27-30 was 3 years of me trying to make living in Nebraska work while juggling the artist thing. It didn't work the way I thought it would. I started looking for options around my 30th birthday. I tried Denver again for a little while, but that didn't work... I spent about 6 months with X travelling around in a van seeing the country, which worked great... So I think it's time to go looking for something different again. Focus on what works. Trust myself that it's going to lead to long-term happiness. If it doesn't, at least the journey was worth it.