Oh wait, that’s now. That’s this time.

Sigh.

I started this year with the best of intentions in picking this project back up, and before we get too deep let me assure you this isn’t a post to tell you I’m quitting again. Far from it, actually.

But yes…I started 2019 with the best of intentions of tackling music blogging again, and then life happened:

• I started feeling antsy at my job, stressing that I would never be able to retire because I’m a Millennial and none of us ever will and thinking that meant it was time to move on. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t because I needed at least ONE stable thing in my life for the duration of 2019.)
• My grandpa died unexpectedly. He’s only the second close family member I’ve lost, and it happened so quickly that I took it a lot harder than I expected.
• Depression came knocking again, causing me to take an entire week out of my life just to breathe because, quite frankly, the thought of going back to that scared the shit out of me.
• My parents sold my childhood home and moved 1,400 miles away. (I’m barely a month removed from this one and still having a hard time with it.)

If you’re keeping tabs, that’s a LOT of stress and change in just a six-month span. And I’m not someone who has ever been good with excessive change in short amounts of time.

That’s also a LOT of feelings. Stress, anxiety, uncertainty, grief, loss. A lot of those feelings have been jammed down into boxes, taped shut and shoved onto shelves because I don’t have time to deal with it. I have to keep moving forward.

(Read: I don’t want to fall apart.)

As a result, it’s pushed me back into the one place where it’s safe to feel: music.

 

When you can’t get through it, you can listen to it

I’ve been craving music lately – the perfect song saying the perfect thing for what I’m feeling. Last week it was light-hearted beach bops as I got excited to return to California for the second summer, then excessive amounts of 80s tunes as I obsessed over the third season of “Stranger Things”.

Over the weekend, I needed quiet coffeehouse songs for my cozy Sunday morning on the couch reading. Today, I’ve been wanting music that makes me feel and makes me feel alive. (This playlist has been doing the trick.)

I’ve always been the type to need my music to match my mood. I don’t want anything to do with those beach bops when I’m feeling depressed, and I can’t listen to anything but spooky music when I’m working on my main blogging project these days.

Perhaps that’s why I let The Good Groupie go so quickly. I dropped off posting the week of my grandpa’s death because I wasn’t ready to feel, and everything spiraled from there.

Music is intrinsically tied to feelings for me. Yup, we’re still on a break, but that doesn’t mean I can’t say Hanson said it best with this lyric:

When you can’t get through it, you can listen to it.

Ugh, hello life mantra. That line pretty much summed up my late teens and all of my 20s. When life got too hard, there was always a song waiting for me.

So how do you separate the two?

The easy answer is…you don’t.

This is just how I was built.

 

The Good Groupie Returns…Again…No Really!

So here we are, ready for a second try on that return to music blogging. In addition to craving music lately, I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer and a creative.

And I give myself a very hard time about NOT being either of those things. I’m scared to embrace those terms fully, scared of what they might mean. I play the procrastination game, waiting for perfection that’s never going to come. (See: my five-month gap between posts.)

Instead, you just have to do the damn thing…right?

I think about that a lot, esp. when I look to some of the non-mainstream music I listen to or musicians I know personally. These musicians, these creatives – they aren’t waiting for perfection. They’re going out there, doing their thing and working on it as they go.

Music is what drove me to decide I wanted to be a writer when I was just 13 years old. I’m 35 now, and I’m pretty sure 13-year-old me would expect myself to have written a book or two, at least, by now.

Instead, I’m still sitting here waiting for things to be perfect, waiting for the right song to inspire me, waiting waiting waiting.

For what?

Nothing anymore.

 

 

 

I didn’t quite mean for this post to become a mini-therapy session you could read, but here we are.

And, I suppose, here we go ’round again, music, one more time with feeling.

All the feelings, to be exact.

 

xo,