Learning Curves

It's nearly one in the morning. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor of the studio, staring at the near-blinding glare of my IMac screen and listening to the hum of the various machines and desks that sit, dormant, nearby. I am exhausted, but somehow I feel like sending a little missive before I lay down on the narrow camp bed, squeeze shut my eyes and try to get the rhythms of the day to exit my head. Oustide the window I can hear the wind whipping off the sea and howling around Beachy Head. Not ever having lived near the sea it sometimes feels strange to me to exist so close to such an enormous body of water. To perhaps over-poeticize, I sometimes think about how much the great, vast, intimidating unknown of the sea somehow reflects the vast unknowability of where I am going. The analogy stops though, when I realize that I know where I would end up if I travelled across the water out there, whereas the end of this journey is, of course, a mystery. I just hope the cheese is as good when I get there.

You could say I am going through a bit of a odd patch. A couple of things that have happened in the last few days have slightly shaken my faith in things I had taken as certainties. These events have saddened me and increased my resolve to take everything with a pinch of salt from here on. These things are not huge, and they will not alter my life in any grand way, but they have made me resolve to think a third time before trusting anybody.

I am fundamentally uncomfortable with doing anything 'on spec', wthout assurance that it is the right thing to be doing. I am all for taking a risk or two, but every so often it hits me that I am gambling my whole furture on something that relies entirely on faith, on belief, and on tenacity. Blind faith is not something that rests very easily with me, so from time to time I catch a glimpse of the yawning void full of the possibility of failure and it makes me want to throw up and die.

I wonder if this all makes any sense. It's natural, people say, to be scared doing this. It's all so exciting, though! they usually follow with. What an adventure!

Most of the time, though, it doesn't feel like an adventure. It feels like I am broke and far away from home, pouring everything I have into something that most people fail at. Part of what makes it so hard is knowing that I will never walk away and give up, so I risk sitting on the floors of studios, with nothing but an empty bank account and a couple of half-wriiten songs, for the rest of my life.

An odd patch. I feel more isolated in this than I have for a long time. I am terrified. I know I cannot give myself the normality and routine that I am craving at the moment, and I know I cannot make the hard things go away. It's a learning curve, of course. It's just that it turns out that this learning curve might just be a bit of a shitter.