FALL!
What tales are you telling?
For me, it was: "I'm not ready." A simple saga of self-sabotage, and the knee-jerk response to anyone asking me why I don’t share my creative work. After all, that 'work'? It means everything to me. I’m always keen to discuss it, but then why was sharing it such a hurdle?
The Great Pumpkin showed up after all.
It was in my elementary school Drama class where I first learned of the Trust Fall exercise. The assignment? Well… fall. Y’know, with trust. Into someone’s arms. Backwards. A very straightforward task on paper — and yet, when it was my turn to do so, I feigned a sudden illness, excused myself from class and avoided the exercise altogether. I had convinced myself that if I never fall, I’d never get hurt. Pretty sound logic, right? As it turns out, it doesn’t really work that way. Life taught me that even without taking a leap, you can still trip over your own feet.
But along the way, I also learned that there’s a unique charm to failure. Seen through the right lens and lighting, it can almost become invisible. Keep failing long enough, longer than others, and you might just stumble into a form of success; a messy brand of victory riddled with beautiful twists and turns of human error and signature imperfections to carve your path. Style points galore.
Equipped with a blurred sense of self-evaluation, I set out to fail my way up. Okay, no… the cards just sort of fell that way. Let’s face it, life is a shuffled deck. It's always fascinated me how well we can grasp something intellectually but fail to synchronize our actions to the words we know are oh-so-rational. As a result, my ear can be wonderfully bendable to others but rigid as a plank when it comes to heeding my own advice. When opportunity has knocked, I’ve not only failed to answer the door but anxiously battened down the hatches and reinforced the locks. I guess it takes everyone's eyes at least a moment to adjust when moving from darkness to light. Some of us just need more time for our pupils to react.
“…you could end up spending a lifetime delaying the tide with grains of sand.”
Still, somewhere deep in those moments of adjustment, I wrote a sonic love letter to all my fellow late-blooming self-saboteurs in the form of a pandemic-penned passion project. It grew into what I’m proud to now call my debut album. I had been dwelling complacently on the pause button of life for so long that when the whole world suddenly followed suit and pressed stop on itself, it sort of took the pressure off… and I finally let myself play. And while I’m sure I’ll hit pause now and then along the way, I never again want to stop. I know I’ll regret it if I keep myself stuck in the illusive comfort of my hero’s journey’s early stages, so I’m deciding to accept the call. Better late than never. Playing it safe can be a reliable shield, but play it too safe and you could end up spending a lifetime delaying the tide with grains of sand.
My debut effort this year is dedicated to the insular over-thinkers and over-feelers who learn to harness our hyper-sensitivity into finely-tuned superpowers. To my fellow creative types lost in obsessive-compulsive, maze-like corridors of the mind, only to find ourselves in the desperate expressions of our hearts. To the world’s proverbial tortoises with sub-par cardio who step over ourselves too much to find our footing, but somehow still find a way to win through unyielding determination. And to the self-proclaimed perfectionists with imposter syndrome, always chasing that elusive “perfect”, who will always have more than enough inner resources (and unreleased magic) at our disposal than we know what to do with.
So hey, in the undying spirit of valiantly stumbling on the way to success, faults and all, I’m finally willing to confront the exercise I started running from all those years ago. I’m free-falling now, and whether I land in your embrace or on a bouncy castle crafted from my own imagination, I’m thrilled to finally step out of the Danger Room and officially share my work with you (look ma, I’m on streaming services)!
Time to tell some fresh new tales.
I’m ready. Are you?
