A Forced Midlife Crisis & Another Punch Thrown
BIG IDEA: I’m forcing a midlife crisis in an attempt to do something I’m afraid of.
Did you know that I once worked the graveyard shift at a gas station?
I graduated high school in November of my senior year and - alongside taking some college classes - I started working graveyard at a local gas station 3 nights a week. I already had some insomniac tendencies, but once I started that job, my days were totally turned around. Which meant, I had a lot of time by myself in the middle of the night.
That’s when I first started playing guitar & writing songs. I had dabbled before & written some funny songs with my buddy. Well, we thought they were funny (still do), but that was when it turned into something different for me. A pastime.
Within a year I had downloaded a recording program & started experimenting with recording music (poorly). Since then, playing, writing & recording music has been my most consistent outlet. One that has been an extremely private thing for the past 20 years. I can count on 2 fingers the number of people that I’d shared those songs with up until this past year.
It’s just that music feels so personal to me. I tend to be an open book in a lot of ways. I don’t know how many hundreds of people I’ve cried in front of on stage, but there’s a different kind of vulnerability about sharing something like this for me.
In part because I don’t feel very gifted at it. Just thinking about friends & family hearing my ‘singing voice’…the lyrics…me sharing my personal, internal world…there’s a level of feeling exposed with this that has kept it such a private thing. But there’s been something in the past year that keeps whispering, nagging, pushing for this to not be something I keep to myself anymore. I’ve shrugged it off & excused my way through a lot of that process, but it’s catching up to me & compelling me to do something.
When it comes to “better safe than sorry”, I tend to lean ‘safe’ rather than risk ‘sorry’ in my life. But I’m feeling led to change that in some ways as I enter into this next season. So, like I wrote in a song that no one is likely to hear…
It’s not that I regret the life I’ve lived
I just think it’s time for a midlife crisis
So, starting in May of this year, I’m challenging myself to release an original song each month for the rest of the year. I’m pretty much writing this blog to keep me accountable to move forward with something that I’ve continued to convince myself to ignore for too long.
It’s not so much that I think these songs are so good that they need to be shared with the world. There’s not even one specific reason I can think of that I’m doing this - though here are a few that come to mind…
I don’t take many risks in my life. When I do, they’re pretty calculated. This feels like an uncalculated risk that could have very little reward, but a healthy one I feel like I need to make.
This is partly for my kids, though that sounds dramatic. Even though they won’t really care about my songs at this stage in life, I want to model the importance of doing things that are difficult & push us if we feel led to do them.
While writing & recording has always been a personal outlet for me, I feel like I have some songs that I need to get out of me in order to move on to other things. Almost a writer's block that I don’t think I can fix until I do something with the songs that keep weighing on me. Like I need to let go of them before I’m mentally/emotionally free enough to start working on other songs that have been eating at me.
My self-talk has always leaned negative to a potentially unhealthy degree. Fear tends to be a driving factor too often for me. This feels like an important step toward silencing my inner critic from continuing to allow fear to rob me from doing meaningful things that feel too big or risky for me.
Let me be clear, my expectations for anyone to really care about this - outside of the novelty of it - is low. Hah. If you’re bothering to read this, I’m assuming you’ll listen to a song or two, but it’s not that I think anyone is going to be deeply inspired by what I’m doing.
But, of course, I do hope this connects with people. At least the act of doing something I’m afraid of, but also the music/lyrics too. I hope someone enjoys it - relates to it. Even writing that feels oddly selfish because that is not my expectation. My intention is not that this is a service I’m doing for others, but really more of an internal pursuit that feels stalled if it only exists in my own world & an attempt to, once again, try to punch fear in the face.
So, as much as it scares me to say it…
as dramatic & pretentious as I feel hitting publish on this blog…
as much as I’ll want to walk this whole thing back…
as much as I try to tell myself no one will even care about this…
& as I second guess if this should have been something I kept to myself…
…the truth is that, at 38, I’m still doing my best to try to live the life God has given me. And for whatever reason, despite the risks & the vulnerability, this feels like it’s something I should do. I’ve been telling teenagers for decades (and my own kids since they were born) to not let fear keep them from doing things they feel like they should do. So, I’m going to try to stop being a hypocrite and do something about it.
So. Stay tuned. Or don’t. No hard feelings either way.
But maybe I’m not the only one trying to manage my fear - feeling compelled to do something that scares them. Maybe there’s something in your world that feels like a big risk. That feels both scary & necessary that you’ve been putting off too long. If you’d let me, I’d love to push you in the same way that I’m trying to push myself to quiet that inner critic & take a risk with me!
