Where words might fail

I was a pretty self satisfied kid.

I’d get back from school, pull my toys and instruments out from my private cupboard, and build a nest of creativity.

Now, those times weren't about “getting through the day” or “looking forward to the weekend”. It was just a world of wonder, music and sound, discovery and daydreaming all of which I believed to be more real than what was happening around me.

Most of my friends in school were born and grew up in my neighborhood, so we were all quite similar. Being kids, we used our bodies (sometimes fists and kicks) to express ourselves as much as our voices, and no one took any stuffed emotions home. 

As time wore on, moving out of my hometown changed quite a few things for me after my father got a new job. New school, new friends, tall glass buildings in place of a friendly neighbourhood. And air that didn’t feel quite the same. 

These new friends seemed way cooler, wore fancier clothes, but they were a lot meaner too. They’d judge you based on where you were from, what you wore, and made fun of you for these things. It was a struggle to fit in, and I’d never know what to say when we all sat down on the grass to talk after evening football. It was fear as I’d never felt before run through my nerves, even as I tried to deny it and put it away inside. 

And I think, it was around this time that my true voice began to diminish.

People talk a lot about how great diversity is, but I dunno - maybe there’s a reason we survived in close knit tribes in the early days. I suppose there’d be less pressure to build personality, say clever things in conversation, stuff like that. Even as your weird self, you wouldn’t have to fight for your place in the tribe, I suppose. You wouldn’t have to fight so hard just to belong.

I’ve never understood the idea of selling oneself, rather I find it exhausting to build an acting persona for the public anymore. Authenticity is the most crucial trait for anybody with any artistic ambition, I believe it’s what keeps the passage clear between your true creative instincts and your body and gives you access to the magic well where everything good has ever come from. Ideas, words, images and sounds. It’s what I felt I’d trade for whatever gains I may make otherwise - and it’s a trade I found I was mostly unwilling to make. 

Only, I could never have realised the deep inner confusion and loneliness this would cause me, and how few could have understood this side of me.

Music, and especially playing the guitar has helped me find and save that drowned voice. Melodies can often ease feelings out of you where words might fail, or too exhausted to come.

But the guitar will scream for you without hurting yourself or anyone (well, except perhaps your neighbours), croon when the pain chokes up your voice, heal what no doctor can find or fix.

I used to sometimes feel closer to my guitar heroes than people around me through my years of teenage and early adulthood. Questions that were dwelling deep inside me were quenched watching their interviews later in life, and made me feel deeply connected to them. I felt understood knowing they’d felt what I’d felt and reaffirmed that I was on the right path in my life and my mind, even if no one around me agreed. It made me feel less alone in my thoughts and beliefs.

Mr. David Gilmour said it best here -

Good conversations should be like making good music. Built from curiosity, steeped in a desire for fun, discovery and exploration, made with a silent ego, and in real creative collaboration. This is hard to do for most people, including myself. Where, however, the motivation is to steal glory or compete for volume, whether it be playing music or while talking - sometimes it’s better to play the pause!