Hello,
It’s been a long time. Sorry about that.
While I lived in Aarhus (from August 2017 → June 2018), I wrote the most songs I’ve ever written. At the end of my time there, my partner and I did some travelling. I had neither a guitar nor time to make music. When I eventually returned home, I decided that I should focus on practising the new songs I wrote in Aarhus so that they would be ready to record once I found time and quiet. This was a mistake, and that time never came. I don’t exactly know why, but I have some excuses. In short, they are that reintegration was drastically harder than I expected, and I was, and may still be, severely burnt out.
I have not written a single song since Aarhus, and readers of this blog will likely note that I haven’t updated it in about 11 months (the last one was posted on September 6th, 2018). I feel like I wasted a year.
the wheels of my brain spin in sand and the grains of time slip my grasp and fall into the bottom of the glass
To be an artist, one needs to have a practice. I want to be an artist, but I have yet to develop a practice. I can fix my bicycle without being a bicycle mechanic. I have plans but no execution. The difference is practice. Both practice as a verb and practice as a noun.
I often lean hard on student life to justify, blame for, my lack of practice. Or I blame the cumulative time and energy drains of school and work for my seeming inability to develop said practice. But so many people work and go to school while they do cool things and work on projects that are challenging. So this can’t be right.
This past school year I started seeing a counsellor. She says “social comparisons” are not useful. I think she’s right because this line of thought leads me to one, work harder (ineffectual criticism), and two, develop stronger working habits (which I have been trying with some success). My counsellor also says that trying to find causation is less productive than other modes and expectations for and of self-exploration, desire them as I might.
At the top of this post, I told a lie, “I feel like I wasted a year.” Instead, I recognize that I felt that I wasted a year. I am now looking more to the year ahead than behind. This year will be something different. I approach it restless and excited.
For a long time, I restricted myself to more or less chronological blogging and socials use (that’s why my instagram never gets updated). This is especially true of planned travel writing. I have travelled fairly extensively since Rome and Stockholm, but I haven’t even started writing the pieces I had planned.
This post marks the end of my commitment to strict chronological blogging, and ideally, a new beginning. I hope to gesture from rigidity towards fluidity in my thinking, writing, and practice to avoid the hang-ups that seem to have lead to my recent lack of creating and sharing. On this blog and elsewhere, I intend to become more free with form, as I imagine is evident, and to continue this exploration. I hope you will join me.
Warm regards,
Kostyn
EDITED BY: Danielle Mackie (my partner)
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