A Lifestyle of Starvation

I've been starving myself.

Not with food. I'm fortunate enough (and thankful!) to not be hungry.

No, I've been starving myself in a variety of other ways. I didn't realize it for a long time. The starvation crept in slowly, over the course of several years, until I finally recognized it was there, present in many aspects of my life.

Those who have known me prior to about 2018 know how passionate I am (or was, in this case) about music, composing, and the arts in general. In high school, I would spend some of my free time painting. A lot of time was spent drawing. Playing piano was one of my favorite activities at home. Just for fun, and just to express myself.

And then in college, I majored in music - specifically in composing - which of course meant a lot of my time was spent either listening to or writing music. I would sit in my dorm room at my electronic keyboard, or in the practice room at the acoustic piano, tinkering away at melodies, chords, harmonies, and exploring whatever concepts I was taking away from class.

Then came grad school, writing music for film and video games. It put everything I had learned about music to the test, and pushed me far both personally and professionally. All in the span of 10 months. It was a pressure-cooker situation - no time to hem and haw over the little frivolous details of the music. Grad school was a great experience for me and taught me I’m capable of more than I give myself credit for. Completing my degree was also the beginning of my starvation.

I wanted to continue writing music, but I was burnt out. So I put down the pencil and the staff paper, giving myself a break until I was ready to pick it up again. But then I began to feel lost. I shouldn’t be setting this aside after over five years and two degrees of work. Was this just a passion project? Why don’t I have the energy to jump right into the industry like my peers? These thoughts (and more) I felt to the core of my being.

While wrestling with those thoughts, I decided to pursue a new path - one that I had been interested in since childhood and which only became more fascinating to me during grad school: video game development. I justified my setting aside music with this new path, as a means to an end: if I develop my own video game, I will then be able to write the music for it.

Over the next few years, I continued to pursue this path. Although, I was far too focused on planning games instead of developing them into playable prototypes, which also meant I wasn’t learning the skills I needed (programming, design principles, animation, and so on). All the while, my staff paper sat collecting dust. And I was no longer expressing myself as I had before through art.

To be fair to myself here, I should mention that - like with so many others - the Covid pandemic played a role in my imbalanced lifestyle. I like my solitude, but I also need to spend time with my friends which, as we know, wasn’t the wisest decision from 2020 to early 2022. Along with this, of course, was the unhealthy 24/7 news coverage of Donald Trump, George Floyd and the following national outrage, economic crises, and a general sense of uncertainty about the near future. It wears on a person.

In 2022, I was struggling financially. I was trying to freelance full-time, but I was having difficulty finding enough work. This went on for several months. It was a downward cycle: I couldn’t create because I was stressed, and I was stressed because I couldn’t create, all while not earning enough income. In my mind, I thought that if I was hired at a part-time day job, I would be selling out my career. Thankfully I was wrong.

In April of 2022, I finally swallowed my pride and was hired at a part-time position. Around this time, too, I was working on a contracted music job; however, the project was incredibly mismanaged and, after a couple of months of writing music, the client decided in the 11th hour to not pay me. The silver lining for both of these situations? I began to realize that I had been starving in many areas of my life, without even knowing it.

The part-time job helped me in several ways: I’m no longer working solely from home by myself, and instead I get to be around people every week (I get along with my co-workers, so that’s a huge bonus); Financially, I no longer have to worry about how my bills will be paid, and any freelance work is, as they say, “gravy”; My time has a far healthier balance than before, and the lowered stress means I have the clarity to create again.

As for the botched contracted music job, it prompted me to reevaluate my entire career as a creative: What do I want to do? What projects do I want to create? What are my artistic interests? What do I want my career and my life to look like in one year, five years, 10 years?

So I set out to answer these questions, which, for some of them, took the remainder of 2022 to answer. It was the hard push I needed to realign myself. I began by organizing my many works-in-progress and prioritizing them based on how complete they are and what order I want to release them. Financially, I started paying attention to budgeting: what’s coming in, what’s going out, and where is it going to? Scheduling and using two or three different types of calendars have been a huge help in my realignment as well.

I’m happy to say that, by about October 2022, my lifestyle no longer felt so starved as it had been for a few years. For the first time in a while, I felt as though I had control over my life - or at least, the aspects I’m able to control. It felt good, but my self-fulfillment was only just beginning.

In the final months leading up to 2023, feeling far better about myself and my direction, I doubled down on my improvements and created a roadmap for my 2023: the works I want to release, the projects I want to pursue, and when I want to do them. (I even picked up the pencil and the staff paper and began work on a larger piece that had been tugging at me throughout the year.) Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this amount of control over or fulfillment in my life.

I feel empowered. I feel excited for the future. I am no longer starving the life I want to live.