Inauthentically Me

It’s 6:15 am and I am awake early for the first time in decades. The sun is just barely peaking over the apartment buildings that surround my house, omitting a blurred sheen of blue- gray light, I nudge my dog to wake up and he rolls over and resumes a comfortable position which informs me that this hour must truly be, ungodly. I struggle not to reach for my phone first thing in the morning because if I do, the day becomes wasted by constant streams of short videos, I wonder to myself whether or not reaching for a 6 am cigarette is equally or lesser destructive as scrolling through the black hole that is TikTok? Today is Monday and the first of the month, I currently have less than $200 in my bank account and my car payment is due. I’m thinking of this last Saturday night when I found myself wrapped around a cocktail with a close friend getting her masters in psychology, we shouted to each other over the booming music at a crowded Eastside bar, I told her of the doubts I am having, about how I feel so desperate for my career to take off and grow further, about how reluctant I am about moving forward, how exhausted I am by the expectation of constant self advertisement, how disconnected I am to my writing, how intense these feelings of halting my career are, how intense these feelings of failure have become.

By the end of the night, soaking in the warmth of a flurry of gin and Campari, I make the decision to give it a shot, to try and partake in the humiliation ritual of social media in order to further my career. The next day I wake up with feelings of optimism, I prop my phone up on a windowsill and press “record”, I scour my brain for all the ways I could perform for my outdated iPhone in order to harbor some attention from strangers on the internet, I think of all the people at the top of the food chain of the music industry, and wonder how they were able to utilize social media in order to gain success without feeling completely ridiculous, I wonder why I lack the ability to do the same. As I twirl in a skirt and shirt from a thrift store with the caption “y2k outfits by me” I struggle to grasp how this will do anything for the years of writing and touring and conceptualizing that I have done in order to maintain my body of work as an artist, how will sharing my lip combo do anything for my music other than garner a wave of embarrassment from my peers in the industry? How will sharing fifteen second videos on this god forsaken app do anything other than create proof of my newfound inauthenticity?

When I was in my early twenties, after releasing my first album, I found myself living back in my hometown, I entered into a community of well educated musicians, mostly jazz and folk musicians, all having degrees in music theory, 3 or 4 times a week, I found my self in bars and small venues, watching live music performed by people who seemed so intensely and gleefully immersed in their craft. I’d watch and listen with a pit in my stomach, coming to the realization that everything I had ever made thus far in my life was, a calculated image that was attempting to omit some kind of narrative that was completely untrue. I wrapped my voice around words at the foot of a stage, words that were meant to convey some kind of sex appeal, I was playing the muse, the nymphet, the desirable young thing, and all of it lacked any meaning to me whatsoever. Soon, it just became so incredibly painful to go on playing a part that was written for me without my full consent, it became so incredibly painful to do anything other than be my complete self. So, in the years following, I committed myself to building something that felt true to me, I wrote about my inner struggles, about heartache, about my mental illness, about yearning for love. I committed myself to being nothing but, me, and it felt beautiful.

Now that I find myself in a wave of uncertainty over who I want to be, who I want people to see, I am beginning to ponder how to get back to my roots, back to a place where I am in control, to a place where I feel passion for the work again. How is it possible to create with this burden of doubt? With the pressure to achieve? How is it possible to sell myself when I don’t even know what the product even is?

Then, I find myself sat at another bar top, this time with a paper basket of tortilla chips and guacamole. I say to my boyfriend of seven years “I just don’t love doing it any more” as tears swell in my eyes, he leans in closer to me and says “do you think anyone really loves their job? Do you think you’d love waiting tables all night?” I peer over at the staff as they busily place plates of hot Mexican cuisine onto sticky topped tables, in their Hoka’s and black t shirts, their exhaustion is permeable. Suddenly, I feel so incredibly spoiled, so incredibly entitled. How dare I contemplate stepping away from the career I’ve been building up for over 15 years? How dare I give up after all this just because of my own insecurities? How dare I. “I guess you’re right”. I scoop a bit of guacamole onto a chip and swallow it, later that day, I make another TikTok video.

Inauthentically Myself

-A