Sounds all too familiar, right?
Yeah, I feel the same way.
I’ve never denied the value of reflection or making resolutions for a new year. Self-improvement is always a positive thing in my book. I’ve just always said I was going to do it, and then kept on living my life because #yolo (remember when yolo was a thing?).
However, this year was different. Partially because I started a few months ago, hitting a breaking point and deciding that I could no longer live the way I’ve accepted for too long.
To be fair, my life doesn’t suck. This is not a sob story of how unfortunate I’ve had it, cause that’s just not true. And honestly, that’s been a major part of the problem. On paper, my life is super dope. Telling my friends about what’s been going on and where I’ve been, they all tell me how jealous they are and how they wish they could live like I do. It’s one of those things I always laugh off, but I get where they’re coming from. I get paid to fly around the country and put on pretty rad events, have a zero fucks given attitude, and I’m a narcissistic yes man who lives for the story. But I’m also one of those people who only talks about the good stuff. I always feel like people have their own shit in life and don’t really want to hear about mine (starting this blog is weird for me because it goes 100% against that, but we’ll get there in a minute).
It was a weird thing to wake up one day and look at my life and realize that all the elements of it were things I loved, but I still wasn’t happy. It bothered the shit out of me and so I started doing some soul searching to try and figure it out.
Surprisingly, I learned a couple things:
- That despite being a workaholic and always being gone, I was never actually getting any closer to my real goals in life.
- That I was really alone. I had stopped investing into people that I cared about and had zero community in my life.
Unfortunately, once you realize a problem in your life, it’s nobody’s fault but your own if you don’t make the change for the better. So that’s where I’m at with all this; trying to work through the wall I’ve hit. So for once in my life, I have made some resolutions that I’m gonna try my damnedest to stick to (hopefully everyone will keep me accountable on them by posting them on the interwebs):
1. Make music sustainable - 2015 I was able to transition to doing creative work full time without a shitty day job. 2016 I want to shift the pendulum to where it’s fully music driven (I’m sure I’ll always take clients for various projects, but I don’t want to be dependent on it).
2. Be on tour 300 days a year - Yeah, 300 is a shit ton, and I may regret it if I actually get what I say I want, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take. I love traveling. I love experiencing new cultures. I love meeting new people from new places. And if I get to play music while doing those things? Perfect.
3. Be happy - I don’t know if I’ve figured out the recipe for this one yet, but I’m hoping that by focusing my energy into things I love, that it will come. I’m working on investing into people again, which unfortunately means being way more transparent because the reality is that you can’t get any closer to people if you don’t let them in. And that's the major driving force behind this blog: transparency. My best friend challenged me to do it, so I’ve decided to give it a go. I wouldn’t say there’re any real expectations for it, but I hope that if you stumble upon it, it helps you feel like you’re not alone out there when times get tough. If you ever need someone to tell your story, I’m always here to listen.
xoxo
Vance
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