learning how to sing
For the past 36 hours or so I've been getting in my own head a little, thinking about a problem I've been having and trying to figure out what to do about it. At some point that thinking started to turn into composing a blog post about it, which is its own fun challenge; trying to dance the line between expressing things in a way that feels honest to me, while also not crossing any of the lines I set for myself when writing content that other people might see.
And then, a little unexpectedly, I learned that one of my friends needed a lift home, and all of a sudden the thought loops that had been filling me up were gone, torn to pieces and banished in the face of something that actually mattered. Those problems aren't real, after all, they're just silly things in my head. So I went out driving.
I'm not much of a good or confident singer, but I do enjoy singing, or at least I used to. At some point I got intermittently very self conscious about my voice, I guess. Sometimes I get into singing along with music in the car, though I struggle a little with the pitch ranges of a lot of my favourite artists, so I tend towards the kind of shitty under-my-breath singalong that makes it easier to manage that.
But there's a problem with singing like that, which is that you can't do it for very long, and if you try to push above speaking volume (for example, if your girlfriend turns the volume up), it hurts your throat really quickly. So at some point you have to shift into singing properly, pushing out with your voice instead of keeping it inwards, and that's a little scary! It makes you more audible to others and that's nerve wracking, especially when those others are singing along too and they're better at it.
But the volume on the stereo is still turned up, and when an album you love is playing and people you love are having fun singing along, you kind of just have to push through it, right? You can start running and keep putting one foot in front of the other and trust that people will catch you if you trip,1 because if you don't then you're just going to sit there wishing you could.
Because, as it turns out, all of those problems are also just in my head, and they can be banished just as sharply by moments and albums and people that actually matter.2
I would fucking love to make this metaphor more domain specific and also backreference to a post that I wrote in July last year here, but I can't because I NEVER ACTUALLY FINISHED IT DID I↩
List of albums i've specifically referenced in blog posts: Folklore (Taylor Swift), Bad Blood (Bastille), Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (My Chemical Romance)↩