The Steady Thrum

I’ve had an obsession with time since I could grasp the concept. Movies, stories, games, and especially music have influenced my curiosity in our perception of time as humans, and have fed my anxiety as an individual. What is it about rhythm, repetition, common themes that make us so content? Other than the comfort of knowing what comes next in a pattern, anyway. (Or maybe that’s just it and there’s nothing else to it.)

Y’all ready for some (possibly batshit-sounding) imagery? Strap in.

I played alto saxophone from about age eight until high school, but although I was first chair almost my entire musical career, I was actually quite bad at reading music. I guess I was sick the day we learned about time signatures and missed out, so I instead relied really heavily on feeling time and watching the conductor. I didn’t actually know how bad I was at reading timing until I was in college taking a music theory class, because I never really played by myself. I always relied on my fellow band mates, the drummers, the conductor, to fall into a rhythm with. I didn’t practice, either, because I was an arrogant little shit that thought I didn’t need to. (You always find out too late that if you apply yourself the way your mentors tell you to that you could have unlocked so much more.) But I used music as a community, anyway. I didn’t use it for my soul the way all my peers did. I never felt that special flow by myself. It took at least one other person to play with to feel that…whatever that feeling is. I’ve always envied soloists.

When I lost my band by going to a new school, I lost my passion for saxophone. I took private lessons, and even learned piano, but it wasn’t the same.

While I don’t physically play anymore, I use music a lot in my writing—more than just as the sound in the background to help me make a rhythm with my fingers against keys (Blank Page Syndrome is no match for “I’m not keeping up with the tune” anxiety deeply ingrained from conductors with bad tempers).

In my head, I hear the story as music. I hear specific sounds for each character, and I feel when I’m designing the story where a motif needs to be repeated. I hear when the tempo should change. When I write a scene and I feel like something is missing, thinking of it as a song helps me feel what I need to add. Maybe this hyper-awareness of patterns in what I create is why I don’t have very many writer’s blocks.

What stops me from writing is that moment in a soundtrack where the tune shifts to the scene before the climax. That moment the hero is weak and doubts their strength. It’s that moment right before they’re reminded of their loved ones, or those powerful moments that give them strength. When they hear their mentor (who’s dead, probably, at this point) and their steady reminder in the back of their head. When they see their friends’ faces.

Right before that moment, when doubt is high—that is where I freeze. When actually writing this part, I’m fine. This is all a metaphor for life, by the way. (Batshit imagery, remember?)

When I am writing a story, or doing anything I feel important, I hear the music in my actions. I hear my own soundtrack layered over that of the story’s. The moments of doubt are my moments of exhaustion. When runners hit their “wall” in their marathon. When writers experience the block. When programmers find their solution created more errors than fixed, when the paint colors get muddy, or the spices don’t marry when cooking a meal.

This creative exhaustion, this moment before burnout, is when my fear is louder than the music. It’s when I hear a time signature rather than feel it. It’s when I hear things like, “Why does what you say matter?” or “This has been said already, and no one listened then. Why now?” or “Your words don’t matter.”

Lately, because I’ve been working on silencing those anxious thoughts through logic—that with the billions of people on the planet, someone must like what I’ve got to say—that my anxiety is tightening toward the only thing I can’t logically comfort myself with: time. “No one is listening and no one ever will. This is a waste of time.”

I have no conductor to tell me I’m rushing, or drummer to keep me on beat. What if I’m reading the time signature wrong, what if I’m going too slow?

What if my song stops before I’m done? What if my stories are unfinished, unrefined, and I suddenly die?

What if I’m wasting my time? What if this particular message isn’t worth it and I could be doing something else?

It’s the risk we take as creatives, I guess. We risk no one will listen to our songs, and then we die.

I just hope I’ve learned my lesson from college, that I’m reading my time signatures right, that I’m not moving too slowly, that I’ll get to finish my song in time.