I am an artist. It has taken a long time to become comfortable saying that, but it’s true. The work I’ve done over the last several years that is the most meaningful to me has been my music. It’s the only area in my life where if I don’t spend time on it, I go into a dark headspace. For most of my life I’ve considered music as a “want”: I want to be better at guitar or form a band, but I need to be practical and focus on other things that are supposedly more important. But this isn’t true: music isn’t any less of a need than working my day job, doing yard work, painting the guest bathroom, or any number of mundane things that fill up my waking hours. I need to be making music. Outside of my wife and son, it’s the most important part of my life.

So why is it so hard? Each day is a struggle to allocate even the most modest amount of time to music. Everything else crowds it out. I try and try and try again to carve out a sacred time to work, and yet I keep getting thwarted by mandatory business meetings, my son’s after school activities, a plumbing emergency. It never freakin’ stops. Any boundary I put up gets knocked down quickly. My life has too much noise, not enough signal.

This is where I’m supposed to announce some new plan to fight back. Well, I’m out of ideas. I’m no closer to solving this problem than I’ve ever been. But I want to write about it more, and celebrate the small victories as well. If I can be more diligent about sharing any progress, no matter how small, I might end up with more to show for my efforts. Hopefully that’s something.