On Mental Health Recovery #1: Motivation

I peel myself off of my couch, where I have been horizontal for the past 20 minutes after watching a Bob Bookmeyer documentary on his orchestration for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and staring at the ceiling. I'm intimately familiar with the nagging feeling: I have stuff to work on. Now, GET UP. Come on...GET UP.

I had stuff to work on yesterday, too. I was teaching a new student the standard four way vibraphone voicings and independence exercises. I learned a new set of Mainstage (Logic Pro X Live platform) functions for the Malletstation. I was practicing solo pieces, thinking up the idea of a solo record as something I had wanted to do for a long time but “didn't have enough time for”. I made out revisions for my first vibraphone/marimba compositional commission. My first official string writing introduction. Transcriptions, Bach, going meticulously over that one section that my far right mallet never seems to want to cooperate with. An hour long workout that made me want to go to sleep at 9pm. The list was far from done. That's always seemed to be my problem.

It is often dubbed a “Gemini-esque” curse to start too many things at once and never finish them. It's not just that I have always aspired to be a composer, performer, bandleader, multi-media producer, electronic fanatic, writer, historian, and teacher all in one. My archives are littered with unfinished projects: Mementos of works lost to poor mental habits of my past. 1000 voice memos, 85% unheard. Essays unpublished, unrevised, stored into miscellaneous folders on my hard drive. I seem to have no problem with ideas, or knowing how to get them down. It was the commitment in question. When one gets too scatterbrained, worried about perfectionism within multiple passions, everything flounders.

And so here I am. Staring at the ceiling. I did the same thing at 1am last night. Eloise nags at me, too. Of course, she wants simpler pleasures: food and attention. But it only seemed suitable that around my slump time – 4:00pm or so – she would pine me like my own brain. GET UP. Don't you feel guilty, wasting all this time? Initiative doesn't spontaneously happen. You have to make it happen. You know this. We've been through it before. You've read the artistic recovery books – Julia Cameron, Deepak Chopra. You've seen your successful friends power through 12 hour days like nothing. It's easier to cut out the middleman and just do it before you have time to overthink it. So why can't you just...do it?

There's a famous study on dogs who have been abused that showed that dogs who were in cages, restricted, and abused, once the cage doors have been lifted, will still be afraid to leave the cage. Even if the life on the other side of the cage is easier and evidently much happier. We return to pain, even if it is harder than pleasure, if the pain we have known has become comfort to us. My recurring stress dreams about my music being ridiculed, laughed at, humiliated, unmoored, or out of control, indicate that my past issues with self esteem and poor confidence in my artistic output are things that are still affecting me – however subliminally.

So when I ask myself why I can't get up off the couch, even though there is nothing immediately threatening whatsoever and my life has been positively turning around at a rate unprecedented to me four years ago, I remember the slew of anxiety inducing factors following me around like the devil on my shoulder. I remember it was just a year ago that my mom visited NYC for fear that I had mentally gone off the deep end for the second time. I was starting medication again, its sickeningly jubilant shift waking me up at 6am to a immune system like perpetual butterflies and a nerve system gone haywire. (This was following my public fainting stints, which I later came to realize was my non-mammalian, extremely primitive brain's response to anxiety that can't weather fight or flight anymore). I remember waking up in the Bushwick studio apartment Airbnb my mom was staying in, escaping my suffocatingly toxic apartment situation at the time, staring out the giant industrial windows, and thinking, man. I'm dealing with this the rest of my life, aren't I?

I am unlearning habits at the fastest possible speed that my apprehensive feet will allow me to go forward. I will wake up tomorrow to three hours of teaching and a five hour Malletstation session with a DJ. I will be reminded of the impact of mindset and awareness. I really can see the other side of things, and it doesn't have to be so hard. Hell, I've done it before, and I'll do it again. I know that much. But I cannot do this on command. My subconscious is still doing backflips, and it's going to take years – perhaps a lifetime – to get it going straight.

And one by one, even if it is merely enough to equalize the incessant number of ideas going on in my head at any given time, I take a project by its horns. And if I'm lucky, I'll find it finished. That has to be enough win for me.