Songwriting As An Outlet

The piano is my vehicle of choice when it comes to escaping reality. I haven't been playing for a long time, so I'm no expert on the instrument, but I don't consider that in any way an indicator of the amount of emotional joy and exhilaration a person can feel when they play. 

I'm not a professional musician, or a rock star, or someone who'd willingly compete in The Voice or The X Factor. But I do believe we can get the most significance out of our lives through the act of writing our own music. It's sort of how I reflect on my own troubles and comforts. In a way, it's even more therapeutic than talking to a paid professional; I've always been a believer in the possibilities that arise when you open yourself up to the arts, especially when it comes to understanding yourself.

It's an intensely personal experience to write compositions, mostly because they are almost always a poetic evaluation of my relationship with specific people or ideas (but mainly people). I write about my standing with God, with my parents, with all the boys I've pretended to show no interest in; I'm secretly romantic to a fault, so I tend to write about intimacy a lot. Although it's true, I've never been on a date or had someone share a mutual attraction with me, those aren't necessarily disadvantages to how I perceive love. Sometimes, I wonder if they just make me naive and a little gullible to believe every person who comes my way has good intentions, so maybe that's why I have a tendency to pull away from people, no matter how much I like them.

It's the failed relationships - the ones that make me feel like I just died a little inside - that need to be expressed the most. Usually, it's when I'm vulnerable that I'm most honest with myself, and this susceptibility to what's going on around me drives what I write about. It's the only way I can allow myself be a teenage girl in regard to the fact that we're notorious for writing melodramatic poetry. Now whether that stereotype is warranted or not, I guess it just depends on which teenage girls you've been around. 

For me, there's always going to be a certain amount of shame and guilt attached to a song because of how poorly I've communicated with these people, but I realize it would be pointless to let those emotions weigh me down. Instead, I should let each song be a way to forgive myself. It should be a freeing experience in every sense of the word.

All the relationships that have accumulated over my (relatively short) life, all the people I've disappointed or driven away from me...of course I still think about that. Not on a daily basis, but enough to hold me back from moving on. But now it's time to make some changes; particularly in how I deal with my mistakes, and I feel like all my self-reflective writing may end up going in that direction now that it's a new year.

So. Cheers to making ourselves better people?