I've spent much of my adult life unemployed, or as my resume states, self employed. For me they where often one and the same. I was never good at self promotion and I never wanted to work too hard. That next step is a hard one to take sometimes, especially when you feel like maybe you've been walking in circles. If I had had the good advice given to me when it was applicable would I have taken it, would I have ended up in the same place in my life no matter what because it was destined to happen? Hell no I wouldn't have listened to nobody telling me nothing contrary to what I already wanted to do. I had that proverbial foot in many doors and the glimpse of the future I saw through the crack scared me. All I ever wanted to do was play guitar and enjoy my life, my year book write up was exactly that, the future would find me swinging in a hammock playing guitar living the boho lifestyle. Oh look here I am. So you get what you fix your attention on. I admit getting here my grama mistook me for a hobo not a boho but it's probably an honest mistake made by one who lived through the great depression. It's time to reframe that aim at RockStar status. That's really all I wanted when I was a teenager, you only take so much laughter before you stop telling people your plans for the future. World domination Mother F&^%#@! I got distracted. My former band mate and song writing partner always maintained that we would have been dead long ago if we had had success with our demo when we were teens. Me and his mom spent a lot of money recording it and then the band broke up when we graduated and everyone went their separate ways. We lived in one of those small towns in an economically depressed rural area and it was just a given for everyone that as soon as graduation came we were all leaving town. It's funny to think of kids getting kicked out of the familial home at eighteen or now living there forever because it's unaffordable to do otherwise. No one I knew wanted to stay at home any longer then they had to. Some of my friends were even living on their own before they left high school.
I guess I believed all those people who said get a day job to some degree. I had a few of those. I've tried my hand at so many professions you'd think one of them would grab me but nothing did. I followed in the foot steps of Jesus for a while and became a carpenter. Until a table saw caught my shirt and I ran the tip of my thumb through the blade. I had failed at my only real job, go home with all my fingers. I had my own interior finishing company and I was doing window trim at a townhouse complex. I already told myself since I first encounter a knife blade with my finger tip, that left the ring finger on my left hand flat on the end, that my number one job priority is personal safety, especially that of my fretting hand. If you wanted a dangerous job, try being the left hand of a right handed trades person. My neighbour at the time of the thumb accident was also a carpenter and guitar player. He'd recently ran a skilsaw through the fingers of his left hand just above the last knuckles. They'd managed to sew them back on and he could still play better guitar then me, but it was a sharp reminder to always keep your fingers out of the moving parts. After I almost lost my thumb I decided to find a new line of work, preferably unemployment. I've been once again chasing the dream of Rockstardom ever since.
It's a slow build but it's building. I had to learn how to sing and play guitar better. I had no problem writing hit songs as a teenager and the gift never left me but it's painful to listen to recordings from then and almost as bad hearing my voice a few years ago. Obviously it's a matter of usage. There we're long years in the middle where I only played guitar now and then with a passing interest. Sometimes songs would pop up and refused to be ignored until I wrote them down and then the muse would go silent while I turned my nose to the grindstone yet again. I never played with enough consistency to improve beyond passable for the presentation of a bared representation of my works. I've had to spend sometime in confinement working on refinement, and now I'm ready to emerge still following in the footsteps of JC making my sermons from the mount.
One day at a time and one thing a day as long as your moving any direction is forward if you're facing your direction of travel. It's important to save somethings for tomorrow so you have something to do.