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Hit the ground running-- boldly venturing forth into the world


coz_holly

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Hello everyone, this is coz speaking.  I'm a recording artist who started my own cassette recordings in 1979 and quickly grew a rep on the Austin Music scene equal to Daniel Johnston, but that's all to say I'm considered a savant and an "outsider artist."  I need to write myself a good resume, but I've always just worked minimum wage food service, so although I write fiction, I can not write a resume.  But it just looks to me like a press kit of cassette ad copy to promote yourself anyway.
So I've been living an unimaginably cruel life for the last seven years dealing with personal problems that eventually led to the break up of my marriage and my kids getting taken out of my life, as the mother's home was not a good place for them and they need me to get a psychiatric evaluation before they let me have them... not going to want to be a single parent, but the point of all this is to say that I have been in some pretty intense PTSD therapy and listening to my Guru on the Ram Dass podcast network, so when I got fired by the guy who took his hardest working, most intelligent and reliable employee, talked down to him, and repeatedly fires him (I can usually come back, but I'm not even interested) I did the opposite of what I normally do and decided that if I was going to work for peanuts I'd do that for myself and not for any boss.  Normally I'd be too depressed to get out of bed for days or even weeks, but therapy has taught me to be independent-- like you know my wife?  I thought she was the one I'd been looking for for all my life, and she was, but she changed and I am being taught not to base my happiness on another person or being in a relationship.  And really, I've always been my own worst enemy, asking for too little, appearing too meek, being too modest and putting my life and health ahead of others.  At the same time Ram Dass is teaching me not to be attached to anything, and to live in the moment and everything works out the way it is meant to if you just stop trying to get what you want, but just accept and be happy with what you have.
So not only did I decide to never call anyone boss again and to stand on my own two feet, but to just accept things as they come and patiently await the solutions and resolutions that are just ahead.
And this is a breathtaking change.  That's exactly the opposite of me.  My doubts and social inadequacies have held me back for too long and I'm my own worst enemy.  But now, I am exploring every way to make my own living with odd jobs and gigs of sorts.
I have tons of raw talent-- they knew when I was an 18 year old kid playing his first gigs and selling tapes in Austin that I was a genius.  Not everyone knows I have other talents, but I am a true self taught Savant.  Like I didn't have a job when I started recording, so I couldn't buy a four track?  So I took two tape decks and a handfull of radio shack parts and invented my own (crude and very limited) multitracker!
Anyway I had to just jump right in.  I didn't want to think about how much time it was taking to set it all up and start to lose my cool!  I know that depression's number one enemy is activity, so let go of my attachment to the comforts and life I was used to and got into it. 
And I mean the same way as everything else I learned in life-- trial and error, self teaching, finding people who were experts and knowing how to talk to them.  So for years and years my wife and I have both been saying how is it we're so god damned smart and we're so poor?

Well I'd just shrug it off and say, "you know I'm not materialistic, and making money just isn't that important to me. "  That's an attachment that I had to let go of-- my attachment to just quietly eking out what I could instead of upselling myself to the max about everything and finding niches I could fill.
And even when I was a young man in Austin I knew that I should have put my music first and my lonely heart last-- I just wanted a relationship and when I had one I wanted to devote myself to keeping that going.
I don't ever want to be attached to anybody again and that has had unexpected results.  I want to be as independent as I can be, no relationship, no boss, no authorities looking over my shoulder.
I still have a lot to learn about presenting myself, but I am really internalizing the experience of standing on my own two feet, and I ain't gonna stop.  Maybe it will be Fiverr, maybe some other thing will come to me.  I just got to be here now, and what path I'm on will guide me to what i'm supposed to be doing.

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