.png)
“You’re doing what?”
Her voice was incredulous, steeped in
equal parts wonder, shock and just a little bit of playful derision. I still
remember the way her smile looked, a splotch of mockery and a dab of pity.
I knew what it sounded like.
 |
| Jared Thomas - Class of 2020 |
It was just the latest in a long line
of projects designed to “take my mind off things” or “give me a new
perspective.” Inevitably, it would end up rotting in the trash pile of a
million other initiatives, ideas and idiosyncrasies just like everything else
some younger iteration of me had tried and failed at.
After all,I wasn’t a musician. Far
from it--I could barely scratch out Vance Joy’s “Riptide” on an old Ukulele I rented a few
years back that I kept for so long that they gifted it to me out of incredulity
at my stubborn determination to be aggressively mediocre. I hadn’t picked up my
chipped and cracked guitar with the faded wooden finish since my eighth
birthday, the first time I swore up and down that I’d be playing Boondock
Saints before summer died on the vine of October. Of course, the leaves turned
from green to brown and then they turned again and again and again until the
leather on the case started to peel and curl in on itself and I’d moved on from
some kid’s dreams of being some kind of rock star.
So, when I picked it up again, one
late Sunday morning in the last days of September and started fumbling my way
through a few chords I barely remembered, no one believed it. They believed it
less when one song turned into nine and even less when I uploaded my album
cover to Instagram in the dead of night in early October. I’ll admit I was
playing to my pretensions, but what would life be without theatrics?
I didn’t pick up the guitar again on
accident. I didn’t do it on a stupid, fleeting whim. I picked it up because,
unlike every other time I’d try and failed to learn to play, I had something to
say. Sure, I could croon on and on about girls, but I was fourteen, sixteen,
eighteen. What did some Southern white teenager who was born in a Batman onesie
have to say about what it was like to be left in the rain and to watch the love
of your life walk away to a country rock beat?
I had a real desire to create, but
had no foundation, so I had no motivation. Until I did.
I’ll be the first to say that I’ve
been blessed. By and large, my life’s been easier than most and sometimes, I
feel guilt for that. What I lack in traditional diversity, I make up
for with a unique social experience, one that’s been fraught with heartbreak
and poor decisions. I don’t regret these, not a single one. But,what I’ve
done, time and time again, is fail to channel the negativity in my life into
pure, unadulterated productivity. I’ve instead wallowed in the feelings of loss
and let myself slide into a morass of bad chick flicks and worse rom-coms
that lend not to self-reflection, but self-pity.
So, I turned to music and I started
to play. What I found, first and foremost, was that it was liberating.Unlike
poetry or screenwriting, putting lyrics to a chord provides immediate results.
You can adjust on the fly and what sounds right and wrong is as apparent and
obvious as switching one note for another.
Surprisingly, for me, lyrics came easy--all I had to do was sing about my
experience and find ways to make my mistakes rhyme in 4/4 time.
And yes, it was fun and fulfilling
and cool to listen to songs come together, but it also caused me to do something
I’ve been lacking for a long time: self-reflection. As I taught myself chords
and found out the best way to express my thoughts and feelings, I started to
view myself in the context of my own actions, and if we’re being honest, I didn’t
like what I saw. For so long, I’d constructed myself as a moody creative, who
the world didn’t appreciate and didn’t understand. But that was preposterous.
It wasn’t that the world didn’t understand what I was trying to do. It was that
I wanted the world to see me as something I wasn’t and that I wanted to lie to
myself about my circumstances.
I tried to trick myself into thinking
that life wasn’t fair and that those were just the breaks. But the breaks are
only the breaks if you let them break you and I found in the strings that what
can break can bend and what can bend can mend itself again.
Making music gave me context. It made
me reevaluate myself in a time where no one was evaluating me and I came down
harsher on myself than I expected to. But it has also inspired me to change, to
grow and to not just be an adult, but to grow up. For the first time in my
life, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and I thank my guitar for every
single inch of that. Because as I learned to play, I learned to think. And as I
learned to think, I learned what it took to be the person, to be the man I
thought I could be.
And as I become that man, as I shed
the shell of what came before, for the first time in a long time, I like what I
can see.
So yes, people doubted. So yes,
people laughed. But, in the end, this wasn’t about the music. This was about
me. It was about the choice I had to make and how I made it, the choice between
passivity and action, between acclimation and acquiescence. It was a choice
between the past and the future.
I found peace between the frets of my
guitar and I hope you’ll find your peace, too. Just listen to the music.
Listen to how it changes. Adjust.
Jared Thomas, of Cynthiana, Ky., is a sophomore McConnell Scholar studying political science and economics.