everything scares me...
fear and identity
“I’m afraid of being anything because I want to be everything. Or perhaps I’m afraid of everything because I don’t want to be nothing.”
This article is another personal essay meant to serve as a sort of Part 2 to my most recent article “Why All Musicians Are Sad.” I usually stick with factual articles or music artist interviews rather than personal essays, but after seeing all the interest brought about by my previous article (“Why All Musicians Are Sad” is now my top article), I decided to go through with writing a part 2.
Part 1 focused a lot on the sadness and despair musicians face when they attach their identity and self-worth to their ability to create. Attaching your worth to something as fleeting as creative ability is a recipe for self-loathing. It’s simply a fact that sometimes you will create great and beautiful things, and sometimes you won’t. In this article (Part 2), I want to focus on fear rather than sadness.
Fear is something that highly creative people face when their identity feels misplaced. Whether they find themselves in an industry that doesn’t feel right, they have been put into the wrong box by peers and onlookers, or they don’t even know yet where they put their own identity, it can feel deeply unsettling to have your identity in something that doesn’t feel truly “you.”
In my own experience, I can see every day how this type of fear threatens to hold me back. I’m hesitant to put too much work into my newsletter because I’m scared that if I write too much my identity might switch from “musician” to “writer.” And being a writer is great, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that for me to feel like me… I have to be a musician first before anything else.
When my university caused me to have to change my major from Music to Communications after my second year (because my main instrument was not supported by the school’s course offerings), I was excited but I also began to worry about my identity. How would I feel like myself when I had to tell people I was a Communications major? The idea of other people not understanding my identity was scary to me. In reality, I shaped my courses so I could still stay involved with music, and I knew that my journey as a Communications major would revolve around my interest in the music industry. In this way, I knew that I would be perfectly happy because I knew where my identity stood - it’s just that I didn’t know how to prove that to others.
This fear in mistaken identity goes further and further. It may seem silly and unimportant, but I know others must feel it too because I feel it every day. When I would write and arrange music often, I never even considered showing it to other people, because I didn’t want one arrangement or one lyric to define what type of musician I am. This is a terrible place to be for someone who longs to create.
I’m afraid of being anything because I want to be everything. Or perhaps I’m afraid of everything because I don’t want to be nothing.
You could boil this down to simply caring too much what others think of you. And you wouldn’t be wrong - that’s definitely part of the issue. But what feels even worse than being misunderstood by onlookers is the feeling of being frozen in your ability to create, perform, or pursue any interest because you are too afraid of cementing your identity in one genre, job, accomplishment, style, or anything else you succeed in.
Unfortunately we as humans find comfort in defining other people by their past accomplishments, styles, and abilities. But what we must learn is that anyone can grow to be so much more than one thing. I have to learn that becoming a better writer does not make me a worse musician. I have to learn that changing my major does not mean changing my identity. I have to learn that writing a song in one genre does not mean that I will be looked down upon if I try to write a song in a different style. I have to learn to stop being afraid of everything. I cannot live life dipping my toes into different pools, too afraid to ever fully commit to one. I need to dive in headfirst and know that if I can dive into one pool, I can dive into plenty others as well.
I wish I could come up with a way to make all these fears about identity go away forever, but unfortunately I don’t think that will ever be the case. I do know this though, and I hope anyone who feels the same way will listen to my final statement on the matter: a fear of everything should never force you to do nothing.
Thank you for reading.
Being afraid of one label sticking too hard is such an underrated kind of paralysis, it doesn't look like fear from the outside, it just looks like hesitation or indecision. The pool metaphor is exactly right too, most people don't realize refusing to fully commit anywhere is its own decision, just a slower and quieter one. Letting other people's shorthand define who you are is always going to cost more than the discomfort of just diving in.
I relate a lot to how you feel, and it covers an aspect of what I've been thinking about a lot recently. As artists we are often told to find our niche to be marketable, easily digestible for the brief onlooker, no misunderstandings, no room for error or confusion. I heavily leaned into that as well, thinking I had to choose between sharing my music or my visual art, even though both of them inform each other a lot of the time. Ask anyone close to me in my life, they will likely define me through both. And I am beginning to think that it matters less and less, actually. Because if we're going to think in target audiences, do I want my target audience to only be able to see people and their artistic output through one lens? Not really. And I am open to this changing as I am still thinking a lot about where to go with this and struggle with it from time to time, but for now this is where I am at. Thank you for sharing your thoughts so openly.