Thoughts on turning 21

4:30 BST - 23/09/2024

Yesterday, I turned 21 years old. If I were American, I’d now be able to legally drink alcohol, but thankfully I live in a real country & I’ve already been able to do so for three years. A lot’s happened in the past year or so; I’ve moved out of my family’s house & into my own place (in a smaller & more remote town, unfortunately, but the housing market’s not really the best at the moment), I’ve taken up the clarinet, I now have over 1,000 followers on Twitter… but at the same time, it doesn’t really feel like all that much has changed. It’s somewhat telling that I’ve only really brought up moving house as a major event; this past year has been almost entirely uneventful otherwise.

I dunno, I guess I’m still just kinda… around? I’ve involved myself in many a creative endeavour over the years & at the moment my interests are mainly geared towards attempting to make music… emphasis on “attempting” here, because it hasn’t really amounted to much beyond scraps here & there. I don’t really talk to that many people offline because I don’t really know anybody in the area since moving, & there’s not really much to do to get to know new people. I don’t really do all that much other than eat, sleep, go for walks, buy random-ass instruments & browse Twitter. Anytime I want to do something else I move at a snail’s pace because of how much I bloody procrastinate over everything. Even writing this rather basic article has been a five day process so far.

I guess there’s a part of me that still feels like I have to be doing something. Part of me knows it’s perfectly fine for my life to just be having fun lounging around, talking with folks & not really getting much else done, but another part of me isn’t happy with this state of affairs. I have to do something, I have to make something more of my life, no matter what that may look like. Even making small steps towards working on my creative endeavours is good, really. Progress can be slow.

I figured that writing this article is a good place for me to kinda set myself some goals that I can try & follow up on. A place for me to look back & get my bearings a bit, you know? Anyways, I’d say my current life goals are as follows:

• ACTUALLY GET SOME FUCKING MUSIC DONE. This includes but is not limited to: practising my instruments on the regular, solidifying my song ideas beyond the most basic of sketches, getting a better DAW, fixing whatever’s up with my microphone & it only ever being too quiet or too loud, linking up with some other aspiring musicians & maybe starting a band, actually learning to read sheet music, finding some tutorials for instrument playing that go beyond me just glancing at fingerings to facilitate me playing by ear, etc.
• Get myself to write more regularly. I’ve got a bunch of ideas for potential articles for this site (starting with a follow-up to the Badenoch article) that I’ve been putting off due to distractions & laziness.
• Maybe start drawing & animating again. I used to love doing that a few years back, but I got burned out & sorta ran out of ideas.
• Get better at looking after myself. Admittedly, I’ve already done a pretty good job of this since moving, but I could definitely get better at it.
• Get out & about beyond just strolling around my local area every day. There’s nothing to do where I currently live, but that shouldn’t stop me from getting buses or trains to bigger cities nearby & fucking around there instead!
• Improve this website & add some more features to it (I.E. an “X of the week” panel on the home page & an RSS feed so that people can be notified of my new articles, among other things).
• Get a handle on the amount of tabs I have open - the count as of writing is 1242 (I've gotten it down to 1198 by the time of publication), & it’s beginning to get a bit unworkable. That means wading through all the articles & music I’ve been putting off getting through, & the like.

I’ll hopefully keep you lot posted if I get anywhere with any of this, like. Don’t bet on it too soon…