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Dear darlings,
I often say I feel distracted, but this week it’s more severe than ever. I can hardly focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time. Maybe it’s just the end of the year? General burn out? A nightly routine of weed and Baileys? My poor excuse for a diet?
Probably all of it. And the earlier the sunsets the more likely I am to seek comfort in treats. Twice this week I’ve dined at a place famous for its pancakes. The first time I ordered a Dutch baby, which I loved. The second time I wanted to try something different so I inquired about the apple pancake, which is they categorize as a “Specialty of the House.” My friend and I sat across from each other at a booth for two, cradling our mugs of diner coffee rich with cream, while I ran a few concerns by our server.
“Is it, like, a fluffy pancake? Or Dutch baby style,” I asked. I really do love a Dutch baby.
“Oh, it’s fluffy,” he said persuasively, unaware that this was not the answer I wanted. But I agreed to try it anyway.
To my surprise and delight he was wrong. It was in fact a Dutch baby-style cake baked with a thick layer of sticky caramelized apples on top. The server came by to check on us and asked what I thought.
“Really good,” I said.
“See,” he said, and gave me a pleased, approving smile which he continued to flash my way every time he passed the table and saw I’d taken another bite.
I couldn’t finish my breakfast, and he was happy when I wanted a box. But I’d eaten more than half, and I’d also had about 3x the amount of coffee I normally do. As we stood beneath the sky-themed ceiling mural to pay at the register, I felt the first touch of the jitters. An hour later at my desk I’d try to work through the wild unfocused energy that surged through me. At the end of the day I realized I should have just taken the afternoon off. The house specialty apple pancake did not facilitate executive functioning.
A pancake, however, is not to blame for every setback. Sometimes what stops me in my tracks is the fiery desire I have to do something and do it well. I know some of you must understand.
When I started Disco Diaries it was the beginning of lockdown. Everything had been canceled and I felt free. The overwhelming pressure of musical presence and performance had been lifted and I could finally create again. Writing for myself and putting in online did not feel risky. It felt natural and curious.
Then the Thing happened, the Thing where the desire to create gets mixed up with the desire to be relevant. This is what had happened with music, making it messy and confusing. The more I care, the higher the risk of the Thing.
Creativity can feel like unrestrained potential. At the start of something, I’m thinking outside of the box because I don’t know what the box looks like. But as I grow more invested, I start to question my authority and wonder how I could earn it. I want to be part of the conversation, so I study what’s established—the people, the rhythms, the content—and try to create inside whatever boxes they create in.
In the effort to calculate what would really count in this world I, lose my identity. This makes me miserable.
Inspiration is essential, but it’s easy to cross a line and start seeing the references as the rules. The more I focus on made-up rules the more blocked I get. The less a person thinks about rules the more original they can be. This is how, I theorize, someone can pick up an instrument they’ve never played and come up with such good music. But eventually experience brings references and things shift. The key is to remember you can ignore the rules or rewrite them all together.
Moving in to 2024, I’m making my own rules. Goofy, honest, practical rules. One of them is stop flying by the seat of my pants and really do the things I mean to do with careful planning and intention. Another is to live by this Oscar Wilde quote:
“Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”
Doesn’t it have a live-laugh-love tone? Can’t you picture it displayed in white cursive on stained wood? But it’s true, and I always come back to it. It’s literally the only option.
xo,
Katya