Liberio at Night; New Version (Kohta Yamamoto)
Rises the Moon (Liana Flores)
Song of the Ancients (Keiichi Okabe, Kakeu Ishihama, Keigo Hoashi, Takafumi Nishimura)
What a Delightful Scenery (HOYO-MiX)
Akari (Soushi Sakiyama)
Let You Break My Heart Again (Laufey, Philharmonia Orchestra)

Kaleidoscope, meaning “a constantly changing pattern or sequence of objects or elements.” (definition from google)
I’ve definitely been being too hard on myself with this.
Part of me felt disappointed looking at how few recordings I made this year.
In my last post, I wrote about how I had become essentially burned out in making music for a number of reasons. Comparison, the pressure to keep beating records and growing, and the inevitable assumed failure of every post because I was not crossing the threshold I felt I needed to in order to justify the time spent on this channel. Because my channel was not monetized or anything close to it, and that my music was not good enough to even license, this whole undertaking was doomed to fall apart. I went through cycles of believing if I just made more, got closer to this vague “enough” then I would be satisfied, or finally earn back what was invested and “make it.” Would be “enough.” In this mindset, me being successful would be endless productivity, and green arrows for days. “Enough.” But enough for who? Certainly not me, and not even my goals anymore. So I needed to complete the thought. Take a step back from making more and more and more, and try to get to the bottom of what was going on here. How I burned myself out doing something I loved, why I could not be satisfied with any recording, and why I felt so, so much pressure to keep on doing more, and being disappointed with the outcome anyway. Even when I took some breaks and came back, I fell back into the same patterns and ended up in the same place. Even when I came back from the break and did “more”, it never felt like enough.
Where did this pressure come from? It went beyond the comparison and showed up in many places in my life. At the end of the day, I never felt like I did enough, no matter how much I did. I wasn’t reading enough books. I wasn’t writing enough books. I wasn’t writing or recording enough music. I was sitting on projects for too long because they were not good enough.
But enough for…what? We have to complete the thought, and it isn’t really that it wasn’t enough for me. I could enjoy and be present for most of the steps along the way or hours of the day, and it’s not like it’s a requirement to do or product XYZ products every day like there’s a life quota we all have to hit. Even my quotas were ever-expanding (at my craziest, we were speedrunning typing manuscripts, which unsurprisingly ended up being full of mistakes). Today, I just needed to write and read my book. Tomorrow, I needed to do those, plus make an arrangement, plus do lectures for school, plus design a website, plus learn multiple languages, plus draw, plus, plus, plus…The list literally has no end.
And, like…why? Why was I stuck in this loop without being able to get off the ride? I legit hated the ride but could not get off of it…kind of like…real life, you know?
(This description exceeds the character limit, so…brb!)
We’re so back!