I’m sure most of us have felt burnout before. It’s that feeling you get when you’ve reached your limit but you’re being asked to do a little more. Whenever I’m feeling burnt out, I tend to be a bit unreasonable. That’s why I sometimes react poorly when my teachers try to give me advice. Here are the two pieces of advice given to me by my music teachers and how I chose to respond to them. Fair warning: some of my thoughts get pretty heavy in this article but I don’t mention anything too explicit.
Advice #1: Being a grown up sucks.
Being a grown up… it sucks. Because there are so many things you have to do, you don’t get time for things you want to do. But sometimes to do the things you want to do, you gotta do the things you have to do.
– My Music Production & Technology teacher
In high school, I took a class where I learned how to use Logic. When Logic Pro X was first installed into the school computers, our teacher encouraged us to fiddle around and find out how to achieve certain effects given the new interface. One day, I was being a little disobedient because I was having trouble figuring out how to do pitch bending. Instead of having Logic open, I was playing solitaire. That’s when my teacher gave me “the speech.” I had actually heard him give the same speech to a few other students but I never thought he would have to give it to me.
To be honest, my mental health had already been rapidly deteriorating at this point. With university practically around the corner, I had a lot of concerns regarding my future. I thought to myself: What would happen if I told him I don’t plan on living long anyways? What would he say? I mean, he would probably have to call my parents and a guidance counsellor. In reality, I don’t think I said anything at all. If I recall correctly, he just sent me immediately to my seat after he was done talking, so I wouldn’t have gotten a word in anyways.
Advice #2: Nobody dies on the table.
The great thing about studying music is that nobody dies on the table if you mess up.
– Various music teachers at my university
Pardon my memory, but I actually don’t remember who said this first. My music teacher repeated this phrase at the beginning of last semester, so I want to believe that she coined it. She’s not wrong, though. Bad music won’t kill anybody. Mistakes happen, but we’re still learning and it’s not the end of the world.
Here’s where my overactive mind twists everything into something negative. I didn’t really get into this in my last semester update, but I cried a bunch doing my music homework. And no, it was not because I was in my feels. I genuinely hated all (okay, most) of my compositions. I thought back to my teacher saying this phrase at the beginning of the semester, but it wasn’t reassuring. Instead, I thought to myself: If I can’t make good music, it will be me that dies on the table. No good music, no career, no food on the table, just death… but I somehow ended up in a music festival, so maybe I was being melodramatic!
Is there something wrong with me?
I’d like to clarify that my music teachers are awesome and those two pieces of advice are perfectly sound. In fact, you may be noticing a pattern here. The only reason I wasn’t too receptive to their advice was that I was not in a good place mentally to heed them. And you know what? That’s okay. I think I put too much pressure on myself to find the perfect balance between work and play. Just because you experience burnout doesn’t mean you need to quit your job. Sometimes you just need to take a break. So that’s my advice! To close out this article, I thought I would recommend this song by Paul Kim:
Don’t get timid from the harsh words of others
– Paul Kim, Big Heart
It will be difficult and that is normal
It’s not really anything at all
Video belongs to Neuron Music.