Quote:
Originally Posted by JonPR
. . . Well, it's never happened to me, and I've been playing for 58 years (and counting...) . . .
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Heh heh. I've been playing since '68, when I was sixteen. It happened to me (I remember it well) exactly once, when I was maybe twenty or twenty-one.
I realized that no matter how much I wanted to, I'd never be as good as all my friends who played in bands. I had no chance of ever being the world's best guitar player. Depressing. Discouraging. So I gave up.
But about six months into it, I realized two things.
1. If only the world's best doctor stayed in the business, there wouldn't be enough doctors. You don't have to be the world's best doctor to cure someone. And even the best loses a patient sometimes.
So it's good that we have lots of doctors and guitar players who just do their best with the talents they have. In fact, the more the merrier, right?
2. I missed playing!
So I decided to accentuate the positive, and thought about what my real talent was. It took a while (I can be dense), but it finally dawned on me that while all my guitar buddies were great at nailing the songs they covered, they'd hardly written any originals — something I did all the time. (Not well, at that point, but I'd only been at it a few years.)
Which brought me back to both playing and writing — never as a pro, always as an enthusiast. Sometimes work and life have pulled by away from making music, but I've always kept it close at hand and enjoy the time I can put into it. When it gets stale, I just try something new.
It's only rock 'n' roll, but I like it.
Koa, I don't know if that helps, but there might be something to latch onto in there.