transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
As someone who loves to sing and make music, as someone who loves to dance and to be crafty, and as someone who inherently sucks at it - especially the music part, I can’t tell or hold a rhythm, let alone a note - this post really got me. I often feel like I am not allowed to sing or join or like I have to hide that I used to play guitar and write songs for hours when I was a teen and young adult. Because I was never good at it. Because the chords were just strummed. The chords didn’t fit the melody in my head and I could not sing the melody as it was in my head. And I just suck at it. And still, it brought me so much joy. It was such a big part of my life. I loved it.
I now sing songs to my daughter when we are in public. I pretend it is because she wants to hear them. It’s a great alibi. (She often doesn’t like my singing.) Sometimes she joins in. This is the best. There is no better sound in the world.
I’m ok at writing. But even this - I am a biomedic, not a writer. I didn’t study linguistics or literature or politics or journalism, I am absolutely not in the writing world. I can’t write professionally, so why should I even write. There are tons of more talented people who actually learned how to write out there. I leaned out of the window and got a side gig while I was on mat leave and wrote for a blog 2-4 times a month for a year. It was the best. I was paid peanuts but these were the tastiest lil’ peanuts I’ve ever devoured.