Good is the enemy of great and so am I

Confessions of a former teenage rapper.

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Good is the enemy of great and so am I.

I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. I’ve been wanting to scream it at you. I’ve dreamt of cupping my hands, mustering a pep rally worth of gusto, and letting it rip as I fall into a void. I’ve been wanting to whisper it in your ear. I’ve been wanting.

There’s been so much wanting.

I wrote it in my notes a few years ago, convinced it was the single most important sentence I’ve ever written. Someday, I’d use it as the lead for a brilliant essay. A novel, perhaps. Maybe a screenplay. Maybe an album. At the very least, a song. Or a really good poem.

It’d be my thesis for a life of unfinished goals. The diagnosis for my symptomless pain. The sentence I’d use to describe this sentence, a perfect definition for the dull sore of seeing so many things I could be and being none of them. Not for a lack of trying. But instead, worse yet, for an allergy to it.

Every time my favorite football team loses, I turn on the franchise mode for that year’s Madden video game and drop into the current moment, playing out the rest of the season in a way that’s realistic enough to be true. I trade a few players away, sign a few new ones, reach the precipice of a new season with a new hope, optimism, roster and — for a moment — reality. I play a few games. It feels good and new.

And then I turn the game off. And the next time they lose, I do it all over again.

Every time I look in the mirror and don’t like the person who stares back at me, I call someone I love and tell them all the ways I should change. Sometimes, they agree. Sometimes, they disagree. That’s worse.

The next day, I set out on a mission to change these things. I run a few miles, read the first few chapters of a book, smile, put on a smartphone screen time limit, fast, write, take a walk, make a meal and kiss my girlfriend, with the honey-sweetness of the moon still rising.

And then a few days pass, and the feeling fades. And I do it all over again.

Every time I get frustrated with work, I start hypothesizing new careers I could pursue, and what cities these careers might take me to. In my head, I’ve been a graduate student in Leeds, an English teacher in Rhode Island, a food critic in Denver, an administrative assistant in New York City, a sports reporter, a copywriter, a college admissions counselor, a therapist, a songwriter, an author, a friend.

And then I wake up. To the blue light of this stupid fucking video game. It’s the Super Bowl. I’m in it. I really don’t feel like playing. Because the hard work was putting the hypothetical team together in the first place. Right?

I’ve been listening quite a bit to Always Repeating by Runnner lately. It’s a perfect album, especially for this feeling. Here’s a potent verse from “New Sublet”:

Now you're seeing it backwards
You're struggling to draw your own face
Sitting drunk on the internet looking at prices of places
For cities you don't live in and you've never been
You're just getting addicted to starting all over again

And another from the obvious standout “Ur Name On A Grain Of Rice”:

Maybe I loved you
Or maybe I wanted to
see something through
Just cause I never do
And I should call, but I'm afraid
of what you're gonna say
Notice all the ways I’ve changed
and all the ways I’ve stayed the same

There are so many books on my shelf with bookmarks after their second chapter. I don’t know how any of them end. I’ve never even been to the middle. I’m struggling with that.

I’m feeling aimless, at sea with an oar and not a damn clue which direction land is. I’m hoping Sounds Great is the beach. But I’m not sure.

I’m scared. Because as far as I can remember, I’ve only seen through two things in my life.

First: My relationship, a true miracle cobbled together with some combination of luck and her immense patience.

Second, and I mean this: The shitty rap mixtape I made when I was 16 years old. I wrote the entire thing in solitude with YouTube-bootlegged Chance the Rapper type beats, Band of Horses instrumentals and the worst cadences imaginable. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve just picked up an instrument.

It sounded terrible. It was poorly mixed, derivative, corny, messy and downright embarrassing. It was the kind of thing you’d expect, given I was a white kid in a small town, dining on a diet of pop-rap and lyrical miracles. Sorry to the voyeurs, but I’ve scrubbed it from the internet (though there are two dozen or so CDs floating out in the universe, so I imagine it’ll come back to haunt me someday).

Still, I wouldn’t change a thing about those days. I’ve never been intoxicated by a creative project the way I was with that one.

I wrote the entire thing for myself. I kept it a secret from some of my closest friends for more than a year. In my childhood bedroom, I sang into an off-brand podcast mic until 2 a.m., tinkering with GarageBand effects and coming up with new hooks. It was an obsession. It was the first time I felt truly passionate about anything.

Around the time I wrote it, I was dealing with intense bouts of anxiety, fearing death to the point of physical symptoms. I held this anxiety like a dirty little secret. But the music helped.

Even more than death, I feared disappointing people who’d be ashamed of this little project. The music sucked, after all. And I knew on some intrinsic level it did. But I finished it anyway, because I had to.

The track list followed a linear narrative: 14 songs, with the first 7 sad and the second 7 upbeat. The plan was semi-meta. I’d speak my happiness into existence by writing an album about becoming happier. It was audacious. but it worked. Sure, the product wasn’t great. Unlistenable, even. But I did get happier. I found joy in finishing a project for the first — and hopefully not the last — time.

There’s a part of me that’s still sympathetic to bad art because of this experience. Even those God-awful Instagram Reels songs that go viral on Twitter every few weeks. Because I know making bad art with pure intentions can be a really transformative thing, both emotionally and creatively. I know nobody is a fixed point on a line of artistic value.

I knew then, too. But in the years after making that project, I let the anxiety get the best of me. I continued writing songs for a time and learned a few chords on my guitar. But I didn’t share these songs with anybody outside of a few close friends.

I’ve channeled my creativity into different types of writing — articles, poems, a few texts and tweets, even! — and all of them were infinitely better than that damn mixtape. But the process has never felt as good. Nothing has felt as freeing as my year as a dumb kid when I wrote songs in my room with one goal in mind: feel better. Sometimes I still listen to them, and I can’t help but smile.

I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. It has scared the hell out of me, but I just thought you should know. I thought you should know how vast this ocean is. How heavy the paddle feels in my hands, how sharp the splinters are in my palms.

I just want you to know there’s land somewhere, and you should build a sand castle when you get there. Forget about the structural integrity. Wear your crown for a second. Let the castle stand, just long enough for you to feel pride. Take a picture of it for later. Cup your hands around it and let the sand slip between your fingertips. I want you to know how soft and warm it is when it’s yours.

I want you to know who the enemy is.

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