I'm Remembering Those Times Too

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my identity and the various pots I've got my spoons in in my life. I do think that I crossover a lot of subcultures, but I wonder if a particular one wins out over the others in terms of the perception of me by others. How do others see me?

We don't live in a world of absolutes, so I guess the easy answer to this issue would be that your identity depends on the person you're talking to. Each person you interact with approaches you with a wide range of experiences, preconceptions, and biases which all affect how they consider you. To my co-workers, my love of baseball and music stick out a lot more than my interest in art because we all already share an interest in the latter. As a result of that, they probably see me as more of a punk dude or a "bro", because let me tell ya, the artworld knows fuck-all about sports.

Also, as a sidenote, I am consistently surprised by how little people know about punk music and the subculture. I guess I spent a lot of time hanging out with mostly punk people, which explains it, but it still surprises me when I mention a band like Against Me! and get blank stares.

By the same token, I'm sure that I'm the "art" person to my punk friends.

But with this in mind, can I control my identity? If I try hard enough, will one identity win out over the other ones? What the fuck is my identity now, anyways?

I guess that I've been thinking about this a lot because for a long time I could be pigeonholed as a punk. This was especially true when I was in Beat Noir, as BN was always my main pursuit artistically. Being a band guy was an integral part of my personality and I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "Are you an artist?" since starting my job. Since I'm not a practicing artist, at least in the "makes tangible artworks for the purpose of showing them in a show" sense of the term, my response was always "I'm a musician", which usually led to some haughty art fuck being slightly condescending about my elision of "artist" and "punk band".

Now I am sort of not a musician because Beat Noir isn't a band anymore. I'm still (half-assedly) working on songs, but not seriously enough that I would label it as my main pursuit. I've also had a lot of trouble doing any creative writing lately, as I'm sure you can tell if you frequent this blog with anything resembling regularity. For a time I would have maybe self-identified as a writer, but I've been kind of doubting that lately too. I am still less than a year removed from finishing Engineering Failure, undoubtedly the biggest writing project I've ever finished, so I might be being a little hard on myself, but the aforementioned doubt does carry a lot of validity with it. Maybe I'm not a writer.

Do I become a "Museum Educator" now? This is definitely not how I want to be known. I need to avoid that, for the sake of my sanity.

I feel like I'm using a lot of big words in this post to make myself feel better about not writing so much,

The project that I outlined late last year has slowed to a trickle lately. I initially was very gung-ho about it and outlined a whole schedule to keep myself on-track, but I can assure you that I am very behind schedule now. I think I'm still in fine shape, but I do really need to stay on it.

In thinking about my identity, I came to the conclusion that calling myself a writer would probably be what would make me feel most comfortable about myself. I also don't want to ever let go of the part of myself that's a competent musician in a punk band.

The path to both of those labels lies in working on stories and working on songs and writing on this fuckin' blog. It's important to remember what inspires you, hold onto the feeling it gives you like it's rope ladder, and never look away from it. As easy as it can be to let yourself grow stagnant and sink into watching TV, you can never let that happen, because nobody ever changed the world by sitting on their couch.