The Email
An email landed in my inbox this week from a guy I follow, an audio engineer who’s spent his whole career being “the audio guy with audio issues.” The subject line made a little joke about imposter syndrome. Under the joke was a real question, one he said took him years to let himself ask: what if you don’t actually want this career?
I sat with that longer than I expected to.
Apartment 219
I lived in apartment 219 at Park Hill during my years at Penn State. I always loved music, enough that I found my way into a job at the college radio station while I was there, playing records, learning the board, being around people who talked about music like it mattered because it did. That job was real. It wasn’t a hobby I dabbled in on the side of some other life. It was the thing that felt most like me. Looking back, I learned more at that radio station than I ever did in any classroom.
The Suit and Tie
My Dad once told me to do what I love, and the money would follow. I’m still waiting on the money part, honestly.
Looking back honestly, saying I wanted to major in music or go to recording school doesn’t feel like it was ever actually on the table. I wasn’t at some fork in the road, and I chose wrong. I didn’t feel like I had the support to make that choice or even explore it. I needed something sensible. A career path where I put on a suit and tie every day, sat in traffic, and looked like I was headed somewhere responsible. I had this vision in my head of what was expected of me in college and for a while after, and it didn’t have room for a kid who wanted to make records.
These Days It’s Guitar Shops
What survived was smaller than a career: a hobby musician with a home studio, but that need to make music never went away. I travel for work more than I’d like, and at some point I noticed I was seeking out music stores the way other people seek out good coffee. Not to buy anything, usually. Just to stand in a shop, talk shop with whoever’s behind the counter. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty tops. But it’s the little bit of time in each of those shops that makes the rest of the trip bearable.
The Other Door
Looking back, there’s a part of me that thinks I should have said fuck it and followed my heart. That’s not a throwaway line. I mean it. There was a version of my life where I walked through that door instead of the one I picked, and some days I wonder about it, what it would have turned out to be.
And while I do wonder about the other path, I have no regrets about the one I’m on. The path I actually took is the one that gave me my wife and my family, the four kids who are now standing at their own forks in the road.
Let me be clear — I wouldn’t trade that for any version of nineteen-year-old me walking through a different door.
What Never Left
Here’s the thing I keep landing on now that I’m almost in my fifties. The kid who worked at the radio station never actually left. He just found a different route in. He’s the reason a work trip isn’t complete without a stop at a guitar shop. He’s the reason eleven days turned into a three-year record made mostly alone in a home studio, because something in me needed to make it, whether or not it made sense on paper. Down on Jane isn’t the life I would have built if I’d said fuck it at nineteen. But it’s proof that the thing I thought I’d shelved never actually left the building.
So if you’ve got your own apartment 219, your own version of the sensible suit-and-tie path you talked yourself into because the other one felt too risky to say out loud: I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t matter. It does. But I’d bet the part of you that wanted the other thing is still around somewhere, showing up in smaller places and ways than you expected. Pay attention. Worth going and finding it. Go explore it. It’s OK not to know what you want to be when you grow up. I’m still working on it too