Jaimee Eat World

When I made my way out to Vancouver last fall, I knew I had settled into a lot of compromises that I didn’t really want to make.

I have always done this. I’ve always been someone who makes due with what’s offered to me with a belief that in time I’ll be able to turn things over in my favour.

Maybe that’s arrogant of me, or maybe I developed unrealistic expectations for someone in my meager position in this world.

To say I pictured my life at 35 different than it is today would be an enormous understatement.

City As My Witness

Of all the challenges I realized stood before me as I watched the tide roll in at Kits Beach, I knew there was one I was no longer willing to compromise – the freedom to create.

I may not have a terribly elaborate home studio set-up. It’s something I’ve slowly been re-building over time because I previously compromised my entire ability to record and create music when I started selling my gear to try to keep up with bills that kept flying in out of thin air for one reason or another. A lot of them came in the years just before I first got married; Our roomate moved out unexpectedly, the apartment complex we lived in decided to start pushing tenants to pay for their renovations and then my ex lost his job. Although I picked up a weekend gig at a coffee shop on top of my full-time job to help us through, it just wasn’t enough.

And it took me longer than it should have to realize that my ex was more than comfortable with watching me head out the door constantly to work while he slummed it out at home drinking and watching sports – and gambling on them with whatever change he still had in his bank account. And losing those gambles.

In that time I sold off my interface, my monitors, amplifiers and whatever else I deemed at the time non-essential and relatively easy to replace once things turned around again, unknowing that this situation as it was would never actually turn itself around. It took years to re-purchase everything I needed.

When I packed up my car to move to Vancouver, I couldn’t fit very much. I compromised again, bringing only my interface, a mic, laptop, 1 guitar, my bass and little Akai midi keyboard.

I figured I could get by with that for a while before I’d be able to ship over the rest of what I needed to keep doing this project (and my other projects).

But for every minute I was in that apartment building, I knew that it just wasn’t going to work.

Having spent so much of the last few years just rebuilding my work station and growing to a place where I have all the essential items I need to track the way I like to with real amps, with a drum set – albeit an electric one (another compromise), and most importantly, without the limitations of being in a shared space which allows me to be as loud as I need or feel like being that day, I knew that the move was a huge mistake.

My life still lacks the stability I’ve craved since I was young, but music provides an outlet that feels safe and inviting and I need the right space to allow myself the ability to continue. Without it, I’m not sure what else I really have or who I am. It took until I was giving it up to see how critical having this type of space was to me.

I Am Who I Wanna Be

I’m not someone who has ever had grand aspirations of climbing a corporate ladder. I’m not someone who dreamt of the perfect wedding day. I’m not someone who wanted to be the most dominent player on any of the sports teams I played on. I’m not someone who has some nagging biologic urge to have children.

If I go through my entire life without achieving any of those things, I won’t feel like any sort of failure.

What I am is someone who has always had a desire to create. Write, draw, play. It helps me work through problems, understand myself and make sense of the world – or at least, it allows me the opportunity to question and consider all the big why’s of the world when no answer could bring any sort of peace to it.

Over the last few years I have cycled through a lot of “why’s” and what I’ve learned is: Things that I’ve always been sure of, I can no longer be sure of; Things that I want to know deeply, I may never know at all; And people who I’d wish to share these thoughts and ideas with may never be interested in being part of the conversation.

But that doesn’t stop my incessant need to explore them.

Be Anything Here

A friend of mine once posed a question – if you could only have one book for the rest of your life, which book do you hold? It’s one of those funny questions that can say a lot about you and be completely wrong in its assessment depending on how much thought you give it.

I chose a blank notebook.

With a blank notebook you can be anything, be anyone, steer the story literally any direction you wish to take it that day – it is absolutely limitless in its potential.

A novel, a poem, a script, a monologue.

A thesis. A diary. A riddle. A blog.

An outline for a project that encompasses over 10 albums of songs.

I think we miss out on a lot when we’re so focused on following a life plan or goals that we didn’t really create for ourselves.

I did the corporate ladder thing for a minute and it meant I spent 7 years of my life bored in an office trying to find every other which way to bring creativity into an environment that didn’t care or call for it. A coworker of mine called my decision to join the team full-time “a means to an end,” because prior to that, I was struggling to stay afloat and unsure how I was going to pay rent with my previous freelance A/V gig. It was never supposed to be somewhere I stayed very long.

I think a lot of our decisions as we make our way through life are a means to an end. We make the decision to go to college or university because high school ends. We make the decision to get a job because university or college ends. We get married because there’s an ingrained threshold in society for how long courting another should be before that stage should end. We’re shuffled along in a lot of situations and experiences that are all just a response to how someone before us thought we should do things.

In retrospect, 7 years is a long time. But all that other stuff I mentioned happened in that time frame and I guess I got distracted by it. All those other “means to an end.”

If you didn’t have all these unconscious road maps pulling you in these directions, where do you think you would you begin?

That’s the best part about the blank notebook – you can start anywhere.