Jaimee Eat World

I was always a pretty independent kid. As the youngest of 4, I was often shuffled around to my older siblings activities (usually hockey), but I always found a way to make those experiences interesting to me. It wasn’t uncommon at all for me to cart around a notebook or a sketchpad so I could doodle and write stories while my brothers hit the ice.

When I’d get home from school, I was often alone, so I’d binge out on music videos, sitcoms and snacks and think about new creative projects I wanted to try until anyone else got home.

I think this type of upbringing was pretty important in allowing me the freedom to choose who I wanted to be and where I wanted to take myself, so I started to dream big and early. I wanted to be a writer, an actor, a comic and of course a musician. That’s a lot of different things all with their own challenges, but there was never really anyone around to persuade me otherwise, so I sort of just went ahead with it.

I’ll Take My Chances

I don’t come from a family of writers, musicians, actors or comedians (though some of them can be pretty funny), but when you’re a kid you don’t understand how important that part of the whole puzzle is as far as turning your passion for the arts into some sort of gainful career, so that doesn’t really stop you from trying.

It’s only as you get older and you start having to deal with real world problems that you begin to reconsider your choices and if you’re not careful about who you take advice from, you can really spiral out of it. That’s a huge mistake.

I hyper-focus on things and dive right into my interests strongly, but took to music the most out of everything I was into as a kid, so that’s what I ultimately chose to put the majority of my effort into. I felt like I understood the road on a more intuitive level than say, the one that led to acting. (How does a 12 year old get an agent anyway?)

I was always a writer so the plunge to songwriting came naturally, but self-teaching yourself guitar is tough. Nowadays there are an insane amount of resources online – full courses by great instructors that lay out a simple plan to follow and learn from. We didn’t have that when I started, we had some tabs of popular songs and that was about it. Still a huge asset, but you can’t really tell how well you’re coming along with it or if you’re doing anything properly, so if your anything like me your first decade of learning guitar is full of doubt and confusion and frustration.

I don’t know what it means to be “naturally gifted” at anything, I have always had to put in the work.

It was always the dream to be able to tour with my band, but while you might all be on the same page with that idea at 15, 16, people change and have different pressures and goals come the end of high school.

Mine disbanded at around that time, and although I had already been working in recording studios, I didn’t really know how to find other musicians outside of high school and I don’t think I was a confident enough band leader at the time to be super into the idea of auditoning strangers. Besides, I lived in the suburbs and one without much of any sort of music community – I wonder if things could have been different if I lived in the city.

Nonetheless, I had a plan B that would keep me actively involved in music even if I wasn’t necessarily destined for the stage. I needed to choose a career (apparently) and the only thing I was as passionate about as playing music was recording it.

So I’ll just become a recording engineer. That’s an easier and sensible career path – right?

My Best Theory

Most of my friends had families and support systems that really helped them along into adulthood whether they liked it or not. I had a lot of friends whose families had their own successful companies, so they’d steer their kids into colleges and universities that would give them the tools or credentials to accept a well-paying stable job within those companies.

When you’re 19 years old, all of that sounds terrible. When you’re 35, you realize how much of an advantage that is to finding financial freedom and a safety net.

But I’m glad I didn’t have that. It sounds great until you talk to them and you realize they’re miserable.

My life has been full of extreme highs and lows, limited safety nets and I only ever experience a semblance of financial freedom when the tide turns a particular way and it doesn’t usually take long for it to slide back out to sea. If I ever won a big lottery, I’m sure I would be afraid to touch it.

Anyways, it turns out a career as a recording engineer was not exactly sane. This was 2008 and for better or for worse, the industry was in a very different place then than it is now.

I actually did pretty well compared to my peers. I was one of few who was actually able to land placements after completing college (thanks large in part to snagging a co-op in high school), but the part nobody really tells you or at least they didn’t then is that, those placements and positions don’t pay. And they wont ever pay. Unless you’re lucky enough to be in the room when another engineer dies or quits, you are fighting a losing battle. Even then, you’ll still have competition. Nothing is guaranteed or even likely.

There just aren’t that many jobs available and once people get into the ones that pay, they ain’t going anywhere.

And well-known and accredited producers and engineers know all this and they take full advantage of eager young minds that would kill just to be in the room while it’s all happening, so they don’t really make any effort to help you gain the confidence or skills to jump into paid gigs or the do’s and don’ts when you start finding your own clients. In fact, they spend a lot of time and effort convincing you that this is totally normal, to make yourself wholly available to them and their projects without so much as a per diem for a coffee each day.

I worked in studios for years until I was beyond broke and had no choice but to find something else. The path I thought I had good sense of just didn’t really seem to lead anywhere and I wasn’t sure what direction to go.

As the years passed and I found myself falling into the safety of “normal” jobs and traditional pathways, I became more and more depressed. I didn’t want to have these “normal” jobs and I felt like I was wasting my life in them. I do believe I was right about that.

I was still fighting for the things I loved to do. I tried all sorts of different things. For a while I got a job as a freelance copywriter and I thought maybe I could find my freedom through that, but getting paid to write just made me hate writing so I decided if I was going to be a writer, I would have to write only for myself.

I started joining bands again, playing bass generally, which I kind of liked because it took off the pressure of being a front woman in a genre that looked down on front women, but honestly I just missed writing my own songs and performing them, so it wasn’t wholly satisfying that need to be the kind of musician my 10-year old self saw me as – playing sold-out arenas and festivals of course, center stage with a guitar in hand.

And I told you already a bit about my previous marriage – one of those funny things I thought I really wanted or needed because it was just a normal thing for people to want and need and then, well, that turned out poorly.

Every time I took one of the forks away from those ridiculous dreams I had as a kid, I fell further and further away from myself and that was hard to deal with.

It wasn’t until I took a step back from it all that I was able to notice that pattern. And it wasn’t until I got myself back on the road to achieving my oldest dreams that I found myself again.

And just like when I was a kid, when I found myself, I was home alone.

A Lonely Real Place

It sounds worse than it is when I think about describing it. On paper, the life I led in my 20’s probably sounded pretty good to most people. Desirable, even.

I worked in studios until I was about 23 working with incredible artists (cool!), then I got a normie job in an office building working for a law school (prestigious to some, safe, paid well) for a few years, then I got married, got a dog (cute little family!), hosted a ton of parties and always had friends kicking around and then…

And then I abandoned every part of that to stay home, write songs, play guitar, pick up a job at a gym where the most important part of my day was cleaning disgusting mens’ toilets, finish writing books I’d started years earlier, play with my dog, go for lots of walks and long runs just to see how far I could walk or run, dabble with doodles and write comics and just about damn near none of this made me any money so you know I’m not exactly living lavishly while I do it all.

Oh, and no friends, really. Not everyone is going to be understanding about the fact that you’re choosing to spent the majority of your free time on your Jimmy Eat World complete discography recreation project, so brace yourself for that.

I used to be sad about it because it’s hard to go from always having a pretty consistent social life to having next to none, but honestly, at this point they’d be too much of a distraction and I’m having more fun doing this anyway.

You want me to sit in a bar and watch the Leafs lose again instead of working on improving my mix? Forget about it.

The crazy part is that despite the increased instability and the challenges that come with this version of my life which has veered well off the beaten path, I feel so much better than I did in my 20’s.

I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of my early goals, too.

I got a book published by a real publishing company. I self-produced and recorded like, 5 full-length records, a couple EP’s. I learned new instruments and got better at the ones I already had. Ran a marathon. Travelled to a bunch of places I’d always wanted to go (Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Krakow, Warsaw) but didn’t have the time or ability to given other commitments. I have a band again – my band, that I lead and stand center stage and play guitar and sing (no festivals yet, but give us time).

I did it all myself and I’d be lying if I told you it’s not a lonely life, but what you gain from these types of experiences (rest assured, they should be important to you and not simply what I’m doing) opens up the world in an incredibly unique way. That’s what we’re all here to find – that’s really what it is to have a life.

I think we know this instinctively as kids because we generally have less outside pressure then and haven’t been hit by harsh realities that make living challenging. The things that sound ridiculous or silly or unlikely as kids are not any of those things, they’re our true passions – the grit of our souls, the entire basis for what we need to lead fulfilling lives. Somewhere along the way so many of us abandon those dreams and then we wonder why we’re unhappy trying to squeeze into the borders of societies that don’t in any way align with our true selves.

The people that try to convince us we’re wrong to chase those dreams have simply given up on their own. You don’t have to resign just because they did.

In the time that I’ve spent chasing my own dreams again, I’ve regained that naive sense of wonder I had when I was little; The one that would pipe up randomly in the car, “I’m going to move to LA and act in comedies,” and her parents would laugh because of course they’re not going to help with that and it’s unlikely and challenging and oh man kids say they darnedest things.

I could do that now. Political unrest aside, what’s stopping me?

On paper right now, I might seem like a failure.

Let me tell you, if I am, well, failure feels pretty good. I think I’m going to keep with it for a while and see what else I fail at.