Yesterday I discovered, with the help of my future Disney roomie - shoutout to Kara, this amazing website: NoiseTrade. Well, amazing to someone who likes to feel like they know more music than other people (aka me, also know as 'a music snob' - sorry about it.) If you don't know, NoiseTrade is a website where artists can put their music up for free downloads to help build a fan base and earn recognition; it's practically a small section of Heaven. Anyway, I spent hours upon hours listening to random artists and downloading their EPs, singles, and albums. Once I had composed a new folder on my desktop full of 500+ new songs, I began to go through and weed out what I liked and what I didn't like.
As I went through each artist, I stopped to think about them, as cheesy and weird as it sounds. I would look up them on social media to see how popular they were. The results obviously varied from well known to unknown. I started to feel bad for those who had less follows on social media than me because let's be real, I'm no one special and 60% of my Twitter followers are old "Jonas Brothers' fandom" accounts from 2008. That means these people didn't even have inactive accounts to boost their ego up some.
Then a funny thing happened. I realized that these people shouldn't be worried about followers and mentions and notices and all that junk that in the end makes no difference. These bands or solo artists are probably thankful that they even get to pursue their passion daily- or they should be.
Think about it. These people wake up every morning and most of them probably go to some office job that they don't really like or feel happy with, but at the end of the day they get to come home and play music or upload music to a website that will build them a fan base. Maybe it's discouraging at times, actually I'm sure it is because that's life, but in the end passion should conquer pride.
This mindset or epiphany or whatever we call it has messed with my mind for the past 24 hours. Sure, I know that writing a book has done and continues to do more for me than anything in my life thus far, but that doesn't stop me from longing it'll be picked up by millions of people one day. And yes, I think it's more than okay to dream of things like that; I encourage it actually. All I'm saying is that your passion is just that - YOURS. If you let the numbers, popularity, or acceptance overshadow the healing or happiness it brings to you, you're doing it wrong.
Passions aren't about shallow words that others will like. Passions are about self-acceptance and appreciation.
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