There is a potentially cool, big, positive thing in the works for me, about which I’ll celebrate and explain if it happens.
But the process has been both exciting and stressful (sometimes it’s hard to untangle those two emotions!) There’s the ordinary social anxiety stuff, but more so, irrational worries of the sort where I know they’re irrational, but knowing is only about 20% of the battle.
Add that to the early 2021 background level of stress. And a problem where water was dripping from the first floor ceiling below the second floor bathroom, as the crazy weather started to thaw… was it a frozen pipe, leaking toilet or roof problem? (At this point it’s either a roof problem or ghosts.) And a mysteriously appearing magazine subscription buried in three layers of obscure companies with no web presence, which I think turned out not to be a scam maybe. And an Android update that broke four different things on my phone (some of which interfered with each other). All together, it’s been kind of a lot.
No full-blown panic attacks, thankfully! Those have a distinct feel to them, and I haven’t had one since about this time last year when COVID was getting really scary but I still had to physically go to the office.
To get to the point: there are certain albums that I find very soothing when things get overwhelming, and my own Float is one of them. It was intended for that purpose, and I’m happy to say that it works. Given that I’ve decided not to pursue the Beads study as an album but as a personal set of experiments, I think the next project will be a sort of sequel to Float. I think I’ll call it “Adrift,” because other connotations of the word fit how things have felt so far this year.
Calming music does not have to be boring. In fact, I find some kinds of boring music cause stress because you want it to stop! Some people listen to death metal, industrial, or HNW to relax — maybe it’s cathartic, or maybe the solid impact of it just drives away everything else, like standing under a waterfall. Other people prefer really thinky intricate jazz, or more soulful heartfelt blues, or old favorite pop from their youth, to untie the knots in their nerves. Whatever works! I’m still basically going for “dark” “ambient” here though with this.