Lennon Bone reflects on 30 years making music and touring, and how childhood trauma with an alcoholic mother turned creativity into escape. Now at 40, fear of judgment keeps them from showing up, and they're trying to break the cycle and create again.
Being a creative of any kind is hard. It's freaking hard. And it's like a privileged thing to say, like, oh, it's so hard to be creative. But you know what I mean is that it's a challenge to get past yourself long enough to show up and make something. Like, that's a challenge in and of itself. And then you have this other challenge, like, well, now I made this thing, I have to share it. I've got to put it in the world. And then when you put it in the world, you have the challenge of like, people judging it and what they think. And for every hundred people that think what you make is great, if one person says that it sucks, you are immediately depressed about the outcome of what you created. And this becomes cyclical, right? When you know that the one bad comment is gonna cause you to feel frustrated. And then you know that one bad comment only comes if you publish something. And you know, and then publishing something means that you have to overcome, like getting something out there. And then getting something out there means just showing up to create. Then you're back at square one and you are immediately up against this wall of resistance that says, ah, but what if, what if.
What if I don't get views? What if nobody cares? What if everybody cares and it's huge? And then I'm getting all this hate. What if my friends think I'm stupid? What if nothing happens and I've wasted my time?
I've been a creative in some form for 30 plus years. At 40 years old now being in a place where I get to be surrounded by creatives all the time, I still feel all of these things. I grew up in a house where my mom was in a bunch of abusive relationships and was an alcoholic. And I remember sitting at the edge of the stairway and when the stairway, where the stairway came up, you could like peek over and see the living room. And I remember coming upstairs to my mom and my stepdad yelling, and her having a gun at his head. And I would go into my room and I would listen to music. And at some point, listening to music turned to playing music and that turned to being in bands, which turned into touring, which turned into some sort of professional career as a musician. But now that I don't have to use creativity or music as an escape anymore, I've sort of lost.
Track of where it fits in my life. It's like the drive that I had from it was always.
From a place of either escape or trying to prove someone else wrong. And so in many ways, the Stuff that I make here on this channel is my form of creativity. But I miss just being around a bunch of creative people, being in a room where we're, like, making music or art or whatever, being around my brother and like making these dumb movies that nobody would ever see but us. But now when I sit down to make stuff, all those things come up. All the what ifs. There's no bundled up conclusion to these thoughts. These are just sort of ramblings. I appreciate you sticking with me for this long, but one thing I've been trying to think of is if I want to be that kind of creative again, the kind of creative that shows up and just creates, what does he do? How does he show up? And if I can just do one or two of those things, that's what I'm going to try to do. There's always a dance and always fear around how do we make this work? And I'm hoping it's not as hard as I think it is. I have a feeling that it's not. I have a feeling there's just some fear in there somewhere that I have to push past. Let me know in the comments if you deal with this at all. And let me know if you'd like for me to talk more about how I'm thinking about these things and pushing through this stuff. Appreciate you being here. I'll see you in the next video.
