Day 12. Sober day. Right now I’m only doing 2 sober days per week. I know it’s not a lot but it’s definitely a challenge for me, coming from smoking every day for so many years. It’s been a couple weeks now and I’ve stayed consistent with this goal, so I’m definitely happy with my progress. I started with one sober day, for 2 weeks, then on the third week started doing 2 days. This is the end of the fifth week, and now I’m gonna do four weeks of three sober days. I can really see how the time I’m spending sober is beneficial for me already, I have a clearer head and I’m really starting to get consistent with my creative outlets. I’ve been making beats for more than ten years now, as well as rapping, but it’s always been something I do just for fun. I’ve never been big into staying up to date with social media trends, so I can’t say I’ve done much on the promotion or networking side of things. I don’t mean to say that I never wanted to make it in the music industry, it’s just that I never got serious enough to promote or to do any serious networking, it’s always been about the music itself for me and I’ve never felt like I had time to do anything beyond that. Now though, I’ve realized that I need to do it, whether I feel like it or not. So many people are creating music nowadays, so it’s not enough to just be good, one has to actively promote one’s music just as if it were any other business. As a young rapper coming up I never really spent much time thinking about this. Yeah, I know I was pretty immature, but at least now I’ve gotten to learn from my past mistakes so that I can do things differently from now on. I’m still young but not as young as I was ten years ago, so although I still have some time to make this happen, it’s not like I have a whole lot of time either. It’s stressful because I know that this is the last chance I’ll ever get, and if I don’t make it happen I just might be stuck in the shitty nine-to-five life forever. However, I feel like this stress is a blessing, the stress is what’s really motivating me to finally do things the right way. Nothing will stop me this time around, which is why, after so many years, I’m slowly but surely rearranging my time and my decisions in order to live with more order, in order to live more deliberately. The sober days feel boring, since my brain has been used to being high most of the time for so many years, but this boredom pushes me to spend time doing things that I wouldn’t do if I was high, things that absolutely need to get done. Anyway, I know I’ve written a bit about all of these things in my recent blog posts, but it’s just because I’m extremely excited to see where life will take me. It feels like I’m finally moving on to the next level of life, like I’m finally taking responsibility for my life and taking matters into my own hands in order to make things happen, God willing. For a while, life was feeling dead, as if nothing new was happening, as if I had settled in life and there would never be any new excitement. In a way I was okay with this realization, because I’d rather not deal with all the problems I brought upon myself when I was living my old, “exciting” life. I see now that I was wrong though, life is starting to get exciting again, and this time it’s for positive reasons, I feel excited about positive long-term changes in my life, rather than searching for excitement in highs and cheap thrills all the time. Life is deep, and sometimes we can shut ourselves off from the experiencing the depth of everything. Sometimes cutting ourselves off from it might be very satisfying, we might feel very comfortable, since we experience only what we know, or what we think we know. We try to take the easy route, to do what’s most comfortable and pleasurable, without stopping to think that maybe, at the other end of a completed challenge, we might just find something deeper, some new inspiration about life, rather than something familiar, something we are extremely comfortable in. It’s common knowledge that no good can come from staying in one’s comfort zone, but I realize that that’s exactly what I’ve been doing all these years. I’ve decided that the world out there is too crazy to deal with, and I’ve immersed myself in things which inspire me, such as powerful music or books, things that transport me away from real life. I didn’t think this was ever a problem because I never realized that this is what I was doing, in my mind I was simply enjoying something I liked. I get high and listen to an album, and it’s magical! No problem. Except that tomorrow I want to make some music, and it’s much better when I’m high. Okay, I’ve been working on music for a while now, it’s time to spend some time with my wife. Okay, let’s watch a movie, but yeah, movies are much more immersive when stoned, so here I go! You see what I mean? One moment after another, life goes by. In a way this is what I’ve always liked about weed, that it can make you more present, it can help one enjoy the mundane moments of life a lot more. I always saw this as something positive, but now I’m thinking that maybe we need to feel the absolute boredom and dissatisfaction of life if we ever want to evolve to the next level of our lives. If we can make any moment comfortable then why would we ever try to push ourselves further?
much love
~ rebel eye
rebel eye 