A couple of years ago, I let my Squarespace subscription lapse. I wasn't doing a whole lot with my practice at Eureka Records at the time, and I just didn't really see the need to spend upwards of $150 on what was essentially an aesthetically-pleasing plug for my services as an audio engineer. I was doing well enough.
That phrase well enough is a killer. Especially when you've positioned yourself over the past five years to be a self-motivated, self-sufficient freelancer working in a pretty cutthroat creative industry.
But the truth is that after those five years of struggling in relative obscurity, scrambling to take whatever work I could and push myself to my aboslute limits to deliver music I never thought I was capable of, I had grown somewhat complacent. As sad as it is to say, I suppose the routine ebb and flow, stresses and successes of anything you do in life, no matter how much you love it, will inevitably become one big J-O-B.
And here's the thing about jobs – we all hate them. Even if we love them. Because jobs require work, and work is often pretty hard even if you like it. And so we do what humans generally tend to do with jobs. We optimize them, so that we are expending just enough of our finite human energies to execute the work we need to do to satisfy the requirements of our jobs, and we acclimate to those conditions, and those conditions become our new status quo.
So that's where I was at. In 2023, after almost five years of scrambling to get this ramshackle audio engineering practice off the ground and breaking even for me in a commercial property somewhere in the suburbs of Detroit, I had settled into a flow. Money was coming in. Not a lot of money, but enough. And the clients I was working with? They were steady. Predictable. Agreeable. And we worked well together. There wasn't any reason to shake it up or iterate on the formula if it was working for me.
Because that's what I so desperately needed by that point in my life. For things to, you know, just work. I was two years out of the COVID-19 pandemic and somehow doing a lot worse personally than I had been during the whole thing. I think that was because life just seemed less complicated during those times on a personal level, even if on a global one they had never been more fucked up.
So as fucked up as it sounds, as the world got better, my personal world started to introduce more and more of that chaos back into itself. I was behind on bills, perpetually short on cash, not exactly drowning in work, and more importantly my enthusiasm for what I did had given way to the myriad frustrations that emerge from renting a commercial space and trying to keep track of yourself in the process while running a business out of it.
Like, "how much of this work is really required of me?" "Am I really being productive every minute of my time here, and what does it take to be productive?" "Have my partners outpaced my growth? Are they tired of my shit? Am I tired of my shit?"
At the time I was really struggling, I was also in the beginning stages of a relationship. This was one that felt like it could stick, as opposed to a lot of ones I'd gotten involved with up to and during the pandemic, so I felt an enormous sense of pressure to try very hard for her and make a life together actually work. But no matter how hard I worked at making a home together, my "other work" at Eureka would always keep away in the little moments that seemed to matter most. I could feel us drifting apart with each passing day, week, month of our lease in a tiny little apartment in town nearby. My failures and shame just blocks away from where I was manning the talkback mic in a control room telling some artist to "take it again from the top."
Eventually, that feeling became unbearable. I wanted to take my whole life over again from the top. And so I acted on that feeling one morning in 2023.
I broke up with my partner, feeling completely defeated and halfhearted about my failure in our relationship and as a so-called "business owner" at Eureka, and moved back in with my parents a few towns away. I was 30.
It was a totally bogus, cowardly, desperate move on my part, a final Hail Mary toss out of a misplaced sense of hope that somehow this humbling experience would get things back to a status quo for me that just worked.
Predictably, they did not.
One of the partners at Eureka announced they were moving shortly after I did this. Going to a big city with their partner to live together and do whatever it is that young, well-adjusted people of my generation with decent jobs do when you have more or less stable existences with a normal amount and type of worries to worry about.