“Missing Motivation”

To say it has been a tough year for musicians is an understatement. We are all facing unprecedented challenges, and my personal view from inside the music community has been of feelings such as denial, disbelief, crisis, apathy, loss of self, and a host of others. I have had some very powerful conversations with musicians about their symptoms in addition to experiencing many of them myself, and I have spent the last several months taking a deeper look. This is all in effort to give words to our shared experience, and to allow us to find relief in community. Here’s part one of this examination, with a little travel blog sprinkled in. 

Traverse City – A glance at pictures from Traverse City’s lakeshore and most mistake it for the Caribbean. The crystal-water bays and dense woods are made for outdoor enthusiasts, and the downtown neighborhoods are flooded with young artists, entrepreneurs, and activists. I lived here during a pivotal time in my life and immediately fell in love with the open-minded, earth-loving, arts-focused community. I visited this summer and had planned to stay for a few days, but there I was, still there two months later. I should have known that in this difficult time of extreme uncertainty, TC would be waiting with open arms. 

Without tours and shows, I saw the opportunity to slow down, enjoy the outdoors, and also flourish in my musical productivity. Well, the latter didn’t happen. At all. To be real, I couldn’t even stand the sight of my instrument. I had spent the last few months at home in Nashville in a flurry of music-related productivity, but by the time I arrived in TC I had completely lost steam. Labor Day weekend rolled around and despite my enjoying every day recreating and seeing friends, the cloud of un-productivity hung over me and I was both confused and frustrated. Around this time Facebook kindly served me a few pictures of what I had been doing the last few Labor Days, which was performing with The Elders at our hometown Irish festival for over 20,000 adoring Kansas Citians. I saw the pictures and burst into tears. Then sobbed. Like, really sobbed. I needed to figure all this out.*

I found myself yearning for the lights, the applause, the rush of adrenaline … anything to feel like the capable and purposeful version of myself. I was grieving the loss of not only the music and connection, but also going through withdrawal from the energy and spark that comes from being on stage. I realized how empty I was feeling without it, and it clicked that this void was to blame for my lack of motivation. With audiences comes a barrage of external reinforcement in the form of applause, head-nodding, dancing, compliments, and smiles. This feedback and celebration starts the cycle of motivation that is self-perpetuating: the more successful we feel, the more inspired we are to create. It was never hard to pick up my instrument on the back of those powerful and uplifting experiences. In the absence of anything to spark this cycle, we’re at risk of slowing to a stop. And that’s what I did. 

“… the more successful we feel, the more inspired we are to create.”

One of my primary teaching philosophies is “success breeds success.” If you’re able to make a student feel successful, even to the smallest degree, that is hands down the best motivator to keep them enthused, engaged, working hard, and setting goals. In the absence of these feelings of success, we musicians are discovering that it is incredibly difficult to keep pushing forward without them. Our fans’ loving feedback tells us we’re doing something useful, and that we’re on a path of meaning. It becomes the energy we rely on to keep going. It’s why we can go for days without sleep and perform for three hours straight without thinking twice. Our goal is to serve, after all, and we need to know that’s what we’re doing.

Many musicians I’ve spoken with have been describing a general feeling of “checked out.” Unmusical, unproductive, and apathetic. Many are having to get jobs outside the music industry, all of which makes our lives as musicians feel like a distant memory with nothing to get us back in the saddle. It would be a lot easier to get that album started if we had an audience to remind us that people enjoy what we do, and writing new tunes would be a lot easier if we had a show or two to feel some enthusiasm. 

The key word I’ve been avoiding here is “worth.” Receiving our worth externally is a much larger issue worth addressing and now is the time. Exposing, denying, and eventually accepting this dependency has led me on a larger journey of self-discovery that was long overdue. 2020 gave me the time, the opportunity, and no real choice. 

I’ll examine these feelings of fragile worth in my next post, and list some of the symptoms I’ve heard and have experienced so we can all feel together in this. In the meantime, I encourage my musician friends to go easy on yourselves and accept that a lack of motivation may be an important part of this process. Using this time to do some deeper self-work now could lead to understanding ourselves and our art even more deeply, and let us find freedom going forward. 

Please reach out so we can share these experiences together. 

All my love, 
Diana 

*(This was written before the news of one of my dear bandmates passing. There’s been a lot more tears shed over those stage memories since then.)