Let me start by saying, I’ll be talking about anxiety in this blog. If you suffer from anxiety, you should seek professional help, talk to your friends and family. The world is full of good people who want to help, and you deserve to get that help.
Anxiety, at times of my life, has made a mess of my mental health. It’s a dark cloud that dominates my thoughts. It seems to lie to me about things, and wants to take over my life. All inside my head.
A huge thing that anxiety zaps out of me is my motivation for guitar. Like, all of it. Playing guitar, learning songs, learning new ways to play, working on guitars, building guitars…all of it. It kind of robs me of one of the major things that brings me joy in my life. Looking at it from outside, it seems insane that something inside your head takes away the things you want, but that’s exactly what happens.
If you’re reading this you probably know that I run an online guitar parts business, along with my wife. Modding guitars and building guitars ( by “building” I mean partscasters) is kind of an important part of what I do. If we carry a guitar pickup, it benefits us for me to install that pickup in a guitar and make a video of how it sounds. But if anxiety has its hold on me, I find it difficult, almost impossible, to get it done.
I also play live music professionally. Anxiety makes it difficult to do that. And it’s especially hard to learn new songs or work on what I need to do in order to get better.
This isn’t me 100% of the time. I have a wonderful wife, family and friends that I talk to, and get help when I have to. But it does happen, and it sucks. I get so tired of it. It pisses me off and makes me sad that I have to put the things I like on hold because of what I have going on in my head.
So, I figured I would put this out there. I reckon if I deal with this, others deal with it as well. If you do, I hope you get help and fight through it. You’re the only one who can take the steps to get yourself better. Do your best to fight against anxiety robbing you of the things you want to do.