Choose sitting for the rest of your life.

Do you sometimes wish you had started your instrument earlier in life? Or had
continued on professionally the one you played in school? I think about it
sometimes, as I sit at my desk on the third floor of an old Victorian warehouse
remodelled (sort of) into an office building, steaming gently in the
ineffectual air conditioning.

There were very good reasons for not going on to classical music as a career choice
when I was 16, and had to make the decision. I wasn’t driven enough, I hated
theory and technical work with a passion, I’m not a particularly competitive
person for competition’s sake. I saw my teachers’ lifestyles – making ends meet
(mostly) by performing in three different orchestral groups, teaching 30
private students each, touring constantly, hardly seeing your children.

How grown up was I weighing all these things? But maybe I was being too grown-up –
I went to journalism school and followed ‘the family skillset’ as we termed it,
which is copywriting, speechwriting, editing, graphics, art direction – any of
that was completely doable in my mind. But a traditional career in classical
music was something I didn’t understand and maybe it scared me a bit?

I think the B flat minor scale scared me more, to be honest, and having to know
crap like that was just something I couldn’t visualise ever enjoying. Not for a
four year university programme, and as for unending years of teaching music; I’d
already had one too many bratty flute students for my taste.

In my last years at university I had switched to media theory and wrote several
papers equating semiotics in language and literature to similar themes,
instrumentation and motifs in opera. At that point I started to be interested
in theory, and I could see the joy of it. But it was a bit late.

Which brings me to now, ten years after university, sitting at my desk as a web
content manager doing my version of the family skillset, and thinking about all
the reasons I chose writing over music.

The important thing now is the fact that I am choosing music again. Here and now.