When I was studying music at Howon University, I took a course called Recording and Mix Techniques. The professor seemed to appreciate the way I reasoned and wrote, and we sometimes ended up talking outside class.
One day, after a lecture, we were sitting in a café when I told him that I hated music and thought I should probably do something else with my life. By then, I had already been questioning music for several years. I had practised a great deal without improving as much as I thought I should. I was becoming increasingly aware of what I considered a lack of talent, the uncertainty of making a living as a musician, and the possibility that I might have been better off choosing another path.
Eventually, it was not only the prospect of being a musician that I disliked. I disliked music itself. Listening to a song all the way through could feel exhausting. Sometimes I simply wanted to avoid music altogether.
The professor told me that he had never seen someone who had truly entered music leave it completely. Even if I ended up doing something entirely different, he said, I might one day find myself buying guitar pedals again.
I remember thinking something like: Really? I am not sure.
It seemed like too broad a generalization, and perhaps it was. I still do not think his statement was necessarily true. Someone may enter music and leave it forever. I also do not know exactly what he meant by what he said.
For two or three years afterward, I barely listened to music and did not play guitar at all. I did not try to erase the fact that I had once been a musician. It was simply a fact about my past. I was more occupied with other problems in my own thinking than with the absence of music.
At some point, I started playing guitar again. Then I began listening to music more often. The process was slow enough that it is difficult for me to identify where one state ended and the other began.
What I can say is that I now enjoy both.
I had forgotten, in some sense, that playing guitar could be this enjoyable. There is a kind of pleasure in playing music I used to love that I do not know how to name very precisely. Listening to music is enjoyable again too. I sometimes find myself thinking that I had forgotten how good it could feel simply to listen.
There are obvious differences between then and now.
When I was younger, I did not distinguish between liking music and wanting music to become my profession. I do not think I even considered making that distinction.
I thought music was my destiny.
I started classical guitar in my early teens and improved quickly compared with people around my age. By around thirteen, after discovering Oasis, the idea of becoming a musician had become firmly attached to the way I imagined my future. I was drawn not only to the music but also to the way the musicians I admired seemed to approach their lives.
Music was not merely something I enjoyed. It was what I was supposed to become.
I do not consider myself a guitarist now, and strangely, that makes playing the guitar easier.
That does not mean that all of my old habits have disappeared. I still want to play well. I still avoid improvisation, as I almost always have. I have never improvised and been satisfied with what I played.
So I do not think the difference can be reduced to something simple like, “I stopped caring about being good, and therefore music became fun again.” Nor do I know whether I enjoy music now because professional pressure is gone, because I have changed as a person, because of some combination of the two, or because of something else.
I also do not want to rewrite the past. It would be easy to tell this story by saying that I never really stopped loving music, that it had merely been buried under frustration, and that I eventually rediscovered something that had always been there.
I do not think that is true. I think I genuinely hated music back then. The fact that I enjoy it now does not make that earlier state less real.
Perhaps that is why I think about my professor’s words again. Not because I now believe he was right. I still do not know whether people ever truly leave music, or what it would even mean to leave it completely. If leaving music means no longer enjoying it, then I did leave for a while.
Now, by that same definition, I have returned.
I do not know what larger conclusion I should draw from this.
There was a time when music felt like my future. Then there was a time when I wanted nothing to do with it. Now I play guitar again, listen to music again, and enjoy both.
I was different then.
I am slightly different now.
For the moment, that is all.