I gave up music for the entire year when my first son was born. I was playing drums in a jazz quartet, and it got to feel like clocking in each Saturday, same venue, same songs, same people, same pay.
When I took a paternity leave, I realized I didn't miss gigging, so I quit the band and stopped playing all of my other instruments and only wrote one song that year. My self-identity had been so tied up in being a musician that I needed to know if I could handle life as non-musician.
I have to say, it was a great year; I learned to cook, went on a 30 day juice fast, became a yellow belt in Kali/Escrima in under 6 months, and I took up archery lessons.
by the time my son turned one, I got the itch to pick up my bass again and decided to take my playing to a new level and I immediately started looking for work that would stretch my comfort level a bit.
My first audition was terrible. I was nervous, the band was lifeless and distant as the moon and, although they said I made the cut to the second round of auditions, I never got a call back.
Right away that nagging voice in the back of my head started screaming, "give up, you're not good enough, you're parents were right, you should have gotten a job with your sister at her office, you're not in your twenties, you'll never make it as a musician."
Even though I wanted to quit, I decided to reply to one more ad for a trio looking for a bassist.
A week later I got a call, and unlike the previous band leader, our personalities clicked. Luckily, the band played some of the songs I had already learned for my previous audition so I felt confident. We got together and "jammed" (which is really just an audition but psychologically it takes the pressure off) and I got hired in two of the band leaders bands out of the one jam/audition.
The catch was, I had to learn roughly 80 songs in a month (which I did with a similar systematic approach that got me to become a yellow belt in such a short period of time).
This isn't the first time in my life where I had to keep going even though I wanted to quit? Does anybody else struggle with that? Do you ever tell yourself things like, " I have been playing for years, but I still can't do (skill/technique/song)?