Not gonna lie, for us musicians, that is an incredibly hard thing to do. We're trying to get known for our work, and we're trying to make connections -- not drop off the face of the earth!
I felt guilt recently when I announced that I needed to step off Twitter for a while due to recent discourse on there that has been retraumatising me. I mean, I'm sure you'd argue that it's a serious and salient enough reason for anyone to take a step away from socials -- our mental health is very important, after all -- but the guilt is still there.
The guilt is still there when I take a break from a particular site during the season of Lent. It's there when, for whatever reason, I am not sharing a fragment of something that I've recently written. I'm sure that many of you have comparable situations -- it's there when you perhaps feel you can't share anything due to it being under non-disclosure agreements. It's there when you feel you can't take part in a challenge that is hosted on socials regularly, and you feel the fear of missing out. There are other reasons, of course -- but often, the long and short of it is, we don't want to merely progress as musicians, we also want to be seen progressing.
I'm sure that you and I will agree that, regardless of our contributions to social media, or the friends that we've made on there, socials often tend to show the triumphs, the achievements. Many social media feeds don't show the low points. We've all been guilty of perpetuating that, often because when we've hit our low points, we've needed to take time off (or, otherwise, we try and conceal that in some way, shape, or form).
I guess I'm writing this to remind us all to step away from socials, from our websites -- heck, from even whatever we're doing every now and then. Breaks are good for us.
It's important for us to not forget that we need to function, and that we shouldn't feel guilty for taking the time off to be able to feel refreshed. And when we feel ready, we can return.
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On another note, I want to draw your attention to the Listen page, because I've recently released not one, but TWO game jam soundtracks! The most recent one, which was done for the Bored Pixels Jam 8, was jointly scored by Mackievellian and myself.
Many of you will remember Mackie as the lead guitarist on Variations on Endless Handbag, which at the time of writing, still graces the home page. Aside from playing guitar, he has been known to do video game score, and has a particular predilection for chiptune. While I composed the songs that made it into our jam entry, a platformer titled The Day of Wrath, he did additional production on the chip bass and drums for those tracks and gave them a spin that I never would have dreamt of!
I hope that you all check it out -- a fair warning; it is at least mildly infuriating to play, but I hope it gives you that sense of tension that we felt when we listened back to the music that we did for that jam entry!