A few months into playing the same handful of songs to myself in my room, I was gifted a shitty electric guitar and started slowly entertaining the idea of playing in front of people. I played a few songs to my best friends Sophia, and before I knew it, she had told her musical boyfriend that I played guitar and even sang a little, too. He asked me if I wanted to play together, and soon another one of my best friend’s boyfriends wanted to join. Suddenly, I was a part of a full-fledged band with two teenage boys who played multiple instruments and had experience writing and playing songs around local all-age venues. I had quickly gone to the deep end of the pool, and I felt completely out of my element. Soon, we started writing songs in my friend’s basement, and eventually, decided to sign up for a few open-mics around Seattle.

On the night of one of our first shows, I couldn’t eat for a full 24 hours before. As we walked up to the small stage, lights blaring in the dark venue, adrenaline took over and my limbs went limp. The next thing I remember, we were walking off stage, my face hot and red from nervous energy. As I quickly put my guitar away and started collecting cables from the stage, a smile grew wider and wider on my face. “I freaking did it! I can do this,” I thought to myself.

With every show we played, I felt more confident on stage. My band started opening for our friends’ bands, and we recorded an EP of our original songs, which I contributed a handful of lyrics to. Whenever we wrote together as a band, I remember feeling so much pressure trying to think of good, meaningful lyrics on the spot. I would stare at the blank page, willing myself to be creative, but the only thing that would come to mind was the constant feeling of being inadequate and replaceable. From time to time, I would try to sit down and write a few lyrics by myself, but a warm prickly feeling made me put down my notebook when I couldn’t think of a good rhyme or inspiration didn’t spark right away. 

As we got older and started getting close to graduating from high school, the joy I felt the first time we played was eclipsed by anxiety. Sharing my own personal thoughts, feelings and stories through song felt impossible when my inner monologue was constantly telling me I was not good enough: “Everyone is so much better than me,” I would think whenever I tried to play guitar. “How could I possibly learn how to play as well as people who have been taking lessons since they were kids? I’m just here playing covers I learned off of YouTube, what do I have to offer?”

Over time, my friends broke up with their boyfriends and we all started to carve out our paths for the future, and the band dissolved in the quiet implosion. As I prepared to move to college in the northern Washington city of Bellingham, I kept picking up my guitar and trying to hum along with lines jotted down in the middle of the night or after an argument with my parents. On the rare occasion I wrote a chorus or verse that I liked, within a few days I would find something to dislike about it, and discard it into the cemetery of half-written songs. Sometimes I wonder how many songs or lyrics died in my journals because I didn’t give them a chance.