convinced myself to go to open mic
i was very busy this morning having a tough conversation with friends for about two hours, so i didnt get to my journal until now! i convinced myself to come to open mic even though i was tired, and need to be up at 7:30 today
i always get anxious that people will feel like im showing off. like somehow instead of stage fright i have the exact opposite anxiety where people will think im too good and think badly of me for it. and i have a hard time re-doing songs, even though i know most people even if they have heard it before dont remember.
i do love open mic though. i think this is where we all need to be. listening to other people's art with no monetary pressure. i think too many of us have internalized this "empathetic cringe" (in less kind terms, bullying) where we can't even see someone be earnest and imperfect onstage without feeling embarrassed ourselves. but this is what art has meant to us throughout all of humanity. we didn't have much access to "masters" and "career artists", the average piece of art we saw or heard in our lives was made by someone just like us.
"we want to love the thing that loves us when we hate ourselves, we want to hate the thing that loves itself like we cant ourselves" dont stop me
i have been watching a lot of anthropology videos recently. humans have been organizing in hierarchical governments only the last 5% of their existence. they weren't built for this. all this.
i feel this the most at the theater and the open mic.
maybe 9 thousand years ago my anxiety wouldn't be so bad. a friend who studies sociology told me of a theory that our genetic predisposition to mental illness remains because it was at one point useful to the common good, even if damaging to the individual. the same way a left handed individual forces the group to innovate in tool construction and possibly discover new things they never would have before.
at one point there were many species of humans interacting with each other at the same time. its strange that we accept homo sapiens are the only human species on earth as a given, but think of any other animal and you can name many many of them. imagine if there was only one dog, one bear, right?
i think i'll do an epic poem. i should be able to fit it in the seven minute cutoff.