When Your Creative Community Rejects You

I used to be a musician.

I say used to because I wouldn’t say I’ve been a musician in a while. I still play Flute from time to time and certainly 15 years of musical training has never been wasted. Especially after doing 2 record labels and creating wonderful projects like this music video.

Music is still a huge part of my life. I sing almost everyday to my favorite songs and sometimes under the right conditions I will sing with my friends. I will still do some flute performances in some settings for holidays and other fun moments. After running two record labels and working with some great guys, music is still the story of my life. I listen to music almost all the time and I sing daily.

However, there is a particular experience that I found really difficult. When I was ready to go to college in 2006, as a flute performance major at the time, I anticipated that I would keep the contacts within the greater Denver classical music and flute community. I had met and been a student of many great musicians within the community. I had the chance to be in a great youth orchestra and eventually teach in that orchestra. I had enjoyed some local gigs and really thought that I had a chance to be apart of the vibrant music community within Denver.

But then I started to feel shut out.

Emails quit getting returned, calls were ignored and it seemed like I just disappeared. I tried to start conversations and I tried to get things going to maintain connections and it just ended. I couldn’t figure out if I had said/done something wrong or if I had just been too odd as a teenager to be worthy of everyone’s time. Maybe I was just too used to the praise or being told I was good and I was looking for that. For someone reason that I still don’t understand, people distanced themselves from me.

Then, I learned it for what it was, rejection. I was being rejected and it hurt. The people I had come to respect and wanted to be like had just left me on the side of I-25 without so much as a “goodbye.”

It really bothered me for along time. 

I dropped being a music major, moved back to Colorado and went to college at the University of Northern Colorado and played in one of the bands. However, the rehearsals were in the afternoon and all my political science classes were in the afternoon, so that ended my music career in any organized way. After that I played gigs here and there, at Farmer’s markets, and other places were people enjoy all sorts of music. I thought that music would always be an option for me. I was told stories about people that went and did other things and then decided to take their music seriously and put together repertoire and sets and found ways to express music in their lives. I thought that might be me one day. I tried to keep the connections going so that options would be available to me.

I always thought that my musical flute community would be there for me and my creative process, until it wasn’t.

It’s hard when something you had learned to rely on abandoned you. Music had been my life for several years. In high school it occupied my days and I kept it centered in my life as other things swirled around like politics and trips around the country. The rejection was not only a rejection of me (at least I felt that way) but of a certain death of my music career. It is very hard to seemingly lose something when it has occupied all your hours and so much of your life.

In the end, I’ve found this therapeutic. I’ve never really written about my feelings on this. It was something that was very quiet that I just sort of went through and then just moved on. Life is a swirl when you are very young and often things that are really traumatic don’t register until some time later when the mind is clear enough to fully appreciate them and the emotions that they caused.

Maybe I’ll break out my flute and play today. It needs and overhaul though.