progress is slow. glacially slow. i've been a bit bummed out that it feels like i'm not making any headway and i'm not at a place that i thought i'd be at by now. well fuff. at work i have a lot of time to think being by myself for 8+ hours a day and it can be a good thing or a bad thing. recently it's been a bad thing and i ended up talking myself down quite a bit, which if you can help it, i don't recommend doing.

a few weeks ago i got to the end of another practice journal and started up a new one. at these points when i go to file the old one away i like to pop open some old journals and give a brief thumb through and just see if anything catches my eye. i'll stop on random pages and just see what i was working on at that particular time and sometimes i'm like "oh yeah, that" and others i'm like "ah... right... slow times". but i will say, sometimes i'll read something i scribbled about how i was thinking about music at the time and i'm blown away at how different it was. different in a misguided sort of way. since i was pretty much going it alone all of my conceptualizations were homebrewed and sometimes they were kinda right and others they were straight up wrong.




it's impossible to see that journey from where you're sitting on a daily basis. the slow movement of overall progress is imperceptible or at the very most a vague and fleeting glimpse of it. being able to look at a record of years of development condensed to 10 minutes or so really underscores the distance travelled.

looking back at the old journals did help me to feel a bit better. but just a bit.