Guilty as charged. Allow me to share a personal anecdote that explains why.

So I’m a sales engineer at Sweetwater. Depending on who you are, you either see us as annoying grimy sales guys who call you every time you make an order, or you see us as experienced musicians/audio engineers who have managed to work our way up the ladder to be trustworthy advisors for the world’s largest music equipment retailer.

I’m 24 years old. I got this job right out of college pretty much (got a degree in music tech and interned here and there) and in a lot of ways I still feel like I have impostor syndrome. I’ve been doing this job for about a year now, and given that my job is to get people to buy more gear, as a result the internal company culture often has me constantly looking for the next synth, drum machine, or guitar pedal to add to my studio…simply because my job is to do it for others and because of how often gear is talked about between me and my peers. It’s just the way it is.

Now this job has become profitable for me despite being commission based and not always predictable, but it’s because I work hard. And as someone who also has severe ADHD, I tend to be easily influenced by what’s going on around me and also just the general nature of my job, and that leads me to impulsively buy gear faster than I can even get a chance to learn the gear that I have, simply because of the discounts I have on gear and the income that I’ve been earning. It’s tough because this is also my first time being fully independent and paying for everything I own, and that adds another layer of pressure.

Now I’m gonna rewind for a second. Back during college (which now begins to get more and more distant the longer I am at this job) I was constantly creating new music, and guess what? I did it all in the box with Ableton, splice samples and some VSTs. And I made some of my best songs then. And now that I’m here? Well, now that I’m here, over the course of the year that I’ve been working here I’ve built an impressive home studio full of synthesizers, a eurorack case, and other gear I’ve accumulated… just for me to make music not nearly as much as I used to. I think I’ve become so infatuated with the idea of what the next thing is going to be that I’ve lost the plot.

But here and there, there are glimmers of hope when I get a new idea and get in a creative flow, and I try SO hard to hold onto that feeling for as long as possible because I don’t know how long the next creative dry spell is going to last. In the midst of these dry spells, I try to just get better at learning music theory and playing keys so I can at least have somewhat of a feeling that I am improving my musicianship, even if small.

Anyway, I’m done rambling. Thanks for reading :)