The Caretaker

 I've been on hiatus from playing piano since May; the longest hiatus of my life probably. It started because my wrists were not okay, but I continued it far longer than I needed to. At some point I realized that I don't want to start again exactly where I left off.

From my earliest childhood memories onward there has always been this pressure on me: "Don't wast your talent!". I realize now that I have rarely ever in my life *decided* to compose - most of the time I was more like "I have this idea, I *cannot* let it go to waste, it is my duty to not abandon a good idea". I got asked at my final exams why I, a supposed *serious composer* would spend half my time writing piano music laypeople can understand, and while that question is incredibly snobbish by itself, the answer is not merely "because I like it", it is actually "because I had this idea and I am now responsible for it's survival".

It's like if I lived at the edge of a forest and there is a constant flow of poor wounded forest animals seeking shelter, and I can't just abandon them, so I never leave the house longer than a day or two. Except music isn't alive - or is it?

There were a few times in my life when I had the urge to write music to communicate something that was beyond words, and the pieces I wrote then are those that I am still proud of. My last "true" ensemble piece was written in 2012, and was, ironically, about the impossibility to share a feeling. And then it never got played, because, as it turns out, if you write for oboes and tubas (plural), you won't find anyone that plays your music. So then I stopped. Everything I wrote after that, I either wrote for myself to play, or didn't take as seriously.

Sooooo... now when I re-start composing again, I want to do it on my terms, I want to stop the endless drain of "You can't just abandon this idea, it is good, it deserves to live!". I don't know how. As far as the "easy" music goes, I compose faster than I can write it down, so I will *never* reach a point where I'm done. And at the same time, I spend so much time on that, that I don't have any energy left to ask myself - why?

This isn't a crisis. I could always just go on, and I would make some music that a few people like, and also some other music that *nobody* except me even listens to (seriously, I have youtube videos with 0 views). On my piano, there are sketches for about 10 unfinished "easy" pieces - and already I feel the urge to just go and work on these, "so that they don't get wasted", despite knowing that it will never stop. I have 100+ piano pieces and too many of them I have neither written down or recorded, so the only thing I can do is play them again and again just to hold off the inevitable. Should I just go through them and decide "Okay, you'll gonna die with me"? It's super ironic that one of my favourite composers just literally burned her pieces, if they weren't good enough to her almost impossibly high standards - whereas I go back to stuff I wrote when I was 11 and say "hah, kinda cute, let's save it". And that mentality has even crept into my thinking when I'm composing so-called serious stuff. I just cannot bring myself to delete anything, and it starts to clutter. I spend all my time caring for mediocre stuff and never look further, because the next one is already waiting.