the radio feels good. it's always felt good. not just as something to listen to while going through the comfortable motions of your every day life, but something else. something bigger. something that's always happening, at all times, in different parts of the world. something that's always been there.
radio, even internet radio, is very old technology to me. it's been around for most of my life and has never really caught much of my attention. i'm twenty six and a few days ago i had no idea what a stream port or a shoutcast server was, but learning it felt very intuitive and exciting to me. that's the thing about discovery. it doesn't matter how old something is, when you immerse yourself in it for the first time it has no choice but to feel new. and i think that's what i need right now. something new. something to be excited about. so that's what i did, i immersed myself in it. i became excited.
three days of no sleep later and i did it. flatsound radio is up and running and it's beautiful. it really is beautiful to me. sometimes it's christian and i talking late at night in a skype call, other times it's just me creating live soundscapes. sometimes i broadcast the sound of birds outside of my bedroom window for two hours. this feels so much more real than other live platforms. there isn't a likes system, or a chatroom trying to compete with itself. it's just me. talking and creating art. exposing parts of myself to something that feels bigger and emptier than i do. i've spent so much of my career completely enamored by the concept of the void. throwing the most genuine parts of myself out into nothingness. this is the purest representation of that.
other than that...things have been an odd mixture of good and bad. trust me, i realize as i'm typing this just how typical that is to say. it effectively sums up the life of every person that i've ever met. it encompasses how i've felt at any given time, ever since i was old enough to take a step back and honestly consider how it is that i've been doing. i guess the only thing different is that i referred to it as "odd", and the only thing odd about it is that i've been handling it well.
last wednesday i spoke to my therapist, as i do every wednesday from 3:30 to 4:30pm. only this time, in the midst of all that i had to tell him, he stopped me mid-sentence and told me with a very comforting sense of confidence that i was doing it. that i was getting better. that everything happening in my life, and how i'm choosing to respond to it all, is what recovery looks like. i know that he's right, but even that scares me.
i think that's the point, though. i think that allowing it to scare me is part of the recovery too. or, at very least, it's a good opportunity to ask yourself an important question. are you afraid, or are you excited? i think i'm excited.