at the other end of the telescope

🔭 being honest and maybe a bit cringe today

Hello! How are you?

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So many good things being shared here, and I wanted to contribute to the high calibre of stuff by writing something ✨writerly✨ today. It’s about becoming an artist, growing up, and the distance between yourself and other people.

If you enjoy it, please let me know. Cause I’m kinda nervous sharing this one! Okay, let’s get into it…

Shall we agree that just this once

I’m gonna change my life

Until it’s just as tiny or

Important as you like

---

When I was seventeen I went to a summer school dance. At the afterparty I made out with my off-again, off-again crush in the bushes. Smelled something weird.

Turns out, I’d dragged my shoe through dog poop.

While I walked back to the glow of the patio to clean my trainers, I caught something in the sky. A fast-moving flicker— a comet? A shooting star? It must have been.

This summer, I’d leave home for the first time. There was a rough plan: go to university, move to Canada, manifest my destiny.

You know, the usual stuff.

Canada was key, though. I’d decided I was going to make this move, one way or another. In fact, this boy I’d kissed was Canadian, my fascination with him another piece of the transatlantic puzzle.

To me, continental distance was dark and inviting. Time zones were veils between worlds. Moving somewhere so far away made me feel like I was about to gain a new facet of personality. People will be so impressed with me, I thought, when I pictured myself flying over the Atlantic.

But for now, I was still unimpressive. Naive. Dog-poop-ridden. I was still seventeen, at a party, surrounded by people, glimpsing some cosmic event. Canada would come later. Distance would come later. And then I’d be exactly who I wanted to be: mysterious, intelligent, otherworldly.

We all have poop on our shoe, but some of us are looking at the stars.

That’s how it goes, right?

---

📐 Finding Distance

When I was in university I wrote a song called ‘TV Shows,’ partly inspired by a guy who played guitar and wore sunglasses indoors because, we all knew one when we were twenty (and if you didn’t know one, that means it was you! sorryyyy!). The song was a fictional discussion between two friends, where each person thinks the other lives an incredible, fascinating life. But in reality, they both just watch TV alone in their room at the end of the day.

he said, i see you like i catch colours after rain

the way a penny glimmers down a dusty drain

you're so far, you're so far

a distant star

and i laughed a little cause i'm not at all

the silver comet or the daydream doll

i spent last week thinking i'd lost it all

watching episodes of tv shows

I still wanted to be the ‘distant star’ at this point. As I leaned harder into songwriting, I started to feel that being an artist created a bit of distance between yourself and other people.

I knew that writing songs involved self-imposed solitude, but there was also a special brand of loneliness I felt within my drive to create. At this point I lived in a flat with four good friends and a piano. I loved this piano and used it to write songs and painstakingly teach myself The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ for hours at a time.

Unsurprisingly, my flatmates found this annoying as hell.

They were prepping for grad job interviews. I was playing the same five bars over and over again. I wasn’t even playing many gigs at this point, but I felt like I had to be doing this for some reason. Bonking my fingers down on the keys ad nauseam, 🎼 I may not always love you, 🎶 there was something. Was there something? Was there a point to me playing music, day in, day out? Making songs which were good, but also not good enough yet? Working on something which wasn’t for money, wasn’t for grades, wasn’t for anyone but… me?

I felt like, compared to my friends, I was doing something weird and unknowable.

---

🚨 What Nobody Asked You To Do

I don’t want to sound self-important or like some sort of tortured soul who is more enlightened because I can hold guitar and go doo-doo-doo. Because everyone can make art. But sometimes you turn around at the pub and say “I’m going to leave early because I have to write my song for today,” and it’s not because someone is paying you to write a song a day, it’s not even because this song-a-day project is going to change your life, there is literally no reason other than you have decided this is a thing that must exist.

‘Art is the Thing Nobody Asked You To Do’ by Babak Ganjei

Art is the thing that nobody asked you to do. But you have this voice inside you telling you to do it. And quite often, you don’t notice other people skipping the party to go write weird songs, or to finish their novel, or to paint. So you feel alone.

As I grew more confident in my songwriting and performing, I had this weird relationship with the feeling of distance. There was that loneliness I felt, but at the same time, this desire for it. At uni, my friends would watch me play open mics or patiently listen as I’d show them a new song in my bedroom and they’d tell me I was brilliant. And to me, it felt like the brilliance of something far away, but also something twinkling, like a star.

I enjoyed self-mythologizing. I took pride in squirrelling myself away to write new songs. I spent the period between New Years’ and the new term alone, in my room, reading and writing. It drove me up the wall, but I also felt that this was what I should be doing, as an artist. Staring out the window at the gloomy park, two search pages deep into Rhymezone.com, I felt important.

But also I felt lonely. Did this distance mean people thought I was self-sufficient? That my songs would stop me from needing the things that everyone needs?

Artists are defined by their passion, that creative fire which feeds their soul.

…did people assume that my soul was fed?

I listen back to my songs and my voice from these years and they’re messy: I crammed too many words into each line, I wanted to be Elvis Costello so I sang with this affectation which made me sound like I had no nostrils, I wrote song after song about boys who were the kind of people I’d ask to buy a drink and they’d literally not look at me before saying no (like, he literally did not even look at me before just saying ‘no’). I had too much to say and not a lot of structure to say it with.

I grew up and got better at writing songs.

---

You'll see me off in the distance, I hope

At the other end

At the other end of the telescope

---

🇺🇸 Founding Fathers

When Hamilton came out I had been back in the UK for one year. Canada had been stressful and interesting affair where it snowed, I wandered, wrote songs, made coffee, got tired and went home. I learned something, though I’m still figuring out what it is.

I didn’t get a second visa.

Now I was moving to London to study music. My inspiration at the time was Lin-Manuel Miranda and I was captivated by his decade-long writing process for Hamilton. Still now, I remember this exact tweet: the screencap of a Facebook status from 2009.

When you have the hindsight of a Tony-winning musical, you can put it all into perspective. These were Saturday nights well spent! He was writing the GREATEST MUSICAL OF THE 2010S. Of course, at the time he didn’t know that.

I wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda’s friends ever got tired of him staying in and writing raps for the founding fathers. I wonder if he ever got tired of being the guy staying in and writing raps for the founding fathers. I wonder if he felt guilty for going to parties, and guilty for not going to them. I wonder if he felt disconnected. I wonder if that distance made him feel self-important. I wonder if it made him a better songwriter.

---

🔭 At The Other End

I feel no self-importance as I go over backing vocals in my room once again. I switch between elation and frustration behind the microphone as I try to nail down a certain note, and then hit playback. I walk round the room and fiddle with things on my desk. I have a box to put my makeup in but my makeup always ends up outside the box and I rarely ever put it back. The calendar on the wall says that I have a gig this Sunday that I gotta prepare for. The calendar says I have ‘improv’ next Wednesday.

I look out the window. I still feel distance.

But it’s a different kind of distance from the magical one I imagined when I was seventeen, dog poop on my shoe.

It’s a different kind of distance from the years at university where I banged on the piano and learned to write songs.

The distance isn’t the snowy failure of a Skype call in Canada.

Nowadays the distance doesn’t come from a place of self-importance, or a place of “I must suffer for my art,” or “no-one understands me!!”

I think it’s a distance that everyone feels when they’ve traveled a few steps down their life path and turn around, only to see the people they know, walking their own paths.

There’s space between us from where we made our choices.

I realise now that being an artist is no different from being many other things. I’m sure some of my friends who have had their first kid have moments of “what am I doing? My friends don’t understand me anymore.” I know that I have friends who have worked so hard the last decade, forsaking social invitations just so they can study and work a little harder to get that extra qualification or promotion. I have friends who have moved away to different countries just because they felt, like me, that there was something else out there for them, but they didn’t know what.

We look at each other through the telescope, and wonder. Did I do this right? Does anyone understand me? Am I interesting enough, am I relatable? Am I alone?

Me, I’m just a gal in her room writing songs and going through the same cycle of “WHY AM I EVEN DOING THIS” to “hey, this is pretty good.” And I think that I realise now that this is everyone’s thought pattern with everything, and it doesn’t necessarily just pertain to being an artist.

Everyone understands leaving the pub early. Everyone has skipped the party. Everyone has wondered if they’ve been left behind.

What we do doesn’t make us more important than anyone else. The way we see ourselves and the way we see others is warped at the best of times. And that’s okay. We’re all at the other end of someone’s telescope. Objects may appear larger or smaller than in real life.

Somehow, acknowledging the distance between us makes me feel closer to you.

I leave you this week with a cover of Elvis Costello and Aimee Mann’s ‘At The Other End of the Telescope.’

📝 Here are some questions I’m pondering

Please answer any/all of them in the comments, or just add your own thoughts.

1. What were your big life dreams when you were seventeen?

2. Have you ever had a poopcident (a poop incident) at an inopportune time?

3. Do you like Hamilton or do you hate it? Defend your answer.

4. What party did you skip that you really wish you hadn’t?

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶