miawook - countryhippie

People keep asking me why I stopped performing as a DJ.

The answer is complicated enough that I usually just shrug and say “life happened,” which is technically true. But the real answer is that I think I accidentally lived out a country song.

A man broke my DJ equipment.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Actual gear. Which, if you are not rich, feels less like “equipment damage” and more like somebody taking a bat to your future self.

And honestly? That wasn’t even the only reason.

Part of it was political. Or social. Or emotional. I don’t even know what word fits anymore.

I got tired of feeling like I had to cosplay being Republican to exist comfortably in certain music spaces. Especially country spaces. Especially Southern spaces. Especially spaces where everyone keeps insisting music should be “apolitical” while also making it very clear which politics are acceptable.

The older I get, the less energy I have for pretending.

And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about detainees. About immigration. About incarceration. About how easy it is for people to stop seeing other humans as humans the second they become categorized correctly. It sits in the back of my mind constantly. I can’t really separate art from that feeling anymore. I can’t stand in a room and act emotionally untouched by the world just because there’s a kick drum playing.

And if I’m being even more honest: I also stopped DJing because I thought I sucked.

I could not watch my old videos without physically cringing.

I would see every awkward transition. Every weird moment. Every time I looked unsure of myself. Every set where I relied too much on “vibes” because technically I didn’t yet know what I was doing.

Today I watched some of those old videos again for the first time in a while.

And weirdly… I didn’t hate myself.

I could actually see the learning happening in real time.

Like oh. That girl wasn’t embarrassing. She was practicing publicly.

Which is a very vulnerable thing to do.

I think I expected myself to emerge fully formed as some cool underground selector with perfect transitions and impeccable taste and effortless confidence. But when I look back now, I can see someone genuinely trying. Someone experimenting. Someone building taste. Someone figuring out rhythm and pacing and crowd energy and identity simultaneously.

Also — and this is important — I realized a lot of my “DJ practice” was never really about DJing.

I wanted to sing.

So much of my time was actually spent singing along to tracks, learning phrasing, studying melodies, listening to country music because I genuinely love it, learning emotional timing instead of technical timing.

I was developing my ear, just not always in the way I thought I was supposed to.

Now that I’ve been playing guitar and singing more seriously, something has shifted.

When I sit down to practice DJing now, I don’t need the decks to emotionally fulfill me. I’m not using them to become a singer secretly. I can focus on transitions. EQing. Structure. Momentum. Actual technique.

Not just vibe.

Ironically, learning another instrument made me less precious about DJing.

And better at it.

I think there’s this pressure in creative scenes to always appear ascending. Always booked. Always producing. Always visible. But sometimes your art form goes quiet because another part of you is trying to grow first.

Sometimes your equipment gets smashed.

Sometimes your heart does too.

Sometimes you spend a year listening to country music in a parking lot trying to understand your own life.

And sometimes you come back and realize you were never actually as terrible as you thought.

Work in progress. Almost done. I woke up at 2 am to work on it. Inspired