THE EDWARD JAMES PROJECT

The Relentless Pursuit of Self Improvement.

That's my eternal journey. My goal in life is just to be better.  Better than I am, better than I was yesterday, better than I will be tomorrow.  Better than I'm supposed to be.  Better than they thought I was.  But being better takes doing one of the most difficult things someone can do...

Honest Self Assessment.

Yeah.  Looking at the man in the mirror.  Asking him to change his ways.  Taking off the veil, removing the mask, and looking at who you are, not who you want others to think you are.

I won't lie, it hurts. Because, who we want others to think we are, and even who we want to be, isn't always who we actually are.  It's difficult to peer into that chasm of insecurity.  That gully of insufficiency.  But it's in that dark place where our greatest accomplishments live.  We just have to be willing to reach into those depths and grab them.

So in doing Honest Self Assessment, I realized something...

I'm inconsistent.

Yeah.  In looking back, I'll have a grand idea, and I'll follow it through for what amounts to not enough time, and if it doesn't get the results that I want, then I'll move on to the next thing.

When I first thought about this, i tried to rationalize it as "oh, I just recognize when something's not working, and the plan needs to be adjusted".

No.

I just plain old don't stick with things long enough.

Seeds take time to grow, and I never give my seeds a long enough time to grow.  And dumping a gallon of water on them for 3 days isn't the same as giving them a cup of water every day for 3 months.

So tonight, I'm challenging myself.  For the next 30 days/nights, I'm going to spend every single day in the studio.  Writing.  Creating.  Singing.

In order for this to work, I have to be consistent.  I can't put out 2 records, and then stop.  I can't put out 20 records and then stop.  I have to be consistently consistent, for as long as God tells me to.

So that's my shortcoming that I'm addressing, starting tonight. I'm going to power through my depression, power through that voice in my head telling me to just go to sleep.  

This dream isn't going to come true by accident...

#30StudioNights

Today, I decided that I was gonna skip out on church and just sleep on the couch, under the cool, mid afternoon, springtime breeze that was coming in my window.  Only one problem.

This damn fly.

Or what I thought was a fly. Because although I never actually saw a fly, I "felt" it landing on me.  My leg. My arm. My head. My feet.  And I just couldn't sleep.

So I took this as God's way of bugging me to get up and go to church.

Fine.

The series at church was all about THE NEW MAN, how men differ from boys. Everything this series has talked about, I've been doing since I was a teenager, so it wasn't really changing my life...which was the reason I was going to skip out on this week.

Then he said something that just might change my life.

"Don't mistake the absence of ease, for God not being present"

This one line right here...is the exact reason that damn imaginary fly buzzed around my head for an hour.  This one line right here, means so much to me, that UOENO.

See...when it comes to this whole music thing, I've struggled...ALOT.  I've failed...ALOT.  I've tried, and tried, and tried again.  Been kicked down, thrown off the ledge, and shot out of the sky.  

It's been a LONG 11 years.

I've been really struggling with the idea of being an recording artist.  Been struggling to make my voice do the things that the songs require, been struggling to write, been struggling to push my music outside the bounds of normalcy.  Been struggling with clients, just been STRUGGLING.

I resigned myself to the fact that if God wanted something in particular to happen, then it would be EASY.  That if something was really that difficult, that God must not want it to happen.  I started to feel that way about my client pursuits, and even started to believe that about the whole artist thing.

I've been really close to giving up.

And then today happened. That fly happened.  That message happened.

For me, that was God forcing my ass off the couch, because He had something to say to me.  It was God saying to stay the course...because even though things were hard, it was just him building my musical muscles...because I'm going to need to use them later.

So I'm gonna keep going.  I'm going to keep trying to believe that all of this is happening for a reason, and that God wants me to be doing this...for whatever reason.

So I'm going to keep trudging up this hill.

This depression shit is real y'all.

Most days, it damn near takes an act of God for me to drag myself into the studio.  Not because I don't want to, not because i don't have a NEED to, but it's that little voice inside my head saying "What's the point?"

THAT'S depression.

I'm sitting in front of my keyboards right now, just editing a simple cover song (something to pay a small portion of the bills in a few weeks).  In another world this would be the simplest thing ever, but add in depression, and it's becomes a mine field...of quicksand.

Every move i make, every change i make to this song, there's depression's little voice telling me things like

What's the point? It's not worth it. She's going to hate it anyway. You should just go to bed. You know, this isn't even going to pay 1/3 of your bills. That part was ugly. It's never going to work. Just go to bed.

I used to be the most positive person in the world, up until a few years ago.  I was painfully optimistic. There wasn't a thing in this world I couldn't do. I would tell people  

"my mama told me that I could do ANYTHING I put my mind to, and for some reason, I believed her"

and that was true...until I decided to change my life.  Well, until my life decided that it was time for change.  That's when everything turned upside down.  That's when i descended into the depths of depression, where i've been ever since.

I gave up the medication after a year...I didn't like what it was doing to my brain.  Honestly, I still feel the negative affects of it.  There are gaps in my memory, especially when I drink.  Sometimes it's a struggle to put together strings of coherent thoughts, using words that are very common in my vocabulary.

Even right now, that little voice is telling me "what's the point of even writing this?  People are just going to judge you.  Besides, your browser will probably crash, and you'll lose all this anyway."

That's depression.  Or at least a part of it.  It's the best way I can describe it.  While I'm in the moment, while it has me in it's clutches.  There's no "cheering up", there's no "sucking it up"...none of that.

This isn't just a bad mood.

Thankfully, i'm just strong enough to know that for right now, I have to power through it.  Tonight, at least in this moment, my will to finish this song is stronger than that little voice...

I’m officially official. Yeah.

Every so often, we get reminders...

So it's a Saturday evening, and I'm at church (@crdschurch).  The series is The New Man, all about the proper definition of a MAN.

So today's message was all about being a good FOLLOWER...going where God leads you, whether or not you like it, whether or not you're afraid, whether or not you know what's next.

That's what The Edward James Project is for me...it's about OBEDIENCE.  I don't want to sing. Never in my life have I had a desire to be in front of the microphone.  It's the scariest place in the world to me. Despite my fear, despite my complete and total lack of desire, I feel as if it's where God is nudging me to be...at least for now.

And I figure, it can't be any worse than the shit storm I've made of my life, so lets give it a shot.

But while I'm listening to the guest speaker (a former exec at P&G, and a new exec at Google), I'm thinking about how all of what he's saying applies to my life, and what I'm doing.  He talked about going skydiving with his son, and when that door opened, it was the scariest thing in the world.

That's where I am. I'm in a plane, 12,000 feet in the air, and literally the door JUST swung open.  And on June 1, I have the choice to either jump, and trust that God's gonna guide me safely to where he wants me to be, or I step back into the familiarity of the plane.

So I'm sitting there, soaking this all in, and I get this feeling that I should stay after service, so someone can pray with me.  Great....here's yet another thing that I don't want to do.  Ugh... So then, the guest speaker starts saying a prayer for EVERYONE, and I'm like "GREAT!!!  That's the prayer at the end, so I don't have to stay!  Nice!!"

Then after he finishes, up on the screens flashes a message that says "Stay in your seat, and a volunteer will come by to pray with you".

Alright God...fine.  I get the message already.

So I stayed.  And prayed.

I say all that to say, that sometimes...actually ALL the time, God leaves breadcrumbs to show us where he wants us to go.  In my journey of obedience, throughout this whole dark, really scary time in my life, I'm growing to understand that, and trust it.

In much the same way he left me little clues (okay, a huge message on the screen may not be such a small clue) in church, He's leaving me the same types of breadcrumbs in my life...and all i have to do is pay attention to them.