Whenever I write essays, I like to have background music playing to set the tone. After a study session where I ended up focusing more on the music than my homework assignments, I thought: how hard could it be to make my own?

Of course, I wasn’t planning to sing; I’ve got a voice best left to silent films. So I turned to what I could do: slicing samples and piecing together beats. After setting up a completely legitimate version of FL Studio, hours of tutorials and listening to artists I enjoy, I managed to make a song so unspeakably bad that I considered burning my hard drive. 

I didn’t understand. I’d seen videos where 5-year-old Chinese kids would play the piano so beautifully, yet my music sounded like a fork stuck in the garbage disposal. I write a ton of articles and stories, so why wasn’t that creativity carrying over to music?

I was coping pretty hard at this point, and began to read articles about how creating music activated different parts of the brain than writing stories. Frustrated at my brain for being deficient at making music, I went somewhere else, to my earliest pieces of serious writing. 

I opted to look at my older writing, and was horrified to find that it was absolutely awful, full of poorly executed cliches and run-on sentences.

“How could this be?” I cried loudly, looking to see if the current stuff I was putting out was actually that bad. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a creative person, I wondered, and that’s when it hit me; I kept writing until I wasn’t terrible at it! Those kids who had outperformed me at the tender age of 4 probably practiced an incredible amount. 

So it was back to FL Studio, where I kept making songs that were terrible, but things started to change when I found snippets that were actually good. The songs themselves were disasters, but there was something there, like finding a bit of hay in the needlestack.

Finally, after many attempts, I made something that I was willing to show my wife; it was a mashup of two covers of the same song. When she said it wasn’t terrible, I felt like jumping for joy. 

It was an exhausting endeavor to be creative, but it felt so rewarding. In an era where AI seems to be supplanting creativity, making something yourself feels like a triumph over technology. I felt proud to have made something myself, like I was no longer waiting for Superman.