The Trials and Tribulations of the Artist.

Hello,

Having recently joined and after making a couple of posts I want to share with you some of the trials and tribulations we have faced as artists in the hope that it will make any fellow creatives feel like they are not alone and we are in the same boat. Steamboat to be precise.

Life is hard. Life is especially hard if you are a creative type, what with all that sensitivity, crippling self doubt, sacrifice and perfectionism. As well as the social stigma and pressure from family to get a 'real' job etc. Ok, that might not make you feel better immediately but bare with me.

It's great that life is hard. How else are we supposed to derive any form of accomplishment or achievement if we don't overcome things that are difficult? Answer: You don't. If Utopia were a circle jerk of continuous woo-woo optimism where nothing bad ever happened life would in fact be extremely unfulfilling and meaningless. We learn who we are by overcoming challenges, stepping into the shadow and conquering our fears, in the Jungian sense.

I can not tell you the amount of satisfaction I derive from street performing with someone whom I love dearly, drawing in large crowds of smiling onlookers who are all strangers, but in that endless moment we are connected through the power of music. I have lived in buses in the middle of December with no heating, slept on studio floors, endured the negativity of nay sayers, and lived in a welfare project for young vulnerable adults for three years. For that endless moment I described earlier I wouldn't change the bad stuff for the world, if it means I get to be here now. I'm stronger for it, I'm incredibly blessed, and that's the point.

So this leads me to my silly anecdote. As you may already (probably don't) know, we are Budika, a musical duo and about six months ago my beloved production laptop died without warning. As in done, logic board fried, no more laptop. We were devastated, first world problems I know-but this is what we do and how we actually earn a living. We were right in the middle of recording our EP having street performed the whole summer. Talk about bloody timing. So, a friend of a friend had an old laptop that I had to hack into, bypass the password in the BIOS, install a new hard drive and install a fresh operating system. Yes, I am now the proud owner of this 2009 CrapBook™, complete with exploding battery, one barely surviving fan and one falling off keyboard.

This is now my laptop, at least I can laugh about it while I save up for the repair of my production machine. The whole point is life is guaranteed to throw you curve balls and swiftly give you a kick in the nether regions when you least expect it at times, it's your attitude toward those times which matter the most. I hope this put a smile on someones face who might be having a bad day :-].

BUDIKA ☯