learning guitar

Back in January, a group of us casually sang while someone played the guitar, and I found the experience to be incredibly captivating. I loved it, and the following week when we without it, I craved it.

So on April 25th, I decided to take my first step and picked up my family’s old guitar. Fast forward five months to when I can only play chords (ha!), but I still feel grateful.

Grateful to be able to sing my favorite songs with guitar accompaniment whenever I want (outside of apartment quiet hours). Grateful to have another expressive outlet during this strange time. Grateful to have relearned the value of starting from scratch and going on the journey of learning something new.

It’s humbling and empowering to go through that process.

After the first few days, I remember feeling pain in my left wrist and finger pads (blisters were forming). Two weeks in, I contemplated giving up after wondering how anyone could play the F bar chord. Still, after about a month of practicing, it became something I looked forward to everyday. Even when I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I felt great comfort in being able to fill my apartment with the sounds of the music that I had made. It didn’t always sound right and there wasn’t a whole lot that I could play, but the experience was so freeing because I didn’t have to depend on somebody else to create it for me.

In this random town alone, I proved to myself that I didn’t need anyone to start building the life that I want.