Find Your Voice

I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can remember. I love writing as a whole, but songwriting has always had a special place in my heart. Throughout my fifteen years of life, I’ve experienced many things—some really great, and some really terrible. I’ve used songwriting as a way to get out all of my bad thoughts or memories, as a safe place to keep my big feelings contained.

But despite having all of those lyrics, I never had the opportunity to make them into real songs. Like writing, I’ve been singing almost my entire life; however, I’ve never learned how to play an instrument. I’ve tried many times to pick up on the guitar, violin, piano, I even tried the ukulele at one point, but I could never get the hang of them. Because of this, I felt like I would never have the ability to share my lyrics, and that I would never truly be able to get my thoughts out.

To make matters worse, after the COVID-19 pandemic, my anxiety was worse than it ever had been before. I’ve always been timid, but I was never afraid to perform. I’ve been performing on big stages since I was just three-years-old. But after being quarantined for two of my most critical social years, it was as if I’d forgotten how to use my voice, as if I’d forgotten how to get on stage and be unafraid.

It took me three years to regain my voice. In 2023, I auditioned for my Middle School’s musical and landed myself in the middle of one of the lead roles. It took a lot of confidence to take on the role, but I somehow managed to get on stage again and perform again, feeling like the last three years never even happened.

After I regained my confidence, I started to think about songwriting again. Though I still had no clue how to play any instrument, I’d recently rediscovered a musical that I first got introduced to in May of 2022. The musical is a rendition of The Odyssey by Homer. It was created by a Puerto-Rican college student named Jorge Rivera-Herrans and is titled EPIC: The Musical. It was written and produced almost completely by Herrans, both with actual instruments and in a Digital Music Workstation, which was something I had never heard of at the time.

Once I rediscovered the musical, I started to come to terms with the fact that I have the ability to create music digitally, with no need for actual instruments. That point was even further proven to me in May of 2024, when I finally caved to my friends’ persuasions, and decided to give K-pop a listen. The first group I was told to listen to is called Stray Kids. I wasn’t the biggest fan at first, until I found out that they are self-produced. Three out of the eight members have been making their own music digitally for almost a decade, and are completely in charge of all of the music they release. This is incredibly uncommon in K-pop, but despite being so different from the rest of the industry, they’ve broken world records, sold out stadiums, and even have a song featured in the Grammy nominated soundtrack for the movie Deadpool & Wolverine.

Taking both EPIC and Stray Kids as inspiration, I was determined to share my music and thoughts. I had my confidence back, notebooks full of lyrics, and all I was missing was the knowledge of how to actually produce anything. I started to search everywhere for any way that I could learn music production. In one last desperate attempt, I posted on social media asking if anyone knew of any way to learn music production. I wasn’t expecting to get anything out of it, so you can imagine my shock when I opened up the comments to see an offer from one of the co-producers of EPIC itself.

For about a year, I’ve been attending online music production lessons from JP once every two weeks. I’ve learned that it is a very time consuming and sometimes tedious process, but it’s absolutely worth it. Now that I have the ability and knowledge to produce, it’s given me a way to cope with all the loud thoughts in my mind. Your voice is one of your best tools, and I’m very grateful that I was able to find mine again. I hope that one day everyone can come to realize that they too are capable of using their voice to achieve what may seem impossible.