Rain, Doubt, and a Beat Machine

The rain was coming down sideways tonight, slicking the pavement in Atlanta and reflecting the neon bleed of the late-night food trucks. It always seemed to rain when the doubt felt thickest, a physical weight pressing on my chest. I hadn't been out much lately, just me and this beat machine, trying to build something solid from the noise inside my head. Six months since dropping out – six months of feeling like I was wading through mud with lead weights strapped to my ankles.

It wasn’t about failing school, not really. It felt more like… recognizing that everything I thought mattered suddenly didn't. The pressure to be “successful,” the expectations, the carefully constructed image of what a twenty-six-year-old black kid from Chicago should be doing – it all just crumbled. Nobody asked how I was *really* doing. Just generic congratulations mixed with awkward silences when I tried to talk about it. It felt like everyone was operating on autopilot, pretending everything was fine while the gears in my own mind were grinding to a halt.

I started making beats again, obsessively, almost compulsively. Not thinking about them, just… doing. It was a way of proving something to myself – that I could still create, that I wasn’t completely useless. Each loop, each drum pattern, was a small act of defiance against the emptiness. The first paid placement, six hundred dollars from some small indie game developer – it wasn’t about the money, honestly. It was like a tiny crack in the wall of that doubt. A confirmation, even if fragile, that I was heading in the right direction, slow but steady.

I spent a lot of time just sitting, staring at this blank screen, trying to figure out how to articulate what was going on. The frustration wasn’t about external things; it was this constant, low-level hum of judgment, this internal critic relentlessly dissecting every decision, every note, every feeling. It felt like I was trapped in a loop, replaying the same mistakes over and over again, adding layers of shame and anxiety to each iteration. My phone buzzed with notifications—most of them reminders of things I should be doing, tasks I’d failed to complete.

There were moments where I just wanted to shut it all off, unplug completely. The urge to protect my energy, as I'd started to recognize, was real. It wasn’t weakness; it was survival. Recognizing that feeling—that sense of not belonging, the anxiety bubbling up—was almost a relief, like finally naming the monster under the bed. It's funny how a simple app update – just changing the settings on my music software - shifted something. A tiny moment of control amidst all the chaos.

I keep thinking about sleep. It feels… different now. Not just physically, but mentally too. There’s this awareness, almost a vigilance, when I try to fall asleep. Like I'm actively trying to *not* fall asleep, afraid of getting lost in the darkness. The idea that shorter sleep onset latency –that moment between being awake and drifting off—could somehow be linked to lucid dreaming…it felt unsettlingly precise.

It’s weird thinking about brainwaves, delta waves, like they're some kind of key to unlocking this part of myself. The more I read about it, the less it feels like science and the more it feels like a feeling—this desperate need for awareness, for control within the chaos of my own mind. It’s almost exhausting trying to figure out how to harness it, how to build something beautiful from the fragments.

Maybe that's the whole point. Maybe the goal isn’t to *fix* anything – not anymore. It's just about showing up, creating, feeling the rain on my face, and letting the doubt roll off me like water. Just keeping those patterns going.