M2M Day 331: That version of me is dead
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
It’s almost the end of the month, which means I need to film my final freestyle performance in the next couple of days. It also means that I’ve been reflecting a bit on my progress over the past few weeks, and so have gone back to review some of the footage from earlier in the month.
Here’s the video I shot on Day 1…
Weirdly, in this video, my rapping is worse than I remember, but less embarrassing than I remember…
This is a fascinating observation: It means that my mental reference frame of my baseline freestyling skills has increased enough where 1. The rapping in this video seems comparably worse (naturally), and 2. Perhaps more interestingly, I no longer associate with this version of myself, therefore removing any amount of embarrassment that I previously felt.
I think this is so cool.
The way I feel is as if I visited my parents’ house and found a painting I made when I was age five. Clearly, this painting would be pretty bad… if it were painted by a 24-year-old. But it wasn’t — it was painted by a 5-year-old, so I can just look at the painting without feeling like its “badness” is somehow an embarrassing reflection on me.
This is how I feel about my freestyle rapping, except it’s only been 27 days.
Perhaps, this is generally how I feel about this entire project: As of I’ve grown over the past almost eleven months, I’ve unquestionally disassociated with the version of Max who existed pre-November 2016.
I didn’t intentionally disassociated with this version of myself. I liked this version of myself a lot. But, it’s really striking to think about how different I am now (Many fears, self-beliefs, etc. that I had at the beginning of this project now feel completely irrational and unimaginable).
I’m glad I feel this way. This is how I should feel, and how I hope to always feel as I continue to grow.
But… it’s genuinely the strangest feeling to watch a video I shot less than a month ago and 100% not associate with the person in the video. Weird.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
