The blues felt like the place where emotion and restraint met, where discipline didn’t kill feeling but sharpened it.
I got a guitar for Christmas.
I played it until my fingers hurt. Until the tips went numb and then burned again. Until the strings left grooves that felt permanent, like proof that I had been there long enough for it to matter. I didn’t think of it as practice. I thought of it as going somewhere.
I played in a church group. That was the setting, but not the destination. Sunday mornings, folding chairs, hymn charts clipped to music stands, the quiet hum of people settling in. The music was meant to be supportive, restrained, obedient—there to lift voices, not draw attention to itself. But even then, inside my head, something else was happening.
When I played, I slipped into a musical headspace that felt separate from the room. Time flattened out. Nerves disappeared. There was just tone, pressure, timing. The way a note leaned into the next one. The way silence could pull as hard as sound if you let it. I learned early that music wasn’t about showing off. It was about listening hard enough to know what needed to be said—and what didn’t.
Even surrounded by hymns and worship songs, I always gravitated toward the blues.
Not because I knew its history back then, but because it felt honest. Blues didn’t pretend everything was fine. It didn’t rush to resolve tension. It lived inside it. A bent note that didn’t quite settle. A phrase that sounded like it had been waiting a long time to be played. That language made sense to me in a way nothing else did.
I’d sneak it in wherever I could—a subtle bend, a darker chord, a little grit under something clean. It wasn’t rebellion. It was instinct. The blues felt like the place where emotion and restraint met, where discipline didn’t kill feeling but sharpened it.
I played until my fingers hurt because that pain felt like progress. Like I was earning access to something just beyond reach. Calluses built up, then cracked, then built again. The guitar taught me patience without ever explaining it. You didn’t get better by wanting to. You got better by staying.
Eventually, life did what life does. The church group faded. The guitar spent more time in its case. Then less time in the room at all. It wasn’t a dramatic goodbye. It never is. One day you just realize you haven’t played in a while.
But the attachment didn’t disappear.
I still hear the world musically. I notice rhythm in conversations, tension in pauses, release in timing. I still gravitate toward the blues—not just as a genre, but as a way of understanding things. Let it breathe. Don’t lie about the weight. Say what’s real, even if it bends the note a little.
My fingers don’t hurt like they used to.
But the headspace is still there.
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