Friends, I want to introduce you to a concept I call The Gaslight Hangover, and tell me if that resonates immediately.
For my purposes, it refers to the mental load involved in separating “what’s you” vs “what’s them” when you get a negative comment. The hard part is that we want to be open minded, and maybe the commenter has a point. But at the same time, something rubs us the wrong way - we feel “wronged”.
Is that just our ego messing with us? Is that just defensiveness, or reluctance to accept reality? Because those things are real.
But you know who’s really good at sublimating their egos and being maximally open to criticism? Cult members.
Because open-mindedness can go too far. You can be so open-minded “your brains fall out” as the cliche goes.
So imagine you’re somewhere along the journey of learning the drums, and you’re “proto” seeing-all-the-territory. There are still big “unknown unknowns” for you.
To use the analogy I use in this week’s video, it’s like you’re partway up a mountain. You can see the summit - that’s like watching instagram videos of our drum heroes. But things like the exact route to the summit, what challenges lie between you and the summit, and even how long the distance…
…are opaque, or shrouded in fog.
You need to be open to feedback about which way to go, because you can’t get to the summit on your own - at least not as fast.
But you also need to be careful not to listen to too much negative feedback (“you’ll never make it”, “other climbers do it better”, etc), because if you let it get to you, you might give up and never reach the summit - which is a problem if you love climbing and really want to climb this mountain.
And it’s into this vulnerable state-of-mind that negative criticism about your drumming falls, causing you to ruminate about “what if they’re right”, which causes…the Gaslight Hangover.
In today’s video, I want to convey a few things.
First, it gets better, and you don’t have to be the world’s greatest drummer to come out of the fog and see the territory well enough that you can at least evaluate whether somebody’s criticism is likely to be true or not.
Second, I’ll give you some coping strategies (not “coping” in the 2023 tiktok sense, but real ways to deal) to use in the mean time.
Finally, I’ll do a reenactment that’s been on my bucket list since around 2015.
Hope you enjoy this one!