2024

I’ll keep this short, but messy.

2024 was a year that challenged me more than any other, and I’m proud to have got through it. As a budding pop musician, I played thirteen shows across six different countries and released my debut album. I missed the ambitious targets I set myself, but did things I hadn’t accounted for at all. I opened for the musical side project of Hollywood actor Michael C. Hall (seen Dexter?), produced a new album out of Naples, gained a horde of crazed K-Pop fans from a song dedicated to Blackpink’s Jisoo, and witnessed a total stranger sing every single word of my songs from the front row of a recent concert. I sent out a hundred handwritten postcards to fans in over 20 countries, and started a Patreon to get more serious about monetising my music. I continued developing the bizarre catalogue of skills that being a modern day musician requires of you (in the first draft of this text I reeled off a list of more than 20 sub-roles I have had to occupy in the past 12 months — across marketing, design, admin, and creative fields). I made the hard decision to part ways with a manager who I trusted and respected — based on the conviction that my business would be better off without him. I posted a total of 285 videos to TikTok throughout the year in the name of shamelessly promoting myself. I had a panic attack before going on stage at a show in Prague, which somehow turned out to be my best show to date. I lay in anxious paralysis in a patch of grass on a Scottish island before getting up to play to a small bunch of posh festival-goers. I gulped nervously in the silence between songs at my Berlin album launch show, realising I’d left my water in the green room and my dehydrated mouth was finding it difficult to get words out. I felt euphoria, emptiness, fulfilment, desperation, steadfastness, self-doubt, self-confidence, and most recently —with the death of my uncle— pure sadness. I saw my mother nestle her sobs against my father’s chest at the funeral, conscious it was only the third time I’d ever seen her cry. I cried myself, both for her and Tío Jose Miguel, and my cousins and my 92 year old grandmother, who didn’t get to see him before he died. I worked a freelance job to support my music project, and repeatedly scrambled to stop the scales from teetering precariously towards the music. I struggled to find romance, unsure if I was actively blocking myself from it or simply unable to muster enough energy to open myself to it. I found myself in a number of odd situations regardless. I had little time to reflect, which is why I’m desperately cramming it all in now, on the last day of the year.

2024 was challenging for all of us. I know this because my brother’s house at Christmas time was a heavy place to be, with the shadow of my uncle’s death hanging over it, and our own shadows projected on ceilings and walls from the phone light radiating out in front of us. These things act on levels we don’t immediately perceive and understand, but my gut remains certain about how deeply they affect us. My attention has never been so weak and divided, and I have a feeling it’s the same for many of my family members and friends. I sat around my uncle’s apartment with my cousins as we all tapped and scrolled in silence. I heard how annoying I sounded when I nagged my father to get off his phone while we watched Friends together. And yet my gut tells me that when we give half of ourselves to anyone or anything, we only get a quarter back. It tells me life will peter out in front of our very eyes unless we wrench focus and attention back as soon as possible. It tells me that phone addiction and digital dependency is a problem that’s getting worse, not better, and our inbuilt capacity to wake up, take stock, and reckon with our habits, is flickering weakly in strong winds.

I know we all had a challenging 2024 because I’m learning that the nature of life is to be challenging. We think we’re unique, so we forget everyone else is going through something similar, or even worse. I’m learning that we look for ways to be dissatisfied, rather than maximise what makes us happy. Politics, newspapers, TV shows, and social media feeds prey on this. I probably wrote all of this back in 2012, but I’m learning that my memory for important things seems to fade quicker than for trivial things. I’m learning that the real challenge within the challenge is to stop calling the challenge a challenge. To enjoy the raw experience of living with no strings attached, just like a tapir grazing on a silt deposit in the Amazon rainforest, blissfully unaware it’ll soon be pounced on by a jaguar. Only once it hears the rustling of leaves will it turn to the question of how to avoid dying.

Speaking of questions, I learned, thanks to a friend, that they are incredibly important, no matter how uncomfortable they may be. These are some questions on my mind: What do I live for? What would life look like if I were honest with myself as much as possible? Do I want the life of a pop artist? How has the digital age changed how we grieve? Do we leave enough silence between what people say, both in my family and in general? When will I stop caring what people think? Am I a good friend? Am I a good person? Do I put too much pressure on myself? Is art self-sacrificial by nature? Do I want children? Are we slowly proving to be the solution to the Fermi paradox, the creators of our own Great Filter? Is our species tumbling towards spiritual oblivion and — ultimately — extinction? Am I an optimist or a pessimist? Will we know another life beyond death?

Tomorrow it will be 2025. In reality, little will change. Frost will settle on the roads, a chilly wind will squeeze in through the cracks in my bedroom window, and my dad and I will continue watching Season 1 of The House of the Dragon. The BBC homepage tells me that fireworks are currently bursting over the Sydney Opera House, and it strikes me as both beautiful and perverse. The new year offers us a blank slate; a fresh start. It renews hope in ourselves and the world — maybe things will get better next year. But it also traps us in an endless cycle of wanting, getting or not getting, and wanting again. Peeling back another layer, it glues our existence to an arbitrary chronological system — the measurement of our planet’s orbit around the sun and rotation around its own axis — and smothers an eternal truth lingering deep within all of us: that we all have the right to the life of a tapir, grazing timelessly on a rich silt beach.

I may wake up hungover tomorrow, because I plan to drink tonight. I don’t care too much if I do (“start the year as you mean to continue”) because I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not an alcoholic, and I’m due a big one anyway.

At least tomorrow I’ll be glad that — amidst a challenging 2024 — I took one full day to reflect on the last twelve months, the questions that preoccupy me, and my little faint flicker of a life.

Lovingly remembering Tío Jose Miguel