Blog: I Know About Me, & I'm Not Feelin' 33.

Hiya!

Welcome all, welcome all to this, my blog. I meant to post about this last week, seeing how my birthday was the 16th, but I was too busy doing birthday shenanigans to be sat long enough to create a post for you all to dig your teeth into. Apologies, but lemme live my life. Damn. Anywho, this here blog will be about my recent birthday, in which I turned the magical, super young age, of 33 years old. A third of a century as my father so delicately put it.

In the world of numerology 33 is considered a master number. Each number what repeats (11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, 111, etc.) is considered as such, & with this ‘master number’ also comes an assigned meaning. 33 is the master teacher. It is a number all about altruistic service, unconditional love, compassion, spiritual uplifing, etc.. Not just internally, but also for the collective.

3s are often considered the strongest number, they lack the dependance of duality & structurally form the strongest construct with the triangle. 3s are often also associated with creativity, joy, communication, so when doubled up you get that energetic signature doubled as well. It is also the number associated with Christ Consciousness. Think Holy Trinity.

So we went a lot of different directions very quickly with that brief soirée into 33 & the breakdown around it, but how does the number make me feel? How does it feel to be Charlie Rogers, newly minted 33 year old? Well, I’m so glad you asked, let me write a whole entire blog as a response to tell you!

In short I too have broad & widely varied feelings about the whole ordeal. Yes, age is just a number & as our annual ticker climbs higher & higher it should be seen more & more as a gift. Not all of us have the privilege of age, much less healthy age, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that a part of me didn’t feel strangely old this year.

I’m not entirely sure why in previous years; 30, 31, 32, I don’t feel as though the weight of my 30s had really sunk in. There’s definitely another part of that we will get into in a couple more paragraphs, but for whatever reason this was the first year that number, 33, really sank in to me. I know to a handful of you reading this that will feel very young still & I think for all intents & purposes it is. I am still in the former half of the average life expectancy. I’m also not entirely sure if I can explain it properly either. There was just something about this birthday that came with a feeling of strange seniority, like I am one year away from joining AARP & retiring to the God forsaken land of Florida. Again, I know that’s hyperbolic, but it was a feeling I carried throughout the last week.

To be entirely frank, I had to ask myself the other night how old I was. Someone asked me which birthday had just passed & I couldn’t for the life of me remember. See! Check me into the facility, my memory is fading.

On the other side of that coin, most days, I feel entirely between the age of 25-27 still. Which is weird, because I haven’t been there for what is going on just short of a decade. Gross. Why did I say that?! I think a lot of my friends who are around the same age as I am would agree with that feeling. Maybe it’s a symptom of having lived through a pandemic where so many of our lives were put on hold. Or living in a world where the daily news is typically competing to try & out “end of the world” itself from the previous day. Whatever the root of it is, so many of us, myself included, find ourselves in this weird liminal space where we’re aging but feel stuck at a point in our lives that was over five years ago.

I definitely don’t think my body agrees with me most day. I find myself increasingly unable to do all of the things athletically that I could in my 20s & don’t get me started on alcohol. One drink in & I feel inflamed & the next day I feel straight up like I went on a several day bender. It’s forcing me to be much more selective with what I consume on a regular basis & where the ‘special occasion’ items are actually worth it or not.

So there in lies the trinity of my feelings towards this most recent birthday. I’m grateful that I’ve made it this far but I don’t feel my age, mentally, but on the other hand, I weirdly feel older than that at the same time. It’s complicated. I would also say that I think this was the first birthday I wasn’t overly looking forward to. It kind of snuck up on me & I really didn’t feel much like celebrating it. Incredibly unlike me. I just kind of wanted to watch it go past & wave at it from the window as it did. It didn’t feel like some pinnacle event or a landmark, it just felt like another day & that made it hard for me to get into the mood of celebration.

I’m thankful for the myriad of you that sent me birthday wishes or gifts. I am truly grateful for that. There was just something askew about this year’s anniversary of my first trip around the sun that felt distant & inauthentic for me that made getting into the ‘birthday spirit’ a near impossibility for me. Again, I’m so honored that so many of you sent your warmest wishes my way.

So yeah, there it is. My 33rd birthday blog. In a lot of ways very reminiscent of the event itself; a touch melancholic, a touch aloof, a touch detached.

As always I wish you all the best day/night/whatever in which you found your way to this page & gave it a read.

Much love to you all,

-C

Requested Blog: Grown Ass Artists

I think I’m going to start doing these, I’ve definitely done a few unlabeled “requested blogs” in the past but I think this is going to be a thing, & I think I’m going to put up a submission form somewhere for people to send in their suggestions for what they would like to read me write about. That was a fun sentence to say by the way, read me write about. Anywho, our first official “requested blog” will be coming to us from Bryan Oliveira, who is a phenomenally talented designer that I will link in a button below! I want to also state that this blog will be more about what this request stirs in my brain than specifically answering & embellishing everything stated by Bryan.

Their prompt for me was as follows: (write about) …How as artists, life keeps pulling us away from our art, & the older we get the more of a fight it becomes to carve out time to create, but that time created is what keeps us going & fed & our creativity sustained.

The statement in & of itself is incredibly profound & honest & a feeling I’m sure many artists such as ourselves feel deeply, especially as we age out of what the industry as decided to claim as ideal time for our success. As a now thirty-one year old still trying to make it in music, I define feel this, in fact it’s something that often keeps me up at night.

I remember distinctly being asked by a higher up in a massive company in the entertainment business how old I was. When I answered “twenty-seven (at the time)” his reply was to say “well you’ve still got a few more years that you can make it in, I guess.” This sentence rings through my brain at least twice a week, if not more. It seems, at least to all of us on the outside of major label/publishing deals, that turning thirty in Nashville or LA is a death sentence. It’s a “well you tried, time to sell your soul to an office job” simply because we lacked the connections, the funds, or whatever to be in the right rooms at the right time, completely devoid of whether or not we actually have the talent & drive to take it from there. The more time passes, the more the pressure is increased to ‘give up’ & ‘find a real job.’ As if art isn’t the thing that everyone on the planet consumes & actually remembers…

In the song “Nothing New” by Taylor Swift she sings the line “how can a person know everything at eighteen but nothing at twenty-two?” A line that she wrote when she turned twenty-two out of fear that the industry would do all it can to replace her as she aged, calling attention not only to the misogyny of it all, but also that the industry has this knack of signing people who are still children & claiming their most profound & impactful work when they still are lacking a fully formed frontal lobe.

I do recall it being a lot easier to find creative time & energy when I was younger though. Time & to-do lists tend to get in the way the more the years creep on, but what I can also tell you is that what I was creating was not nearly as deep nor was it an open & honest expression of who I was & am. The blessing of time & the lessons that come with it are that we gain insight & perspective. We learn & grow & become fully fledged humans with interests & passions that surprise us. We learn to stop hiding behind the walls of perception & feeling like we have to create in a certain style or pattern simply because the people we look up to did/do. We learn that true art is the expression of the individual & not creating something just because we feel like it’s the right more or it’s what’s commercially viable or trending. In all honesty, I wish more artists were signed around my age, selfishly of course, but also because I feel like most of my friends who are in their late 20s/early 30s actually have something to say & contribute, but no one is willing to take a chance on them because of something as trivial as age. Yes there are the rare exceptions; Sia, Chris Stapleton, Old Dominion, etc., but they are definitely that, the exceptions, not the rule unfortunately.

It saddens me that grown ass artists don’t seem to be given the time or resources that our younger compatriots are, because I think it wholly eliminates & diminishes an incredible talented group of people, their individual outlook on life, & their lived experiences. Maybe we as humans are more inclined to the “mess” of growing pains & the lessons there in but a lot of those of us who are old also have that lived experience & the benefit of weaving it into our art.

If you are a grown ass artist, with a fully formed frontal lobe, keep going. Don’t give up because the industry you’re in tells you to or your parents start asking about what other careers you might be interested in or society says one thing or another. If you are talented, genuinely talented, express that! Share it with the world. Someone will connect with it, someone will see the greatness, & it will spread like wildfire. I believe in you & wish you nothing short of the best.

Love Always,

-C