My Life as a “Should’ve Been”

Everyone’s familiar with the term “has-been.” It’s a label we give one-hit wonders and washed-up celebs. But the thing about has-beens is that they have at least, well, been. There are so many more people out there who never will reach those heights at all, who had potential and squandered it somehow. I think those are the cases that fascinate me even more. Maybe that’s because I relate.

Are you holding a grudge? About?

I think my biggest grudge is against myself for not going all-in as a musician when I was younger. I feel like I could have actually taken my music somewhere had I started sooner, had I thrown my entire existence into it. It’s hard to accept that it may be too late. There are artists half my age who are making it in the business now. Thirty is grandma-age by industry standards.

It’s not entirely my fault that I didn’t devote myself fully to the dream. I think back to my struggles with mental health, which were debilitatingly severe in my teens and twenties, to the point where I could barely keep up in school and work. Much of the music industry, now and back then, happened on the internet, which I was scared of using for many years. And who could blame me? There are a lot of things to be afraid of on the world wide web.

I had a presence on YouTube, but I remember being nearly paralyzed every time I went to post a new song. I couldn’t help but fear what kind of reactions I would get. I remember some of the mean comments I’d receive about my appearance and worse, my musical abilities. Even in a sea of positive comments, it was the negative ones that haunted me and made me not want to share my music anymore. I had a lot of anxiety about putting myself out there, and I’m beating myself up for it to this day.

I feel like I could have been something greater. I could have been the next Taylor Swift, or even Christina Grimmie (RIP), had I actually kept an online presence back then. Now I feel it’s too late. In a post-TikTok world, I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to sharing my music. I feel like everything I do will be hilariously irrelevant now that I’m past the peak age for “making it.”

I wish I could go back and tell younger me not to be scared of internet assholes. People are gonna suck, and there’s nothing you can do about that except shine in spite of everything. I wish I hadn’t hidden myself away in the darkest corners because of my anxiety. I feel like a massive “should’ve been,” and it sucks to think about. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be, and I need to accept that. But a tiny part of me still wonders what could have been had I just put myself out there more.

I guess I’ll never know.