After Today
I’ve spent the last twelve hours playing the song “After Today” from A Goofy Movie on loop. I just woke up with it in my mind. It’s a song about changing for the better, it’s about taking that nobody you felt like in the past, and leaving them there. It’s aspirational, not to mention it slaps musically. It paints a smile on my face, even now in this dorm room computer lab. Just the idea that “things will be going my way after today”. This has kind of been my ethos for the last few months. Something clicked in me when the world started ending. But actually it was kind of before that. There were a lot of things I thought I couldn’t do for a variety of reasons. I think it was getting older or getting confidence or some combination of the two, but it’s like all those dreams I had suddenly became so possible.
First I was going to record my first EP. I had a pianist who was a great musical companion, and for the first time I was really putting my words to music. I had a recording studio at the ready, and there was a world just waiting at my feet. And then Covid happened. I lost my musician, I lost my studio, heck I even lost my college town. I spent that first season of quarantine in a depressive funk. But I also used that pain and wrote my first piece to ever be published. That lit a writer’s fire in my fingers and made me realize that I was more than just a voice. So I took a freelancing class, got my first paid publication, and took a greater interest in freelance journalism. One more dream seemed that much more possible.
And now I’m more than halfway through my junior year in college, and I’m falling in love with journalism in a way I hadn’t before. I originally joined the major for all the wrong reasons. I was so scared of doing it wrong that I kind of never did it at all. I stuck to my comfort areas of film criticism and review. But as my interests expanded past entertainment, I realized how great journalism can be. I like having those important conversations and facilitating those same conversations. Topics I was scared to encounter like race and politics I now welcome with open arms. And I’m working so hard to be a better version of myself. I see all this potential and for once it doesn’t scare me. But there’s always that nagging feeling that I never developed those skills I needed when I was an underclassman. I see freshmen doing things I daydream about. And I “just think of all the time I’ve been losing”, waiting for something to change. For me to change.
But I charge ahead! I’m the writing director of a magazine that could be my magnum opus, I’m a founding member of a group helping Black folks in entertainment create community and gain skills! That’s awesome! But now I’m combusting. I’m doing too much but also not enough. I haven’t written a song in forever, my voice barely even works, I’m behind in my classes, and the littlest thing tires me out. There are so many things I want to do. I believe I can do it now. But it can be so hard to see anything other than the aspirational future, because the present is just shoulder pain and frustration.
But still, there’s that mystical tomorrow that Annie talked about. That “After today” that has the potential to be infinitely better. “But things will be going my way after today”, right? Because if I can’t dream of aspiration, then all this optimism is for naught. This isn’t even the hard part. Soon I’ll have to worry about rent and real adult things. But still, “I wish that this was the day after today”.