I’m Garbage: A Confessional Nobody Post

People keep asking where the talent was supposed to come from like it’s a strand of hair I misplaced. I practiced until my voice felt like sandpaper, until the chorus tasted like the same old regret. But the truth don’t spin pretty: it sounds like trash. It always has. Me and these chords  we’re two stupid things that somehow found each other and made nothing but noise.

My laptop lights blink like they’re laughing. I drag another beat into the timeline and the kick hits like a joke I don’t get. I stare at the waveform like it owes me an explanation. I beg it for meaning and it gives me static. I tell myself “finish this one” like it’s an instruction, not a prayer. The verse looks back at me and says, “you’re late.”

I used to think music was a flashlight. Now it’s a mirror that keeps revealing the parts of me I’d already locked in a drawer. Every recording is a catalogue of failures: missed notes, cringe rhymes, a beat that tries too hard. My own voice is the one that hurts the most  raw, flat, a bad recording of somebody else’s life. I spit bars that sound like excuses and call them art. When the track dies, I die a little, too, because for a second I believed I could become more than the mess I feel like.

“I’m stupid,” I tell the mic. “My music’s ass.” It’s not a flex, it’s a truth. I don’t need anyone to reassure me with fake kindness or motivational posters. I don’t want sugar. I want the blunt reality: I’m lost. I am wandering through the same tired loops and wondering how people make it look effortless. How do they laugh in interviews while I’m in my room trying to scrape meaning off the bottom of a broken song?

The voices in my head are loud when the lights go out. They’re not poetic  they’re petty and exact. They catalogue the ways I failed today, the lyric I butchered, the friend I ghosted, the girl I didn’t call back. They whisper that there’s no coming back from embarrassing yourself in the timeline of your own life. When the room is dark, the voices dress up like judges and call out every misstep. Sometimes they get mean enough to tell me to disappear. It’s terrifying how casually my brain suggests those things, like it’s reading the directions off a manual I never got.

I know the big words: depressive slump, creative block, impostor syndrome. They’re neat and clinical, like a bandage on a wound that needs stitches. But when you’re living it, it’s dirt under the nails, a weight behind your ribs. It’s staying up until 4 a.m. and watching your own text messages vanish into nothing because you don’t know what to say. It’s listening to songs that used to make you feel alive and realizing they were the life jacket you never had.

I hate my face some days. I hate how it looks on stage or on a photo or in the reflection of the screen that captured my last attempt. I want to hide it. Not from the world  I want to hide it even from myself. The footage of me performing is the same footage that keeps playing in my head when I try to sleep: every flub, every missed breath. I replay the worst takes like a punishment for daring to try.

But here’s the ugly, stubborn truth I won’t swallow nicely: wanting to die is not a punchline. It’s a cry. And if I’m honest, I’m scared of what that means. I say it bluntly because euphemisms make it softer than it is. Saying it loud doesn’t make it less dangerous. Saying it loud is also a way of admitting I need a hand. Maybe I’m pathetic. Maybe my music is garbage. Maybe I am lost. But I’d rather say that out loud than smother it until it becomes something permanent.

I don’t have some neat solution. I’ve got a notebook with half-broken lines and a playlist of songs I can’t yet be proud of. I’ve got nights where I throw everything away and mornings where I resurrect an idea that’s worth keeping. If you’re anything like me, you know the cycle: lows that feel endless, tiny wins that feel criminally small. But they exist. Tiny is still something.

If you can, tell someone one line of the truth. Not a whole biography; just one line. “I’m struggling today.” “My music sucks and I don’t know what to do.” It’s not a grand gesture it’s a thread. Pull one thread and maybe another hand grabs it. Maybe that’s how this unspools. Maybe it doesn’t. But I’m not ready to burn the whole thing down just because a bar fell flat tonight.