The Story Behind "Transformation..."
Everything I've put out previously have mostly "moments in time" almost journal entries, just in music. Which isn't to say that each release and each song doesn't mean something, they've always been written from a perspective of observations and a way to just express the thoughts and feelings about those observations into a song.
And i do realize how stuffy and arrogant that sounds, maybe just to simplify that is to say, the songs i write are snapshots of a time.
"Transformation as a Survival Tactic" is a bit different. This is the EP that released on August 20th 2021 (the day this is published) and I wrote it as a way to chronicle a journey I started in 2020.
On May 6th 2020 I weighed myself for the first time in seven or eight months. COVID was rampaging, lockdowns in full effect and I tipped the scales at nearly 300 pounds. I knew it would be bad, but didn't realize it was this bad. I had a panic attack, that one day started this journey.
After I calmed down I went outside for a walk. On that walk I realized I had to make a change, I can't just keep on going the way I had been. But knowing myself, whatever change I make it had to be small and easy. So I figured it out, a bit. That one day was the day I started walking. Just 20 minutes. That's it. I made a small change where every day I would walk for 20 minutes.
Over the next many weeks 20 minutes turned into 40 minutes, and then fast forward to October, that became 60 minutes. I had lost a good 20 pounds or so. It was slow, but every few days I'd do a weigh-in, log that in my spreadsheet and i also started logging all of my calories. I also did something else, I started functional strength training.
That was very difficult, and I couldn't even do a single push-up. I could work out for about 15 minutes and i just felt like i was going to collapse. That winter, I started making real steps, starting to figure out how to workout, how to get at least 10k steps each day, how to manage my calorie intake.
Even though I would make progress, I would get so discouraged because my mind was already rewired with all of the small moves I had been making, but my body was lagging behind! This is where many people start to faulter, to fail, to lose their way along this journey. I would just start to picture the ocean, a particular beach i would go back to in my mind, and just let the waves wash away that frustration, the waves performing their function, washing away the all that emotional debris.
This journey isn't complete. I have a little way to go, but through just making these regular small changes, consistently over time, over the last year, I've shown myself a new way to live, and it was like I can finally take leave of the baggage, stop carying it around with me and i found the escape hatch.
As of this writing, I've lost nearly 30% of my body mass (that's about 85 pounds), I do functional strength training workouts three days a week for an hour or so, burning 500-550 calories a workout, average 12k steps in a day and it's been over a year now and through that first tiny little change, one small decision, that one day, i've come this far.
This EP is called "Transformation as a Survival Tactic" for a reason. I had to transform because living how i had been is not a recipe for survival.
