Starting over and all that comes with it

Written by Elijah Valdez on September 1st, 2025. Catching up from where I left off and talking about how things are going now.

Expectation

As of writing this post, I have 16 followers on this blog. As soon as I click the “Send to everyone now” button at the end of writing this article, 16 different people will get this entire blog post in their inboxes. Hello!

Maybe you don’t even remember subscribing to this page and honestly, that’s understandable! The last time I wrote to this was in May of this year. It was the tail-end of my second semester at university and the only reason I even put that second article out was so that I could show my therapist that I could actually commit to something!!!… That was nearly four months ago now and… nothing.

I hate that feeling.

This post, my third substack article, was supposed to be titled ‘I Love Music’, named after a really pretty jazz song I was obsessed with last semester. I was going to talk about the music I love and why I love it. Something that should be easy for me considering who I am and the way that I love to talk about the things I love. I was also doing it because I was supposed to be working on an album this summer, at that moment titled ‘This Is What It Is’ or ‘Songs for Next Spring’, I thought I shouldn’t decide on a name until the music was done.

It’s funny how things ended up going though.

Burnout / picking back where I left of previously

CW: Barf, skip to paragraph 4 to avoid.

The day I moved out of my dorm, which was the Friday after classes ended, I got food poisoning. I called my mom to let her know that I would need her help moving out due to my illness and then I immediately passed out. By the time she got to Bruce Hall, I’d already thrown up twice. Skipping the really disgusting bits, I was finally moved out just before 5PM and I was forced to leave my car at my university parking spot.

I got home around 6:00, and all I wanted to do was sleep. With no real meal in my system besides Saltine crackers and Pepto Bismol, I unpacked all that I could bring in my mom’s car and quickly fell asleep. The wake up process was a nightmare. At around midnight, I began a cycle of waking up and falling back asleep due to lack of energy. I’m not sure if I had a sleep paralysis moment, considering I’ve never had one before, but I just kept waking up momentarily telling myself that I needed to shower but then just falling back asleep, again, due to lack of energy. This process was kind of terrifying and at times I genuinely thought I was going to die. But hey, maybe that was just me being dramatic.

When I finally did get up, I used up all the energy I could muster out of myself to get into the shower, where I finally threw up for like the sixth or seventh time that day. After I would… you know… I would get 30-ish minutes of energy before I would feel like shit again. I used this energy to clean myself of any bodily fluids, drying myself off, and running downstairs to finally eat a meal so I would have some sort of sustenance.

After a weekend of food poisoning, I was finally free of all stressors until June, where I would start summer classes at the nearby community college. But before then, it was nothing but the most amount of peace I’ve felt in so so so long. I was unemployed, I was out of classes, and my responsibilities were minimal. I began to start writing letters to a friend that lives in my college town (hi Kat!!!!), but due to lack of discipline and a June full of writing essays for a summer class, I wrote very few letters and felt very guilty for asking them to write to me (sorry Kat!!!! [ :( ]).

In-between and doing nothing

I think that I just lived through my very last “childhood” summer. Ideally, this should have been the case for last summer. I was fresh out of high school and just about to enter college. I was employed and I was saving money for the upcoming semester and I was so damn excited for the upcoming year.

Now, a year removed, I was exiting my second semester of college, unemployed and admittedly miserable than ever. I was so stressed about my upcoming living situation as I’d barely searched for housing and plans I did make just kept falling through. Everything seemed like such a challenge and a slap in the face. I applied for a handful of jobs, got two interviews, and two “no”s. I felt like I was left in the dust.

By the end of May, I had finally enrolled into my community college classes, made plans to visit my college town pretty frequently, and one night I even recorded and subsequently posted this cover of Jane Remover’s ‘Aberdeen Dream Sequence’ to YouTube.

In June, I went to community college every single week day. It was a really nice routine and filled in the lack of structure I had felt in the month prior, being back in my hometown and all. At the same time, June was full of coming up to Denton (my college town) to watch my new friends in the band Paper Jam perform. They’re so good, I could talk music for hours, you know how it is. Go listen.

I got through my English class but not before making some discoveries about myself in a strange way. There was a poem I’d read probably two weeks into the class titled ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway and it had me thinking about my past year like crazy but also thinking about the parts of myself that I hate. Probably the most important piece of media I took in.

(Bonus shout-out: I watched the movie Materialists during this month with my mom and found out at the end that Japanese Breakfast did a song for the soundtrack. The movie was pretty good but that song got be re-obsessed with Japanese Breakfast’s music and Michelle Zauner as a person.)

After June was over and July had started, I turned nineteen! The day my English class ended actually. I figured out my living situation finally and I felt so good off the high of passing my first summer class, until my second one started. It was a basic math class that seemed easy enough. The entire month beforehand I was under the impression that it would be in-person like my last one had been and I would be in a similar structured schedule. I was so very wrong.

The day before class started, they emailed me letting me know that my class had been cancelled. After a long day of calling registrar people and other faculty, I was placed into an online course which would be the worst possible outcome for me. If you’re new here and are wondering why this is so bad, I previously got diagnosed with ADHD before this summer started. And before you ask, no, I did not get medicated. I really thought I would be by now, but as ADHD goes, I put that shit off. Again. And am actively putting it off. As I type this. Not good.

Failure

I spent my entire July figuring out my plans for my second year at university and procrastinated the entirety of my summer class. July was good in the way that I was finally nineteen, I had signed my first lease, and things felt like they were coming together in a really nice way. I finally started writing songs for this “album” I’d been putting off now that I had so much time to be at home doing nothing else, really. I took care of myself and got back into some routines but by the end of July, my move out date kind of snuck up on me.

I had packed all of my things, yes, and had enough time back in my hometown to become sick of it again, but there was so much going on. As there always is I guess. In mid-July, I found out I was going to be an uncle! What the fuck? It wasn’t bad news or anything but I was definitely not expecting it and it had me thinking about my morality in a strange way.

I kept trying to write things for this “album” but nothing ever felt right. I felt so damn selfish listening back at demos I recorded because they weren’t aligning with my original intensions for the album, of addressing myself for the sake of myself. This was an intro idea I had that I’ll share here and probably never work on again.

It was good in the sense that I was writing again, I guess. Good practice in a way. But another thing I was trying to address was something I noticed a long time ago: I tend to put up arbitrary rules and set unnecessary deadlines for myself that end up making me feel inadequate.

This feeling, mixed with the fact that I could feel myself slipping from this college course had me thinking my life a little bit, I cannot lie.

In August, I finally moved into my apartment. I had one more week left in this summer course and I was feeling the pressure. My family had planned to go out to New Mexico the Friday that my class ended so I knew regardless of how the class ended, I would end up back in my hometown the day of my final. Long story short, I spent that entire Thursday studying for this exam and before I took it I kind of just broke down to my parents about feeling small and stupid. They reassured me that things were going to be alright and that failure is a part of life. Which is something I know and have always known, but I think I’ve lied to myself and others about my pespective on failure as a whole. The person I want to be is okay with failure and almost welcomes it but the person I am knows that’s not how I function.

I failed that shit so hard. It sucked so bad. But hey, I was going home in the morning. I was just happy it was over.

Starting over

I see New Mexico as my second home and maybe even in some ways, my first home. It’s my mom’s birth-place and every time I go, I feel such a connection to the state as a whole.

Coming off of this failure, I kind of just got to exist as myself outside of being a student with my family. It felt refreshing, I felt a similar feeling to the amount of pressure lifted I felt in May. Not only did I get to exist with my family, but in nature as well. The night we got there, I got to sit in my grandpa’s hammock and eat a freshly-picked apple also from my grandpa. I took this gorgeous photo of it because of how beautiful the moment felt. I don’t even like apples!

On day two, we headed off into the mountains about two hours away from where my grandparents live. I opted to ride with my grandparents on the way there to get some insight from them because I often think about how much time I have left with them. It was really fun and my grandpa and I bonded over music for most of the drive.

We got to the camper finally and immediately everything was so refreshing. It was an average temperature of 72º, a far cry from the Texas heat I’ve been used to of about 95º, and especially the temperature of my grandparents’ town of almost always 101º. I was so far away from everything and there was nothing but wildlife and nature for as far as I could see. It was like this for the next few days. I played my guitar in nature, fed the deer and doe(s) apples that we got to pick, and I listened to a lot of music of course. Just in nature. Away from everything. A moment of peace for one last time before I knew that I had to go back to the madness.

New Mexico trip, 2025

When I got back, I kind of realized I no longer cared for the “album” I had planned to make this summer and continue making in the fall. It was a bit difficult to accept that I would have to start over but the music just seemed a bit dingy. I don’t know. Not inauthentic but definitely not what I need to be making right now. I’ve got to focus on getting better. That’s it.

All that comes with it

Right now, all I need to do is focus on getting employed and focus on classes. The bare minimum. I definitely burned myself out last year but somehow it was all worth it. My body rejected everything at the end and somewhat gave up. That shit is not happening again. I just need to get things done. I’ve got to get medicated, I’ve got to make rent, and I’ve got to pass my classes. That’s it.

I had my final therapy appointment with my last therapist in May. I’m restarting therapy tomorrow with a new therapist and I’m extremely anxious about meeting someone new and having to re-explain things to someone new. If I don’t like it, I did some sleuthing and found out that my old therapist works at a practice in-network with my insurance! So, worse comes to worst, I get my old therapist back and I don’t have to re-explain much. But also, I want to be open to someone new and if I have the option to talk to someone new I’m going to give it a chance.

Besides that, classes have been good, I love my apartment, I’ve met so many cool people this past year, and I’ve learned so much. My only goal is getting better and I’m hoping good, genuine, and fulfilling art comes out of it but only time will tell. I cannot force it, I just have put in as much care as possible in everything that I do; that’s all I can do.

Thanks so much for reading this all the way through if you decided to do so, I hope the effort and care I put into this is felt while you read this.

That’s all for now. Take care.