The Amateur Hour

I’d much rather be a passionate amateur more than anything in the world. Don’t get me wrong, being a professional gardener is pretty fucking rad, but I still have to serve other people above their expectations. As an amateur [anything], my inspiration can be as free as the wind and my approach can acceptingly take a lifetime.

The amateur is self-serving, while the professional serves themselves to others for money. I know I know… some money is good, but not at the expense of pimping my genuine happiness. A friend of mine shared this quote the other day that seems to adequately sum up what I’m really trying to say…

“It’s not about being good at something. It’s about being good to yourself.”

Just writing my thoughts and feelings here to share with the world feels good to me. I’ve constantly been battling emotional roadblocks since I was a kid. One of the hardest things still is finding out that some people I look up to, enjoy looking down on me twice as much. My actions and words, in their mind, just insure their place above me and our relationship is really more for their amusement.

Growing up as a husky kid, whose family moved across the country at the onset of puberty, I developed a jester’s mentality at a young age. Sharpening my sense of humor became my defense in what initially felt like a bitter and hostile set of circumstances. Middle-schoolers aren’t the most compassionate age group, so I had to be funnier than people could be cruel. That’s pretty fucking hard considering I was doubling-down as the new kid and the chubby kid.

My heart felt broken A LOT, but somehow someway I laughed my way through the rest of school. I entered the adult world with a heart so full of holes, I couldn’t fill it with love no matter how much I stuffed in there. So… I partied hard to numb the pain, to hide from the depression and used socializing as my escape. Hell I didn’t need to be responsible for my well-being, as long as we were all going to get fucked up together, right??

Then all of sudden, I didn’t feel so youthful anymore. I just felt worn out, lost and pretty fucking creepy. I had reached a dead-end on the road of life and I stayed right there faking every emotion I experienced, except for sadness. That’s right around the time my roommate had lost his mother and right before that, both of his grandparents. Darkness was in full effect at our house, but it was then I started to really realize something about life.

We were suffering from completely different shades of darkness. My roommate had no control over losing his family members and his grief was necessary to cope through all of it. As for me, I had full control of my situation and just got folded into the depths of feeling so damn sorry for myself. Sure we were both sad people, but our circumstances were so different from each other and that’s when I started to write.  

It wasn’t as much of an epiphany, as it was a dense fog slowly lifting over the next few years. As I mentioned in a previous post, I get stuck in these “fork-in-socket routines” where I choose the familiarity of pain over an unexpected outcome of change - 🎶If you’re an emotional masochist and you know it, clap your hands!!🎶  ...and the crowd goes wild - Ahhhh, but I digress. Writing my observations about life was the only thing I found myself motivated to do and everything else I did back then was done in protest… at least it was in my heart.

Eventually all of the writing got me back in touch with myself. It began to detoxify my soul in ways I never thought imaginable. Exercise, meditation and true love all found their own way into my life. I decided to install windows in all of those holes in my heart, not just so it could see the world around me, but so the world could look inside of it too. Life isn’t perfect by any means. Some days are still hard for me to shine my own light, so it’s nice to let some in whenever possible.

In the last few years, I've dabbled in a handful of different blogging projects - RAWdio Podcast, Producers United, Interestingly Human and Michigan Folks, to name a few. None of which I'm currently working on for the simple fact that I haven't felt inspired. I could make a million excuses, but that would only mean I was trying to hide from myself. Instead, my inspiration this winter has lead to writing a "food manifesto" that I truly hope to self-publish later this year. Not to make money, but to creatively inspire others.

Coming back to Brass-Knuckle Love Butter is my way of exploring what's really in my heart. I don’t get paid to write about my life and my observations, but I can’t really put a price on self-exploration anyway - it’s too valuable. This is the true beauty of being an amateur, it’s simply my thing that I do for me. I also cook with reckless abandon, adventurously (and obsessively) listen to music, grow veggies and make love to Mother Nature as often as possible. They are all just the things I do to show myself some love… and without them…honestly...

I would only be a memory.

-Scotty J-