Southbound and Down - Conflict and Avoidance

When your best friend is your bandmate, arguments over music carry a lot more weight. My buddy and I had been playing the same local shows for over a year, earning a few bucks each for our hard work. To me, our popularity was a sign that we were making something respectable. To him, it meant we were pushovers for not charging more. I wanted to play every show available, and he wanted to play only the ones that would justify our hours worked with appropriate pay. Both strategies are valid. But they couldn't both work at the same time.

At its core, this was a conflict about priorities. We were both carving out 30 or more hours a week for musical pursuits, and we each wanted a return on that advancement. For me, frequent spotlight exposure was enough. For him, there was a spousal argument waiting at home every night he played without bringing home some cash. So we were at odds - I didn't want to miss out on opportunities to play, and he didn't want to miss out on opportunities to financially justify his efforts.

I'm a hardcore avoider, and I have been for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I avoided conversations about my different skin color by wearing my attitude on my sleeve, clowning around and hamming it up until I was regarded in every family and social circle as the entertainer of the group. As a young adult, I spent two years avoiding fear of living on my own by partying every night, waking up the next day exhausted and achy an counting the hours until work was over and I could get back to partying. All my life, I've retreated into the predictable dopamine hit provided by video games, grabbing a controller whenever I started to feel overwhelmed by life's responsibilities.

It's no wonder that I avoided my way out of my musicians' quarrel by downloading a bunch of new games onto my phone and wasting hours each day playing through them. I also fell into quite the Netflix binge, preferring documentaries about Hip-Hop to the strain of resolving my real-life Hip-Hop struggle. Predictably, my avoidance just made things worse. We were still playing the kind of shows my friend didn't want to be involved with, only now we were hanging out less, which meant we were practicing less, which meant we weren't playing as well. So now he still wasn't enjoying the pay, and I wasn't enjoying the spotlight. We were worse off than we were at the start.

Over time, my priorities changed, and I came to share my friend's opinions about fair compensation. Now we only play shows where the purse justifies the time investment. We're both dads now, so it's easier to say no than it's ever been. But if I could go back, I'd schedule a time to sit down and come clean. I wish I had mustered the courage to lay out my opinion without hesitation or equivocation, and I wish I had been mature enough to listen to him do the same. We might have stayed at odds for awhile, but the conflict probably wouldn't have bled over into the quality of the music itself. I feel like I'm still trying to repair the friendship, and it's all because I avoided a conflict I could have faced.

This experience taught me two things. First, I learned that there are more subtle ways to avoid conflict than getting blitzed or hiding in my room. I was telling myself I was buying music games to further my art, telling myself I was watching Netflix to study role models, when all I was really doing was running away. Second, I learned that it's never too late to apologize and set things straight. Even after a couple months of avoidance, the friendship was still more than worth saving. Though my perfectionist streak urged me to cut ties when things get rocky, I stuck with the friendship and came clean when I realized what I had been doing. Avoidance remains my Achilles heel, and my habits have a way of tricking me into repeating my worst patterns. But remembering how avoidance has exacerbated past conflicts is a great first step to preventing future avoidance spells. Hopefully I'll keep building my mindfulness muscles to the point where I'll be able to catch myself before I let the cycle repeat itself again.