On January 11th of this year, I released a music album called The Angels.
It's on Spotify and every other streaming platform, under my music-making moniker Enharmonic. It's electronic music. It's really really good work, if I do say so myself — and I've heard that from friends who are connoisseurs and would tell me if it wasn't.
And you know what I did next?
I told 20 people, give or take.
Then I didn't tell anybody else.
The escalation ladder
What I did instead was I built a website — enharmonic.io — self-hosted, custom streaming players, custom music hosting, the whole thing. Because screw big streaming platforms and artist rights and all that. Beautiful custom build.
And with that beautiful custom website?
I told no one.
So of course — obviously — I then figured, well, you know what I should really do? I should get custom credit-card-sized USB sticks made with the beautiful album art and the track list, record-box formatted, in custom little bags with stickers perfectly the right size. To send to all my DJ friends.
Did it. Made them.
Sent them to nobody.
At some point I found myself walking around Santa Monica going, "Am I nuts? What the fuck is going on with me?"
And I realized — this is what I do. I build. I build and build and build and build, and I hide behind the building. Whether it's releasing music or releasing applications or releasing my thoughts into the world, I get afraid. And I feel shame and guilt around that, and I pace back and forth around Santa Monica talking to my phone like a crazy man about it.
(For the record: I also built my Instagram bio before I put any fucking content on it. It's a pattern.)
The pattern isn't just the album
The album is the version of it I've been carrying around in my pocket. But it's not the only one.
I've been writing blog posts on ohdavid.com for months that nobody knew where to find. I built a /shop nobody knew about. I redid the /about page three times. Same shape as CrewLAB. Same shape as Breasy. Now the same shape with OhDavid.
I hide behind the stuff I'm making. I hoard it to myself. Spirals of guilt and shame, all these things. I'm not proud of that — but I'm sitting with it, out loud, because that's the only way through I've found.
The moment before the post button
It goes something like this.
There's a physical thing. Caught-in-the-headlights kind of feeling, real anxiety, an interior worry about how it'll be perceived. And what's strange is I can't quite tell whose voice the critical one is. Sometimes it sounds like mine. Sometimes it sounds like other people's. Sometimes it sounds like nobody I've ever met.
When it's loudest, it's not one person. It's a composite. Some blend of God, the world, the people I know, the people I haven't met yet. A generalized, ever-present witness that doesn't stay in one place and can't really be argued with. There's nowhere it isn't. There's nobody to convince.
So the hand hovers over the post button. And a lot of the time, it just doesn't press.
What I don't want to become
A lot of the not-doing has been about what I don't want to be.
I was walking through Century City recently and it hit me — I was literally walking through the physical embodiment of the kind of self-promotion I've been avoiding. LA ego architecture. Buildings that look like the promotion is the point, and whatever's inside them is downstream of the promotion.
I've been around this in tech, too. Some of my earliest experiences with startups involved trying to figure out how to monetize when nobody really wanted the thing yet — manufacturing a problem so the product had something to solve. Promoting that felt hollow. Kind of shitty. Like I was participating in something a little bit false.
So a lot of my "I don't want to promote" story was actually "I don't want to promote like that." Which is a real distinction and worth making. But it also turned into a convenient reason to not do any promotion at all.
What promotion could look like, if I did it
If I try to describe what respectful promotion looks like — the opposite of the Century City feeling — it comes down to something like this.
Promotion is an ask. It requires the person on the other end to give a shit. That costs them something. Attention is energy, and energy is finite.
Respectful promotion respects that. It's not extraction, it's an offer. It says "here's what I made, in case it's useful to you, and I'm going to trust you to decide." It's not the commodified producer-consumer, what-can-I-get-out-of-you register that dominates in a city like this. It doesn't treat the audience as a resource to be mined.
I think that version is a version I could live with. And that's kind of the point of what I'm working on — figuring out what respectful promotion sounds like in my own voice, and then doing it.
The old story: "not ready"
For years, when I asked myself why I hadn't promoted the album or the blog or the /shop, the answer was always some version of it's not ready or I'm not ready.
"Not ready" is a useful story. It has the shape of a delay, which sounds responsible — as if the promotion is coming, just later, just once the thing is polished enough. Once the work justifies the noise.
But "not ready" is infinitely portable. Any level of polish is still not-quite-polished-enough. Any level of confidence is still not-quite-confident-enough. Any album is still capable of being one more revision away from good.
And what I've been sitting with is — my process is never actually ready. It just isn't. The work doesn't finish, it iterates. The next version is already visible before this version has landed. "Ready" was never the criterion. I was using "not ready" as cover.
If I flip it — my process is never ready, which means it's always ready. Sharing the unresolved struggle isn't a failure to promote. Sharing the unresolved struggle is the piece. I'm sharing this as a way to refine my own thinking about it.
I say I don't want to promote work that's over-polished and hollow. So I promote work that's honest and unresolved. That's actually consistent. It's not a delay. It's a version.
What not promoting has cost
Not promoting isn't a neutral choice. It's cost me across the board.
Financially — business relationships that never formed because the person didn't know I was doing what I was doing. Money that would have come in didn't come in, because the ask that would have led to it didn't get made. Real numbers. Real quiet.
But it's cost more than that, because the not-promoting instinct isn't really about promotion. It's about closing off. It's an impulse to protect, to hide, to keep the box shut. And that impulse doesn't stay in the marketing folder. It bleeds into how I connect with people generally. Friendships that got harder to reach than they needed to be. Relationships where I didn't show what I was up to because I hadn't figured out how to show it yet.
The pattern isn't containable. Not-promoting is a version of closing off, and closing off leaks.
What I've actually been protecting
The real thing, then.
I've been protecting my self-concept.
I have this sense of myself that goes something like — I feel like I'm great. But untested. And if I get tested, and it turns out I'm not great, then I'm not just someone who made something that didn't land. I'm a failure. The whole self-concept collapses into a single word.
Untested greatness is safe. It stays in potential. It never gets graded.
The album stays great as long as nobody hears it. Enharmonic.io stays great as long as nobody visits it. The USB sticks stay great as long as they don't leave the bag. The blog stays great as long as nobody finds it. The /shop stays great as long as nobody knows about it.
They're all the same box. It's not that I have five things I haven't promoted. It's that I have one thing I keep from being tested, and each version of the pattern is just another way to keep the box closed.
The unopened box.
The trouble with the unopened box is it's also unopened. Nobody experiences it. It doesn't work on anyone. It doesn't move anyone. It stays potential — and potential doesn't move anything.
To anyone else feeling this
This part is less about me and more about why I'm saying any of it out loud.
If you're proud of something you've made and afraid to talk about it or share it — in whatever medium, in whatever way feels natural — you're not alone. Just because we all hate the impending-doom feel of social media doesn't mean we can't put a little something out there. To show the work we made to the people who'd actually want to see it.
I'm saying this as much to myself as I'm saying it to you.
There's a little community of you-can-do-it-ers. Maybe you're in it. Maybe I'm just starting to be.
If you want to try, I'll be the biggest, baddest cheerleader for the work you're making — because I've been very fortunate to have those people in my life, and I'm figuring out how to be that for other people too.
You can do it. I can do it. We're gonna do it together.
And by the way
The album is called The Angels. It's by Enharmonic. It's on Spotify and every other streaming platform. It's really really really good — I stand by that, even if it took me six months to say it out loud.
If you like electronic music, go listen.
I think I might finally be willing to open the box.
— David
