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Nova 1035
This week I thought about memories and how they can sometimes come back to us without us even trying. Many years ago, when I was driving the country flat as part of the Radiowave roadshow, we spent a night at a bed and breakfast in Katima Mulilo and the minute I walked into the room I had been given I was instantly transported back to my grandparents’ house in Sasolburg because the room smelled exactly like their house used to, and that smell triggered my memories.
This week a similar thing happened when I was scrolling through the list of songs to choose one for that day’s Torga Optic Timeless Track. The minute my eyes hit upon Van Halen’s “Jump” I not only decided to use that song but was immediately taken back to me as an 18-year-old working alongside two of my friends on building a bed into the back of my dad’s minibus (I think it was a Ford Husky). My plan at the time had been to convert the back of the minibus into a living space with a bed base with built in storage space, mounting brackets for my mountain bike, and 70s-style tinted acrylic bubble-windows (essentially van life before van life was a thing – I also had plans shortly after school to open a bookstore that had a coffee shop inside it before that became a thing…) so that I could use it to become some sort of travelling-hippie-mountain bike-surf-journalist. I had clearly not taken into account that I lived in Namibia rather than Europe or the United States, a fact that would have severely limited my writing opportunities.
One day while we were working on the Husky we put a cassette that had been sent to me by a friend who had moved back to Australia into the car stereo (Also already dreaming of one day working in radio I had asked him to record some Australian stations for me and he had sent me a tape of Triple M and one of Today FM – it was not quite as easy back then to just stream any station on the planet.) and Jump was one of the songs featured on the recording. Van Halen’s song taking me back to the back of the minibus felt amazing because of the memories of friendship and hopefulness it brought back to me – the whole world was ahead of me and nothing was impossible – but also because of the fact that, being older and ‘wiser’, it also allowed me to understand just how much my parents must have loved me that they were willing to entertain my various flights of fancy. (To be fair, my dad did admit at one point though that he had bought a retirement house with a ‘granny flat’ because there was a high likelihood that I would need somewhere to live, haha)
In the end we built the bad back out of the minibus, put the seats back in, and my father sold it. I also never opened a bookstore with a coffee shop inside it, but at least I did end up working on the radio.
Speaking of working on the radio, I also spent quite a lot of time thinking about, almost agonizing about, talent, ability, and self-doubt.
We all have certain crutches, or in radio terms, crutch-words, and in my case I know that I too often rely on using “uhm”, “errr”, or “ahhh” when I am speaking on the radio. Sometimes I do it as a form of affectation when I purposefully want to appear to less confident or to know less about the topic I am talking about than I actually do, but more often it is an unconscious ‘filler’ my brain throws in as I try to connect all the tangential thoughts I am trying to focus into something logical to say on-air (just read through the earlier portion of this ‘column’ again if you’re in any doubt as to how much difficulty I have reining in my various streams of thought!). I also find I tend to use these crutch-words more frequently when I have had a really bad nights sleep and am more tired than usual but regardless of why, I was (rightfully) called out about it this week – it is something a radio DJ should not be doing.
I remember the current CEO of Future Media once saying that radio DJs are people with “massive egos and extremely low self-esteem”. While I don’t believe I have a massive ego at all, I do definitely agree with the extremely low self-esteem bit and while I understand that the feedback about my crutches was valid, warranted, meant to be constructive, and came from a place of empathy, it sent me spiraling.
I am in no way writing this as a way of looking for sympathy or someone to say: “no, don’t worry, you’re good at what you do”, I spiraled completely. I started questioning my entire career and whether I should be doing what I’m doing, whether I am actually any good at anything seeing as my climbing wall is also just limping along from month to month and I’ve not achieved any of the dreams I have for it.
Thankfully I have decades of experience with spiraling and know how to, not necessarily pull myself right out of one but rather, push myself high enough to stick my head just high enough to once again breathe. So, while I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about my crutch-words and concentrating on trying to not use them as frequently, one of the many things I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about this week is being better and drawing on the memories of why I wanted to do this in the first place – memories of a 12-year-old boy sitting in the back of a kombi tuning his Walkman radio to try to find something to listen to, finding a station called “Radio 5” and a DJ called Alex Jay, and immediately thinking to myself: that’s what I want to do one day!
