Make Your Own Kind of Music

My sincerest wish for everyone in 2025.

Note: Hi, there! I hope you’re having a lovely holiday season. R. and I are currently on our first solo vacation since our child was born, so you can understand why this newsletter has been a bit spotty ;) I’ll be back full force in the New Year, but in the meantime, please enjoy this post that has been haunting me for weeks, enough that it pushed me to wake up early and write it on vacation. I’m wishing you the very best start to 2025. Thanks for being here!

The best inspiration to dance to the beat of our own drums is a child who doesn’t know any better. Credit: Laura Fuhrman, Unsplash.

When R. went to pick E. up from daycare a couple months back, he happened upon a scene. The teachers were playing the song “Wheels on the Bus” and all the kids were sitting in on the ground doing the motions for beeping horns, clinking coins, gruff drivers and inconsolable babies. All the kids except one.

The Bean was standing, spinning and outright grooving. She’d wave her hands for the wipers and shush the crying child, but she wasn’t about to do it sitting down. When E. hears music, she has no choice. She simply must dance.

This has been true for a long time. E. cuts a rug to the obnoxious radios blasting from open car windows. She bops to grocery store playlists and the occasional ringtone. Almost as soon as she mastered the baby sign language for “more,” she was asking for more music, more dancing, more joy.

The “Wheels on the Bus” incident has always tickled me, but it came into my mind lately while watching the show Elsbeth on CBS. I’ve recently become enamored with this show, plowing through all of Season 1 and the available episodes of Season 2 in a couple weeks. For those who aren’t familiar, the show features Carrie Preston as the quirky, intelligent, unconventional Elsbeth Tascioni, a character that previously appeared in The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

The short-version explanation of the show is that Elsbeth, a former attorney in Chicago, is relocated to New York City to ensure the police department is following protocol after a string of controversies. While this is ostensibly her focus, she ends up solving a lot of murders alongside the police using her astute, outside-the-box perspective. In the show, we see how the victim is killed. The real mystery is in how Elsbeth and team are going to figure it out.

The show is awesome. It’s funny, and Carrie Preston is a fucking gem. But what I realized when I was sitting on the couch midday, watching my stories mid-afternoon like a wealthy divorcé, and wondering why I like this program so-freakin’-much, is that what Elsbeth (the show) and Elsbeth (the character) stand for is really speaking to me right now.

Because Elsbeth is ferociously her own person. She wears colorful, flamboyant getups in a city known for its devotion to shades of black. She doesn’t skip a beat when someone calls her unhinged or questions her intelligence or insults her name. She responds kindly and pointedly, but never cruelly, and every bit of criticism rolls off her back like water on a duck. She knows who she is, so the opinions of other people just don’t matter. She doesn’t change to meet other people’s standards. She grows and learns from her experiences, but she is steadfast and resolute in all the things that make Elsbeth, Elsbeth.

In the finale episode of season 1, Elsbeth gets roped into a runway show where her style has inspired the designer to create a line around her particular brand of frenetic fashion. The song that plays during this scene is “Make Your Own Kind of Music” by Cass Elliot. I immediately looked it up, and it became my new anthem. To say I was obsessed would be an understatement. I listened to the song nonstop for three full days. It’s a two-minute-and-19-second ditty, so, it played approximately 8 billion times, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Here are the lyrics:

[Verse 1]

Nobody can tell ya
There's only one song worth singing
They may try and sell ya
'Cause it hangs them up to see someone like you

[Chorus]

But you've gotta
Make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along

[Verse 2]

You're gonna be nowhere
The loneliest kind of lonely
It may be rough goin'
Just to do your thing's the hardest thing to do

[Chorus]

But you've gotta
Make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along

Somewhere in the 72 hours of repetitive play, the why of all this hit me: The devotion to making my own kind of music is an essential theme in my life right now, and I need all the universal support I can get. It’s important for me to encounter this theme of unfettered self-confidence in myself again and again, lest it fail to stick.

As many of you know, I’m in the thick of editing the manuscript for my first novel. I’ve never done anything like this before, never created anything like this before, so the opportunities for self-doubt are endless. In a world of gurus and capitalistic influencers who thrive on the ability to identify a person’s feelings of lack and conveniently sell the remedy, it is harder than ever to stay true to your singular way of walking through the world. I’m not immune.

Because the distractions are endless. Are you unhappy with your body? Here are a million products that can change it. Are you uncomfortable being a leader? Here are a million coaching programs to mold you into the boss bitch you’re meant to be. Are you afraid your art won’t be profitable, that your first novel isn’t any good? Here are a million books and published authors and retreat experiences where someone can tell you who to be and how to achieve breakout success?

Being content amidst this chaos is a fucking revolution. It is resistance. It is hard to find and even harder to maintain. So, we all need reminders, everywhere, all the time, that we’re enough just as we are. That it’s OK not to do things the way other people do them. That we’re smart, competent humans. That we can figure it out. That we can (and must!) sing our own special songs.

So, despite the ways in which I sometimes feel inadequate about creating art that I’ve never attempted to create before, I have inadvertently surrounded myself with reminders that I’m doing just fine. And the biggest reminder is a small child who doesn’t know there’s any other option than to always be immersed in your own kind of music. That dancing to the beat of your own drum is the only way to be. That your own special song is the one you should be listening to on repeat, ad nauseam, forever and always.

That’s what I want for all of us in the New Year. May 2025 be the year we ditch the so-called experts and self-doubt and listen to the songs that fill our souls. May it be the beginning of our Singer-Songwriter Era, where the music we make and share is whole-heartedly our own. And most of all, may it be the year we realize that starting to sing our own praises about our unapologetic uniqueness means we’re finally (finally) on the right track. Happy New Year, friends!

With pleasure,
Bored Aquarian

P.S. Feeling generous this holiday season? It would mean so much to me if you could like, share, comment or restack this post. I appreciate your help in getting my work in front of more eyeballs and helping me achieve one of my bigger, more outlandish 2025 goals: 10k subscribers. Thank you, thank you!