Legacy

“Legacy! What is a legacy?

It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.”

-From “The World Was Wide Enough” from Hamilton the Musical

I first listened to Hamilton during a very dark time in my life. So much of my life is defined by loss, loneliness, suffering, and anxiety. I have many hobbies and there’s not a single one I can’t tie to one of these four things. For example, my great grandma, I called her Nana, would hold my hand and tell me how much she loved me, how handsome I was, how smart I was, that my long fingers would be good for playing piano, that she could see greatness in me. I couldn’t see what she saw, but I believed her. Later, my uncle was having us hold onto a piano for him, and I would practice a little when I could. Right before I started college in 2022, she passed. Now, I can’t help but think of her every time my hands rest on the keys. 

My time with Hamilton came before that, when the most pressing issue in my life was fighting to make something of my life. During this time, I felt like no one cared if I did anything with my life or not. In 2021, I was working full time to save up for a car so that I could go to college the next year. I was overflowing with anxiety. My family was very poor, my mother’s health wasn’t the best, and I feared that my life would be meaningless, that all these great things that my Nana had seen in me were fake. I watched people my age leaving high school and going to college in Corvettes their parents bought them, but I had to take a year to work my butt off because I could only rely on myself. My father wasn’t very helpful in searching for colleges either, which increased my feeling that no one cared about my future but me. It was around this same time that sleep was my enemy. I wrote because it was the only thing that quieted the storm inside. 

Listening to Hamilton and hearing these words about a man who wrote so feverishly, often to the point of neglecting himself and his own health… I saw myself. No one I have ever met and asked about this phenomenon has felt this same drive that I do. The feeling that creativity spawns from pain, that art comes from anxiety, that the monster that rages within desires a creative outlet to be put to rest and will not relax until all its energy is spent.

But Alexander Hamilton understood it.

HAMMOND AND HAMILTON
Non-Stop
Legacy
Unfinished Symphony
Intermezzo
Wait for It
Hurricane
The Eye
Memento Mori (Warning: suicide)
High Storm/The Unimaginable
La Fine/Pain=Creativity