I just worked an intense month. Financially and professionally, it was the best month I’ve ever had. I worked with an engineer that had won a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, I recorded students on a field trip. I worked in a famous church in San Francisco, I cleaned up after engineers and clients, over and over, and I mentored students in an audio class. Then I worked with a friend and a team of volunteers for two theatrical productions where we unflinchingly shot down a gallery of problems. It was exhilarating, exhausting, eye-opening, and also left me feeling oddly jaded and annoyed.
Today, I listened to some audio art by my friend. In fact, it was the winner of the Judges Award for the Columbia School of Journalism’s 2026 Radio Race. I met my friend through an event that they originated called Audio Potluck, where people just showed up and played an audio piece and everyone listened to it.
That was it. What did you make? I want to hear it.
Let that echo in your heart. I want to hear you.
Getting started in studio recording has been a wild ride. It’s highly individualistic right now, because the days of big studios with staff engineers are largely over. It’s all about hustling for your own clients and building a reputation, and it’s a kind of life that doesn’t preclude building community, but does hamper it a bit. I tend to thrive as an ensemble player in most scenarios, and although the studio experience has, one day at a time, made me stronger in myself, it has also eroded my focus down to surviving, shields up and striding forward with glowing red laser eyes on the prize.
Listening to audio art felt like dropping into warm water and opening up like a tea flower. Like there was a part of me that had withered until I had forgotten what shape it was, and suddenly my gaze became soft and expansive, and I put out swimming, translucent petals of gratitude for the whole world.
For the first time I wondered: Is what I’m doing worth it?
I said yes to everything when I was first starting out. As a student, I volunteered, interned, and shadowed. Kind people referred jobs to me and I took them, no matter what they were. I worked for an outdoor theater company that performed in a different location almost every time. I worked with an engineer who had a hair-raising temper. I loaded gear, ran up and down streets from stage to stage at community events, wrangled with accounting and budgets, emailed endlessly with bands and organizers. I worked 12-14 hour days for minimum wage, or for nothing, and sometimes paid for the privilege.
All that experience made me grow, as a person and as an engineer. Any thought of quitting ran straight into the brick wall of I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love my life.
Now, I hear my friend’s art and the loveliness of the world stings, like a sleeping limb coming back to life. It comes at a time when I’m already considering my next steps. I’m remembering that I got into this because I want to hear people and I want to hear what people make.
One of the many things that I’ve learned over the past few years is that, every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. If I say yes to a live sound job, I’m saying no to the possibility of working in the studio that day. If I say yes to a well-paid job that makes me feel bad about myself, I’m saying no to feeling good about myself. If I say yes to that sixth and seventh workday of the week, I’m saying no to walking to the store in the sunshine with a boba, listening to the same birdsong that I used to hear in my mother’s backyard as a child.
It’s been worth it, at times, to say no to those things, because I was also saying yes to challenging my limits. In hindsight, some of those things may not have been worth what I gave up. In all cases, I gained strength and judgement, anyway, and that was the point.
Maybe the right question is: Is how I’m doing this worth it? I am realizing that I always want to say yes to meeting life with an open heart, and I never want to give up the roots, stems, and blossoms of community. I want to say yes to challenges, hard work, and of course, survival, and also to the space in between, where life just breathes.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to have all those things, but hopefully, I should be able to know them when I see them, and with luck, to say yes. I wish the same for you, whatever matters to you.