This weekend I had one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life. This might seem somewhat of an over-exaggeration, but I can assure you that it is not. I had the luck of experiencing a beautiful Ecco2k and Bladee concert this weekend and it genuinely changed my life. It honestly is not something I can easily put into words but I want to try so that I can share this experience with whoever reads this. The main lesson I taught myself throughout experiencing this weekend is that the best way to live my life is by living true to myself. I often ignore parts of myself and things that make me happy so that I’m more aligned with others. That does nothing for me but keep me from doing things that would help me love the life that I am living, and this is the only life that I have the only thing I can do is love it. Coming to understanding this took a long time, but the concert this weekend thrust me into a full understanding of this concept. If the concert were to work out in any way that wasn’t exactly the way that it ended up working out, I’m not sure I would be coming to the same conclusion about my life as I have. I had to be alone and feel the crushing feeling of what that is like before I could experience true bliss so that I could understand this concept fully.
Originally, I had bought a ticket for my friend and me to go to this concert together. Unfortunately, though, she wasn’t allowed into the venue even after she had spent around $100 on a fake ID. To me, this was the start of an awful night. I also had gotten the molly I brought there confiscated, but honestly, I was asking for it by how stupidly I hid it so I can only be mad at myself for that. These things combined with the fact that I was now alone and had 5 more hours until I was going to be able to see Ecco’s performance made me start crying and have one of the worst nights I’ve had in quite some time. It wasn’t until a few hours into waiting on a bench that an extremely sweet girl sat next to me and we started talking. Both of us ended up spending all our time at the concert together; if it wasn’t for her sitting down at that exact moment, I probably would have left and not had this amazing life-changing experience. Around 8:30pm is when we started walking around and seeing what performances were where and seeing if there was anything good happening. There were three rooms at the venue: one room played club music, another played EDM (this was the room Ecco2k and Bladee performed in), and another played rap. The room that played EDM was an outdoor venue and there aren’t enough words to describe how large this room was. There was a screen with beautiful visuals that wrapped around the front of the audience, I’d say it was about 400-500 feet long. There were also 4-5 different balconies that were behind the audience on the floor that people could stand up on and watch the performance. As soon as I saw how large the stage and room for the audience were, I knew this was going to be a concert unlike any other I’d ever been to.
The girl that spent my night with at the concert I never got the name of, or I might have but have forgotten but I don’t remember giving my name out that night, so I’ll just refer to her as the girl as I continue writing this. The girl and I split two acid tabs together around 9pm and went from room to room dancing and experiencing music from artists we had never heard before. The artists were nothing special to me until the girl had us go and listen to a band called “Boy Harsher” that was the performance before Ecco. I had never listened to music by this artist before but it was definitely music that I would have eventually found on my own. The vibe I got from their music was that they were heavily influenced by trance rave music from the 80s and I had such a blast dancing alongside everyone else! There was one girl specifically that was in front of me that I was watching dance and I was so mesmerized. She was having so much fun on her own and the way that she danced and let the music flow through her body and exit her fingers was something that I caught onto and began doing myself. When it was getting closer to Ecco’s set, the girl and I made our way to the front slowly as Boy Harsher continued to play through their set. As Boy Harsher was wrapping up their set, we had reached the barricade and slowly pushed ourselves so that we were pushing our entire bodies against it and prepared ourselves for Ecco to come on.
I’ve been at the barricade before for other concerts I’ve attended but this was much more intense. I was directly in front of the middle of the stage and pushed up against the barricade so harshly that a bruise formed on my hips. The stage wrapped around the audience so much that all I could see was the beautiful visuals in front of me and absorb all of it. If I had to say an exact length, I’d say that while Ecco was performing he was probably 4-5 feet from me while on the stage. Ecco began playing a little bit before midnight and I was immediately speechless. There is genuinely no proper way to get across how fantastic this performance was so that while reading you can get a grasp on what I experienced. Ecco is such an incredibly talented musician and the performance he put on for all of us was unable to be expressed with human words. I took very few videos of this performance because I wanted to experience it in the rawest way possible, but the videos I did take show how beautiful the performance was. I won’t go much into the performance in this post, as the main reason for writing this is more the impact the performance had on me rather than the actual performance itself. Though I would like to touch on two specific moments during Ecco’s set. There was a moment when he jumped off of the stage onto the barricade, which was incredibly difficult to balance on, and I among others held him up as he continued to sing and touch hands. Another moment that I will remember for the rest of my life is when he was reaching out and touching those in the audience and I was reaching out as far as I could and he saw me, smiled, and began reaching past people’s hands to touch mine. During that, I couldn’t do anything but think about how I would have missed this if I allowed myself to be suffocated by the feelings of sadness that were taking up most of my brain only hours prior to that moment.
Ecco has been an artist that I have enjoyed for a short period, but during that time he became one of my favorite artists to listen to. His music is so ridiculously beautiful, with lyrics that cut to the core and those that struggle with some of the same issues that he sings about can gain a lot of comfort from his songs. I’m one of the people that can garner a lot of comfort from his music, and one song, in particular, resonates with me: In The Flesh. I’ve always been someone to struggle with finding who I really am, as is painfully clear in the posts I make on this site, and this song is about that. It was one of the first songs he performed and I sang so loudly I forgot my voice was my own as it began to melt into the chorus of the audience. The entire performance was just more beautiful than words could describe. Another thing during the concert that made me feel closer to finding out how to more truly live my life was the fact that whenever I turned around at the concert, I saw thousands of people ready to watch Ecco. Thousands of people supported him in being himself and performing art that had not existed before he brought it into reality. Not only do they all love him for everything that he brings into this world, but that acknowledgment from others didn’t come for some time. Ecco is currently 27 years old and has only recently been genuinely gaining success and fame from his art. 27 is an age that is not even comprehensible to me, which is what made me realize that my life does not need to be as linear as I think it has to be. My age is something that scares me, as I believe that I am too late to begin collecting every experience that has been destined to be in my life. Most people live 6 times the amount of time I have currently lived, and yet I believe that my life is nearly over before I have even gotten close to reaching 25? Once I verbalize it, I realize how stupid it sounds, but it isn’t something that I have consciously tried to make myself understand so I have never doubted that it is the truth. As I was watching him perform, I thought about how I got to that moment. If I had gone through my life that night as I have for the years up until that point, I would have left hours ago having thrown away the possibility of having this experience. I have lived my life being scared to do anything and everything. Every word I have let exit my lips has been carefully calculated for hours before. I never exist in the present moment and am constantly thinking of what could have been rather than bringing what I want into my own reality. I have never lived more true to myself than I did that night.
Overthinking is something that I have been plagued with the need to do for as long as I have had conscious thought and because of that, I have lost countless opportunities. The feeling of regret is something that is constantly on my mind and since that concert, I have decided to live by one thing: Never feel regret. I am going to try and do everything that I want to do without letting the little voice in the back of my head try and hold me back. The fears that I have are only real to me and the insecurities I worry about don’t cross anyone’s mind but my own. Finding what makes the basic building blocks of my being and staying true to that is crucial to living a more fulfilling life. Also, while it’s incredibly terrifying, opening up is one of the main things that I need to become more comfortable with doing to grow closer with those in my life that mean a great deal to me. I have slowly started to do this recently, but this concert has told me that I need to get more comfortable with this immediately. This is not something I should learn to become more accustomed to slowly, as I am at the age where I should already be used to it. Something that helps me immensely is the friends that love me more than words can explain, as they have helped me feel comfortable being who I am more than anyone has in the past before. I want to get to a point where I can speak to those I have never spoken to and feel no fear in doing so. While I’m aware it’s good to have a little awareness of when a situation when communicating with a stranger may be somewhat dangerous, I still want to be able to have this skill. As I grow to be more comfortable with myself, I think something like that will become second nature.
Connecting with strangers is not strange or odd, even though I have been telling myself that it is for as long as I can remember. There have been countless times when I have seen someone in real life where I have wanted to reach out and say something, usually compliment them on some aspect of their physical appearance, and I have held back in fear of their reaction. It’s funny I think this way yet get so overjoyed when strangers do this to me, which is part of why I understand why my thought process dealing with this is so hypocritical and hurts no one but me. All of my friends were strangers to me before I got to know them, so why is it so odd to reach out to someone I might see in a store to get to know them better? The girl I met at the concert I had never known before then, obviously as I still don’t know her name, and I ended up having one of the best nights of my life with her. My friend that was unable to get into the venue because she was not of age ended up having an amazing night herself with people she happened to meet that night in line as well. If that was me, I’m more than positive that I would just end up crying and then going back home, but instead, she did not let her head fall, and while she was disappointed she connected with others in front of her. She is not afraid to allow herself to hang out on a line so that she makes new friends and brings more names and faces into her life. Honestly, she probably doesn’t even view something like this as scary or life-changing as I view it because this is what she has been living her life like for as long as she can imagine. She is such a motivation to me and I cannot wait until I am at a point in my life where I can talk to others with the same confidence and joy as she does. This is something that I believe will be the hardest for me to come around to, but because of that, it is one of the main things I will work myself up to. I believe that I will begin to have a life that I am so incredibly happy to live once I am at a point where I feel comfortable enough to do this.
The experiences I had this weekend made me realize that while I’m not sure what direction my life is going, that does not have to be a terrifying thought. Having no direction does not mean I am lost, and honestly, I am not going in truly no direction with my life. All I know is I want to be happy so I do things that I am positive will bring me pure happiness. To me, this is living with a purpose. I believe that this is something all people have to get to one day, and while I am not fully to a point where I can believe this with all my heart and not feel the weight of regrets and depression on me, I know that this is what is the truth. I will continue to live my life the truest to myself that I can and live each day trying to find happiness so that I go to sleep each night with my heart full of fulfillment. Talking to others, even strangers is not something that is going to be seen as shameful, and instead, I will meet so many others I would not have the possibility of meeting outside of that moment. Even right now, I can think of the faces of 4 people that have been lost out in the vastness of the world and my chances of seeing them again are extremely slim if none at all. It will be extremely difficult, but going forward I will begin to live truer to myself and attempt to do the things that I fear the most. The worst thing that I could meet in my future when living my life like this is rejection and when that small rejection is then compared to the overwhelming happiness I will base my life around, it will fade into the background and become nothing more than a funny story. I am just as worthy of love and happiness as everyone else that has existed. As I’ve stated countless times before, life is meant to be lived alongside others and if I continue to regret the past and think about what could have been, how can I live in the present with those I love? Living in the now and connecting with others is the only way I can someday learn to live the life that I was born to live. I am so thankful that I was able to have the experiences I did at that concert and was able to see my life from a new perspective, and I’m so thankful that a man as pure to himself as Ecco is someone who has played a huge contributing factor to me being able to do that.
Something else that I would like to talk about in a more relaxed fashion about my trip to New York to end this post is about how it has helped me gain a newfound respect for artists. Art has been something I have been slightly interested in for some time now, as is seen through the photographs I post to this site, but also something that has scared me too much to put my all into. Taking a leap into creating art so pure to yourself that you are basically showing a part of yourself to everyone who happens to see it is an incredibly terrifying thing to do, yet they manage to do it. Their motivation to create art in a way that brings them happiness has given me my own form of motivation to begin doing this for myself. I’m not sure what type of art I will begin to create, but I will try to stay more true to myself than I ever have while doing it. That way, regardless of the quality of whatever I create I will know that it is more true to myself than anything else anyone could create. I really do want to find a style of drawing that I am comfortable with, so I believe this along with photography is what I will begin to pure myself into. I also have been filled with an urge to move to New York to pursue this dream, as the art community where I live is nowhere near as vast as it is in New York, but that is simply another dream of mine.
I love you so much Ecco2k!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.˙· 𓆝.° ｡˚𓆛˚｡ °.𓆞.° ｡˚𓆝˚｡ °.𓆛.° ｡˚𓆞 .˙ 