When Your Creativity is Stifled | Rachel Rambach | Listen & Learn Music

A few weeks ago, I was making some updates to the Music Therapy Connections website when an error message popped up. I’ll spare you the technical jargon, but after making a call to my hosting provider, I discovered that my current hosting server is no longer being updated and will prevent my websites from running smoothly and doing everything I need them to do.

The customer support representative recommended that I upgrade to a new server, and explained what the process would look like for doing so. Now, I consider myself to be a pretty tech-savvy person, but a lot of what he was explaining seemed overwhelming and over my head. Even so, it was pretty clear that I needed to take the plunge, and thus began the Great Website Migration of 2017.

Turns out, it was anything but great. I spent the better part of a week on the phone with GoDaddy, or chatting online with their customer service people, or pulling my hair out in frustration because things weren’t going as planned. I was knee deep in FTP, migration plugins, SSL certificates, and mySQL databases. There were a couple days where my sites were completely down, which resulted in a boatload of emails from people trying to access resources. I felt like a huge failure for not being able to figure this out, and for letting people down.

Even more powerful than the feelings of frustration and failure was the sensation that my creativity was being stifled. On any regular day, I’m logged into at least one of my sites, either making changes, blogging, or posting new songs in the store. I couldn’t do any of these things during the migration process, and it was not a good feeling. Luckily, I did have an outlet with my 100 day project on Instagram, but it wasn’t quite the same.

As I write this post a full week after beginning the process, most of my sites are now up and running as they should be (I’m still getting the store sorted out). I can’t tell you how good it feels to be typing this: even just sharing the story with you (which is probably incredibly boring, and for that I apologize) is cathartic. It gives me a new appreciation for having this platform on which to express my creativity, something that I don’t do nearly as often as I should.

I’ve made a practice of focusing my energy on all things positive and intending only favorable outcomes, and I can’t tell you what a difference that has made in my life.The content of this post is the very definition of a first-world problem, and I’m incredibly grateful that right now, it is my biggest problem. I sincerely hope this is the first and last time I ever have to write the word “mySQL databases” on this blog, mostly because I still don’t really understand what they are — and it’s the last thing you want to read about when you come here.

The final step in getting to the other side (other than the work the GoDaddy people are doing as I type!) was venting my feelings and releasing them…so thank you for helping me with that process. Here’s to much less technical jargon and way more music.