Exposure Therapy

Louise Bourgeois' riverbank sculpture of a giant spider at the Guggenheim Bilbao

The name of my first mixtape is “Exposure Therapy” mainly because, for me, this mixtape is my exposure therapy. I shouldn’t assume people know what exposure therapy is, considering the fact that I didn’t know what it was until fairly recently, so I’ll explain it a bit.

Exposure therapy is the practice of being deliberately exposed to something you fear (like spiders, for instance, if you’re arachnophobic) until you become desensitized to whatever it is you fear. In other words, it’s a way to cure a fear by facing the fear…. facing it a lot! So if you were afraid of spiders, and we put spiders on you, you’d freak out for the fist few times, maybe you’d pass out… but you’d soon learn you weren’t dead, and gradually, over time, you’d calm, and little by little, by the 100th time we put spiders on you, it’d have become somewhat easy.

Exposure therapy is an important concept for me because I’ve been writing and recording music for almost 10 years, but I rarely release any of it, for fear of a million different stupid things related to people hearing and commenting on the work. But I’m sick of being that way, so I figure, rather than pretending like I don’t feel those things, I’ll just do the opposite… I’ll acknowledge them and slowly demolish them with “Exposure Therapy,” hence the title of my first release.

So far it’s working pretty well. I know that this mixtape took me way longer to release than it should have, and I blame that all on “the fear.” But since releasing it, it didn’t kill me, I haven’t died, no one has even talked shit yet, and even when they do, because it’s inevitable, so be it. Since this first release, I’ve decided that I’m capable of releasing a good 10 songs per month if I work good and hard at it, proving that a bit of exposure begets more welcomed exposure.

The “Exposure Therapy” mixtape will be featured on DatPiff.com starting on the 20th of May, which is tomorrow, and I am definitely a little on edge about that because my -listens- are going to go from about 300 to a couple of thousand in the matter of a week… but feeling that fear and dealing with it is all apart of this self-administered therapy.