A Thousand Tiny Decisions

“Delighted to share that life really sucks right now”: Composing music in hard times

written by Amelia Clarkson, composer

Composing is not easy for me. Music doesn’t come to me in a vision or a dream. Inspiration doesn’t find me, and I am not blessed by a fog of genius descending from above. My process is slow, physical, frustrating and relentless.

Amelia Clarkson

Delighted to share that life really sucks right now

I am delighted to announce that I am terrified I’ve overcommitted (again). My brain is sizzling, my inbox is a graveyard of unanswered emails (sorry) and I am floating between my two polar states of intense productivity and gentle numbness. There’s a burning sensation tattooed behind my shoulder blades, and I regret to inform you that I can no longer differentiate between your friendly nudge and being chased by a bear.

I can’t pinpoint when this started. Perhaps it was a gradual slide; the cumulative of every choice I’ve made about my career, where I live and what I chase. Maybe one too many flights, or one too many Zoom calls, or one too many composed notes. Either way, life is morphing from friendly animated snowman to all-out horror ice monster looming overhead.

Anyway! I’m MAKING a THING!!! I might have no things left to give. No ideas. Between the writing and the running and the funding applications and just trying to find a different coffee place where I don’t feel guilty about occupying a table for more than 25 minutes, it’s entirely possible I’ve used my imagination up. All my ideas are horrible. Speaking of horrible, I think I might be a horrible friend. I cannot believe somebody commissioned me. Maybe I should write music about how horrible my music is.

So grateful for this opportunity – that’s not even part of this bit – my gratitude is genuine. My gratitude is massive. My gratitude is contorting into self-deprecation.  

A therapist once told me she didn’t think I had enough capacity to fit in therapy. Officially too overwhelmed to deal with my overwhelm. Hope she’s doing well.

Do I create because life is hard or is life hard because I create?

2025 has been a challenging year. 2025 has also been a strange time to have a challenging year. The world is crumbling and my difficulties feel embarrassingly small beside everything else. I have composed 84 minutes of music in twelve months, spanning three orchestral pieces, a solo cello piece and two dance works. If you plotted my life’s stresses alongside my musical output, the graphs would blur into the same line.

I have a self-diagnosed condition which I have self-titled the chronic big feels. I feel things massively, broadly and deeply, and it has always been this way. My lows are gut-wrenching and devastating, and my highs are stratospheric. But it’s not all bad — I think this gives me empathy, high emotional awareness, and significantly shapes my creativity. My music is an outlet and a vessel, and sometimes a lifeboat for things I don’t know how to process. My work has never been separate from my feelings; often I write music that grapples with difficult subjects, and sometimes I’m not sure whether that helps me or hinders.

What is perhaps scariest of all is an awareness that if I were blissfully happy all the time, I don’t think I’d be very good at my job. But sometimes, I also wonder whether I’d be happier more of the time if my job wasn’t my job.

I am an Artist and I am Pained

The first artist I learned about in primary school was Vincent van Gogh. We made replicas of The Starry Night, and I became deeply invested in shades of navy, turquoise and yellow, scrawling out my own swirling sky over a sea of tiny black houses. What I remember more clearly than any oil pastel technique, is that Vincent was very, very sad. So sad, he cut off his entire left ear. 

As I grew older, I understood that he likely lived with severe and complex mental illness, but the legend of the mad Sunflower artist and his missing ear stuck. This image seeped so deeply into me that, twenty years later, I still hold the equation: making art = big sad, and big sad = potentially great art. Through my teens, my list of sad artists grew, canonical composers, lost Hollywood starlets, rock icons, each either enduring their sadness or fizzling out too young. There was an aloofness and a glamour to the Tortured Artist. Life hurts so much you simply must create. You ooze artistic promise. Logically, I know this trope is harmful, unsustainable and problematic. And yet, I wonder if it prevails because it is well, true. I don’t know a single creative person who hasn’t battled something huge.

Opportunities in this industry come unpredictably and often all at once. You can be both genuinely grateful and absolutely spent at the same time, but you take the work you’ve dreamed of and fought for, even when you’re running low.

A thousand tiny decisions

In October, the Ulster Orchestra premiered The Rain Keeps Coming, my third orchestral work of the year and the finale to a marathon stretch of writing since October 2024.

Composing is not easy for me. Music doesn’t come to me in a vision or a dream. Inspiration doesn’t find me, and I am not blessed by a fog of genius descending from above. My process is slow, physical, frustrating and relentless. There are long days in the practice room jumping up and down to psyche myself into conquering the next bar. I lie flat on the floor staring at the ceiling chanting “I asked for this life”. I write. 

It’s not the big decisions that wear you down — structure, instrumentation or emotional arc. It’s the tiny ones that scratch away: the next pitch, the next slur, pp? or ppp?. Composing is a thousand micro-decisions in a row until your brain is threadbare. In a heavy writing period, even the smallest question such as “What do you want for dinner?” can unleash a torrential downpour of I don’t know. I don’t know. I cannot know.

Decision fatigue leaks out of the staves and into your life. I can feel physically afraid of the next bar. Update phobias: Spiders. Holes too close together. The next bar.

And yet, I chase new commissions. I apply for this scheme and that funding programme. I return again and again to summon that same part of myself that is exhausted to do it all again. The burnout is a fog I cannot outrun, but the possibility of finding the flow-state I seek is still enough to weather the storm.

My Murky Month

The final month of writing The Rain Keeps Coming is murky. This wasn’t a crisis so much as the reality of freelance life: you keep going. No matter what else is happening, emotionally, financially, physically, you keep doing the thing. The deadlines don’t wait for the part of you that’s tired, or lost, or uninspired. 

Opportunities in this industry come unpredictably and often all at once. You can be both genuinely grateful and absolutely spent at the same time, but you take the work you’ve dreamed of and fought for, even when you’re running low. When this piece for my home orchestra arrived — an opportunity that meant so much — I wanted to pour the very best of myself into it. I was drained from months of constant output. And that comes with a weird guilt of being totally irresponsible. How could I let myself be so depleted when this honour finally landed?

So I did what freelancers do! I meal-prepped like my life depended on it, ran 10k from my fears, cried to my mum on the phone, took up yoga (yes), cried to my PhD supervisors on the phone and pushed on. From the outside, it probably looked like discipline, but in reality, it was endurance. The reality of making art while making a living.

What I love about making stuff

A pretty bleak read so far perhaps, but I will finish with this. I love creating. I love collaborating. I love being terrified I can’t compose the right music and being surprised every time that I’ve conquered that final bar line. I love hearing musicians play my music live. I am insanely grateful for creativity as an outlet and as a lifeline. I just hope that over time, I’ll find a way to find moments of shelter in my composing amongst the downpour.

My score was late. This essay? It’s late too. 

I am delighted to share that life really sucks sometimes, but I am here, still creating and still trying. I hope you’ll try with me.

–

Amelia Clarkson is a composer from County Down in Northern Ireland, working between Belfast and Manchester. Her music is described as “inherent elusiveness… beautifully captured” (Het Parool), blending folk influences with contemporary timbres, exploring modern issues through the lens of nature, mythology and literature.

Spanning stage and concert hall, Amelia’s music has been performed across the UK, Ireland, and Netherlands including at Ireland’s National Concert Hall, Opera Holland Park, Southbank Centre, Elgar Concert Hall, King’s Place, Hugh Lane Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Lyric Belfast and The MAC Belfast. Amelia is currently working towards a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music, supervised by Laura Bowler and Gary Carpenter, as the 2022 Mendelssohn Scholar. Amelia is a 2026 Royal Philharmonic Society composer, and a composer with Music Patron; she is represented by Contemporary Music Centre Ireland as an Associate Composer.