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I AM NOT MASTERING AN INSTRUMENT, I AM DATING ALL OF THEM (Open Relationship, Banjo Knows About the Concertina)

June 28, 2026

A cartoonishly dramatic group-therapy circle held in a cozy cluttered home office, four anthropomorphized instruments sitting in folding chairs working through their feelings: a five-string banjo with a smug confident grin and crossed string-arms because it KNOWS it’s the favorite, a tiny ukulele dabbing one eye with a tissue while humming something sad, a synthesizer wearing tiny sunglasses and vaping fog in the back not taking any of this seriously, and a guilt-trip concertina off to the side covered in a thin layer of dust with a single accusatory sticky note reading “YOU SAID A YEAR AGO,” a therapist clipboard on the floor titled “ATTACHMENT STYLES: ALL OF THEM,” warm lamp light, a cat watching judgmentally from a bookshelf

People who play music well tend to play one thing well. They picked the cello at age six, got yelled at by a Russian woman for a decade, and now they are simply The Cello Person. I respect that. I will never be that.

I am a serial dabbler. I am, musically speaking, in an open relationship with roughly four instruments at once, and none of them are getting my full attention, and somehow everyone involved seems fine with it except the concertina, who we’ll get to.

Here’s the current rotation.

The banjo gets the most action. I sit down with my Goodtime, run through the basic clawhammer strum—bum-ditty, bum-ditty—and that is genuinely the entire relationship. I am not getting better at it in any measurable way. I have simply achieved a stable, loving plateau of plinky plinky plunk, and the banjo, being the most emotionally generous instrument ever built, does not hold this against me. You cannot be sad while playing banjo. You cannot be ambitious while playing banjo either, it turns out. You just bum-ditty until you feel slightly more like a person.

Then there’s the ukulele, which I have given an actual project, because apparently I need at least one instrument I can disappoint with specific goals. I’m working on “Not in Nottingham”—the Roger Miller song from the 1973 Disney Robin Hood, sung by a sad rooster while everyone’s in jail and the whole kingdom is vibing at rock bottom. It is the most melancholy four chords ever assigned to a children’s movie and I am obsessed with it. Am I close to finishing it? No. Have I been “almost done” for a suspiciously long time? No comment. But it’s a beautiful sad rooster song and I will get there.

A small ukulele standing on a tiny medieval stage in a cartoon jail cell, performing for an audience of unimpressed Disney-style woodland prisoners, a spotlight on it, a single tear-shaped musical note floating up from the strings, a sign in the corner reading “NOT IN NOTTINGHAM — REHEARSAL 47,” a rooster in the front row nodding along supportively, dramatic theatrical lighting, dust motes, very cozy and very sad in a charming way

And then, whenever the mood strikes—which is unpredictable—I make random beats on a synth. No goal. No song. No structure. Just me, twisting knobs until something sounds cool, going “oh that’s nice,” and then never saving it or doing anything with it ever again. The synth is the friend you only text at midnight. It knows what it is. It’s fine with the arrangement.

You may have noticed a pattern. I have noticed it too. I have thirty unfinished novels for the exact same reason—my brain doesn’t do one thing well, it does many things, enthusiastically, in cycles, forever. For years I treated this like a character flaw. The voice in my head said pick one, master it, stop being so scattered. But here’s the thing I’ve finally landed on: the joy was never in the mastery. The joy is in the wandering. The dopamine lives in the new. I’m not failing to commit—I’m just in love with the part where you’re still bad at something and everything’s still possible.

Which brings us to the concertina.

About a year ago I got a concertina. I have barely played it. It sits there, on its little shelf, radiating quiet disappointment, like a gym membership with bellows. Every time I walk past it I feel a tiny stab of guilt, which I have been heroically ignoring for twelve months.

No more. I am declaring it here, publicly, where you can hold me to it: the concertina is my next happy obsession. And I have a reason now, which is the only thing my brain accepts as currency—I want to learn sea shanties. Specifically. The whole grim, communal, swaying, “haul away boys” of it. There is no instrument more correct for a sea shanty than a concertina wheezing along while you pretend you have ever been on a boat that wasn’t a paddleboat. I want it badly. And wanting it badly is, historically, the only thing that gets me to actually start.

Will I master the concertina? Absolutely not. That’s not the deal. The deal is I get to fall in love with a new thing, make some terrible wheezing noises, and feel a little more alive on a random Tuesday. The banjo will understand. It’s an open relationship. Everybody knew.

Pick four instruments, learn none of them, and yell shanties into the void.