My Afterglow Moment: Unlikely Beginnings

Written by Neel Homchowdhury

My Afterglow Moment is a series where staff writers and editors share their favorite music-related memories.

I love beginnings. I guess debuts have always been my favorite parts of stories, like when you’re first introduced to a certain character, or you see the conception of a character’s arc. And then they have their defining moment where you see their whole outlook on life change, and then the score swells, and we cut to 15 years later. Sure, the meat of the story isn’t generally found within that first arc, but to me, without that initial change, the rest of the story can’t exist. That’s why when I think of my favorite moment in music, it isn’t buried somewhere in my 2 decades of musical experience; it’s at the very beginning.

I wasn’t very well-liked when I was growing up. I was an annoying, overly-friendly, hyperactive chihuahua of a kid, meaning that I didn’t really have that many friends or the respect of anyone around me. What I did have was musical talent and overbearing parents, and as a result, I spent the majority of my early childhood indoors honing my craft. Cut to a few years later: I’m in middle school and have the opportunity to perform at my first real talent show. At that point, it felt like it was just me, my guitar, and George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" against the world. I’d never thought I’d ever identify with Eminem, but at this point the first few lines of “Lose Yourself” were more than just words to me, and I was a few minutes away from getting “mom’s spaghetti” all over my shirt.

Anyways, I ended up going on stage and doing my thing.

And this is the point where the cinematic analogy of the comeback kid really came back into play. I finished, looked up, and then heard clapping. Not in the way you clap at mediocre t short films and improv class performances — it was legitimate, heartfelt applause. That night is one my earliest memories of being legitimately liked for what I did in my childhood, even long after it’d actually happened. It was one of the first times I felt accepted. No longer was I just the annoying kid; I was the annoying kid who could do music. From that point on, I desperately chased that feeling, wanting to perform more and more, forever in pursuit of that performance high.

Music may have been something that I was pushed into and used as an escape, but as I’ve gotten older, it’s something that surrounds almost every aspect of my life, and probably will going forward. And I’m not saying that throughout the past two decades there haven’t been a great deal of other defining musical moments for me, but that initial high? That’s something that I will never forget.