I’ll be honest, I’ve just been too burnt out to organise anything for it. It’s pretty hard to not feel like I have anything left to engage in celebration. This project's taken so fucking much.

I have so many dreams for it: I want it to find ways to help everyone - especially the people that don't yet know how amazing our local music communities are - get absolutely pumped for this amazing scene.

And there's the storytelling. There's the celebration of talent, the thoughts of leaders, the context-setting of scenes and subcultures, the experiences of the wise. We have got to do more to help people understand why being a musician is so fucking hard, but more importantly we just need to get out and fucking support. That means being part of your local underground community, not going to more shows at the Enmore. The underground is hurting more. This isn't a conversation. Stop it, it isn't.

If you have a better underground, you'll save your precious industry. Stop clutching your pearls over festival closures and snap to fucking reality. We need to think about systemic, holistic health. Punters aren't going to shows. We have a demand problem. People have stopped caring. And yet all I can see is build-it-and-they-will-come plans that still have economic output as the primary measure of success, or just a general sense that funding is going to save us. It's not going to work.

The work of SydneyMusic is really fucking important, I'm convinced of it. Our growth has been astonishing. The Instagram account has grown from 3,000 to over 10,000 in exactly a year. The website now gets 20,000 unique browsers a month, and it's rising every month. The stories are constant. 78% of people see more live music because of us. 79% of people discover new music because of us. People don't know what they'd use if we stopped existing. They want us to exist.

I just didn't expect it to be this hard.

At every breakthrough there have been another few roadblocks. There have been all manner of things to overcome - limited time and energy being chief amongst them. Trying to do middle management while contributing to a 30-hour-a-week workload on the site didn't work, and it caused immense burnout. Trying to juggle building a sustainable but flexible personal income that enables me to spend time getting SydneyMusic sustainable while spending more time with my kids has been incredibly difficult to achieve - especially in the state I started, and the context switching and reactive environment has done my head in.

I'm so fucking tired. I just need a fucking holiday - like a proper 4 week holiday where I get to zone out. My head constantly feels like I'm on fire, the stress just feels like a dull roar, like tinnitus or a beach shack right on the beach. I'm sick of not seeing my kids. I'm sick of staying inside because I'm so broke. I'm sick of wanting to just keep going another couple of months because we're so close.

I'm so done. And yet I don't want to give up, because I want this for us. I know it's making the scene better. I hear the stories every time I walk out my door. It's wonderful.

I just wish it wasn't so hard.