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.thanks.
-JG-

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

-John Koenig (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Jake Gusto - "sonder"

Personal missive:

"Sonder" is the cost of chasing a dream.

I release "Sonder" at midnight on my one year anniversary in Los Angeles, CA – a year that has been so painfully transformative I'm not sure I can elucidate much greater than this song.

"Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root:
pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance; it means
to suffer." -Mark Danielewski

I wrote "Sonder" at rock bottom. The mental plight that accompanies the pursuit of passion can be as equally destructive as it is fulfilling. 

An individual's purpose (and moreover, turmoil) is as unique as the genetic code from which it is extracted. As I pondered this, a sense of morose engulfed me. I will never fully understand anyone's motives, dreams, desires, reasoning – as they forever exist in a foreign realm.

This notion awoke a sense of self-awareness.

I am only myself. I am the keeper of my fortune. I have the power to respond to doubt, fear, rejection, and failure on my own accord.

So I did. As much as "Sonder" is about agonizing turbulence, its fruition reveals a light in the dark.

-JG