The path to self belief

AKA what I've learned from two decades of hiding one half or my life from the other.

There are some of you who know me as Evan. Others as Mecca:83 if you came here through my music. Rise maybe, if you’ve been around a reallllyyy long time. Or even ‘that quiet guy with the camera’ if you met me at one of the events I help organise.

As someone who has spent the last two decades releasing his creative output for the world to judge - whether that’s via record labels, events, self-published zines or just the plain old internet - this article might seem a little odd on the surface. But the truth is I've been hiding the whole time.

Full disclosure: I’m a lifelong introvert, so intentionally placing myself under the spotlight isn’t my go-to play. I’ve only had one press photo in the last decade. This runs much deeper though. For the last 15 years I have effectively run my professional and creative lives as separate universes, interrupted only by very occasional crossover events. And not by my design. 

One particularly anxiety-inducing moment occurred a few years ago when an old musical acquaintance passed me on the street near London’s Euston Station, shouted ‘YES MECCA!’ and fist bumped me in front of two client contacts who have fairly senior roles in a global, blue-chip technology company. My anxiety wasn’t helped by the fact that he was smoking a joint. The ensuing five minutes of conversation with my clients was a slightly awkward, lengthy exchange about my activities outside of the office. I can’t honestly remember if they found it awkward or not. I know I did.

That exchange really encapsulates the reasons I've kept these two worlds separate for so long. Acceptance and understanding. 

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about my workplace’s views on Hip Hop, it’s more about my internalised belief that the things I love outside of work weren’t compatible with mainstream corporate culture. To put it another way: most of the music events I attend or organise smell of Red Stripe and Weed, most of my work events smell of lavender and cologne (except the ones in Vegas maybe). Hip Hop and Technology Marketing are at more or less separate poles of the cultural spectrum.

Last year I stumbled across Deloitte’s ‘Uncovering Culture’ research paper and more importantly, the term covering. In a nutshell, to cover in a workplace context is to downplay certain parts of your identity to better fit in with mainstream corporate cultures. It’s something that over 60% of workers reported doing. It hit me immediately that this is EXACTLY what I'd been doing for over a decade: both in the workplace and out of it.

Unpicking that behaviour has been, and is still, ongoing work. Writing this is one of many steps on the road to reprogramming my thought processes and moving my two worlds a little closer together.

So what’s the point of this ramble? There isn’t one, other than honesty and self-accountability on my side. 

The truth I've come to understand is that both parts of my universe benefit from one another greatly. Creativity from one feeds into the other and vice versa. And the more I try to encapsulate everything I do - from writing, releasing records, or documenting scenes with my photography, to helping B2B customers tell their stories and supporting client strategy at work - I’ve come to realise that it’s all exactly the same thing. Storytelling.

So expect more crossover this year. More ideas. More experiments. And if I can offer you one piece of advice (am I even qualified for this?!), it would simply be to cultivate self belief and pride in the things you do. I intend to do the same from here-on out.