Pursuit of Happiness: Midwxst Found Serenity in Solitude

In general, maintaining a work-life balance is hard even for us normies. But doing it as an emerging rap star can be borderline impossible. After all — you can shut down your computer, but you can’t really unplug your identity. For a writer like myself, it might mean falling asleep to the sounds of Dragon Ball Z season three, melted frozen coffee on my table, and my wrists sitting on the withered keyboard of my MacBook Air. For Midwxst, it looks more like falling asleep… well, somewhere. 

“I’d wake up like ‘Where the f—k am I?’,” the 23-year-old tells me in a Zoom call last week. He’s remembering those chaotic New York nights that took him from party to party to whomever’s house the night brought him. It seems cool, but it was actually a symptom of a spiritual and mental burnout that eventually led him to relocate to quieter spaces. In his case, it was Georgia, where he moved a year and a half ago. 

Remembering the isolation of transactional friendships and NYC nightlife, Midwxst, born Edgar Nathaniel Saratt III, created Solitude in Silence, a maximalist rap-hyperpop album that is, by nature, something close to the exact opposite of silence. For “Come and Go,” he reflects on those hollow relationships that used to sap his energy. “I kill the only opp, read his obituary / Knew n***as fake as fuck, my mom told me, ‘Be wary’ / Of who I call my friend, I had to test that theory, uh / And I hate that she was right,” he raps, with his vocals careening off the beat like an apocalyptic pinball game.”

Much of Solitude in Silence plays out the same way, with Midwxst’s ruminations ringing through the neon soundscapes with a clarity that belies the frenzied nature of the album. It’s a self-awareness he cultivated through the time he reserved to sort through his own feelings. “Sometimes you need to take that time alone to figure that out about yourself so that you can be even happier,” he tells me. 

Speaking to Okayplayer for the latest edition of Pursuit of Happiness, Midwxst explains some of that journey. 

Midwxst: When I’m having a bad day, I usually throw on therapeutic music. I’ll usually roll a blunt. If I'm not doing those two things, I'm probably talking about it with either my girlfriend or my parents or my family. I have conversations about it because the more that I sit on my feelings sometimes, the more intense they get.

I love nature, so if I'm ever mad or I've had a bad day, I'll just go and sit on my porch. I have a lounge swing chair out there. I'll just go out there, sit in it, play some music and close my eyes and chill. It’s just removing myself from the busyness of my life, and removing myself from the busyness of being a rapper and the things that come with those things. 

Getting out of the midst of those things is very important for your mental. I didn't really understand that at all until last year. Before I moved to Atlanta, I lived in New York for close to three years. When I was there, I was outside all the time. I was falling asleep with girls in cribs that I didn't even know where I was. But it was just where the night ended, and then there's five other people outside on the couch, and I'm sleeping in the bed, I'm knocked out. 

There were so many actual moments where that happened and it just spiraled into me not having as much patience, not being as kind of a person, puffing my chest out more and feeling like I have to lean into the bravado of being a rapper. All that stuff overly f—d with my head. It f—d with my self, my self-confidence and how I looked at myself and what I thought of myself because there was no distinction between me, Edgar, and Midwxst. It was all one person. It was all one chaos.

I had to get out of there because my mental was just so fried from that place. It was hard for me to even go out to events, because I just felt this weighing anxiousness on my chest to feel like something was gonna happen, or I was gonna see somebody I didn't like, or X, Y, and Z, like, and I just don't like living like that.

So I was like, “You know what? Deuces, I'm out of here.”  I have some family that live down in the South, so I just found a crib that I liked, built a studio in it, moved in with my girlfriend, and yeah, I've been here for like a year and a half now, so it's been nice.

I still want to improve. I want to fix my sleep schedule. I'll definitely work on my impulsiveness on the financial side of things. But really, I feel like I'm probably in like my best fighting shape I've been in in my 23 years of being on this Earth. I have the most clarity I've ever had.

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