I've pretty much hit a brick wall.
I'm 19 and trying to learn musical composition. I've been at it for about a year now, and it's been a trainwreck. A whole year and one "finished" (and crappy) composition. I can't go to college, as I can't afford it, nor do I want to tackle higher education right now after how shitty grade school was to me. Even with that, music is what I'm most passionate about, and if I can't study it in college I'll just have to pave my own path. Here's the thing: everything I write is just... sound. I know about melody, harmony, form, dynamics, texture and all that other technical jibjab, but anytime I write something, it's either unintelligible, emotionless slop, or slightly less unintelligible, emotionless slop. The one thing that's kept me afloat for the past year, that's driven me forward. Is about to be my own downfall. I spend hours a day listening to the music I love, yet can't pick anything out of their music that I like without shamelessly ripping that piece off, or writing something so drastically different it doesn't even sound like the source material or its composer. The last couple weeks I've fallen so low that I can't even write a single phrase before deleting it and starting over because of how god awful it is.