Tickling The Ivories

I recently bought myself a piano keyboard with some Christmas money.

I hadn't touched a piano in years -- not since I left Saskatchewan in 2019. I had taken piano lessons in both the first and last years of my degree, but since I had come into the program essentially without an instrument and since the program director was an opera singer, I had by default become a voice major. The worst and most detested voice major in the program, mind you, but a voice major nonetheless.

What I had really wanted to learn was piano. But I didn't advocate for myself -- I felt embarrassed that I couldn't even read music and here I wanted to be in the music program. At least in voice you could fake it without reading music. You should be better than this was the thought that constantly dogged everything I did -- dance, voice, piano, anything.

I took eight years' worth of music theory in the space of two. I learned enough piano to play my own melody lines in practice and to sight read new choir pieces. The rare time I attempted to play something on the piano in its own right, I noticed the peace that settled over my soul as I watched my fingers work out a recognisable -- and not unpleasant -- tune. But then the voices of everybody I knew would come back in my brain, shrieking and strident: you should be better than this.

When I left Saskatchewan in 2019, I was so tired of hearing that voice that I abandoned singing entirely. I celebrated my final day in the practice room, before my last show there. I would never have to set foot in those rooms again. I would never have anybody give me a failing grade on the voice God gave me ever again.

My piano skills died with it. Due to the absolutely insane schedule that school demands performance (read: voice) majors keep, the only time I really got to play piano was when I was learning a new song for my voice lessons. With my voice lessons firmly and definitely behind me, I also no longer played piano.

For a while, I forgot that I had ever known how to play. The pandemic came and took all the theatre opportunities away, so I lost my ability to sight-read music as well. I remembered the hellish hours of voice training during college, but the fleeting seconds of piano were lost.

This past Christmas, my husband offered to buy me a piano keyboard and showed me the one he had in mind. It looked great, but it was more money than I knew he could afford to spend on me and talked him out of it. But then a relative of his gave us both a not-insubstantial amount of money. Despite my pleas to put mine in our savings account for a house, my husband insisted his relative would have wanted us to spend it on something fun.

I have never in my life possessed a sum of money more than $20 with no option to spend it on the practical things of life. I sat on that money for literal months as I tried to think of something 'fun' to buy. I thought of a bass guitar -- something I had wanted to learn for years. But reading reviews on beginner basses overwhelmed me, and I wondered if I was really going to have the energy to learn a new instrument with my few remaining scraps of energy at the end of each day.

But then I remembered the piano keyboard my husband had shown me months earlier. I had some piano experience. I wouldn't be learning a whole new instrument from scratch. And I knew my husband would approve since it had been his idea in the first place.

So I ordered it, it arrived, and my mother and sister (an advanced pianist) sent me some sheet music my sister was no longer using. I found a copy of Michael W. Smith's Great Is The Lord is the pages they sent, and while that's not my favourite worship song or even my favourite MWS song, the memories of listening to it on my dad's vinyl copy drove me to pick that one.

The first week was mostly a rude awakening of just how much music theory I had forgotten. I spent days just trying to remember how key signatures worked (my theory books were all at my parents' house), and it took about as long to remember the notes of the bass clef (the treble clef was more hardwired into my soprano brain, but even that had taken a hit). But it began to come back to me, and I even began to develop some smoothness, then to play both hands together through some parts of the song.

And every time I sat down at that keyboard to run through the song, I felt a brush of... peace? maybe even joy? tickle my shoulders. It was so soft that I didn't even notice it at first. But after a few weeks, I realised it was the same feeling I get when I dance. That same peace, that calm, that assurance that all is right with the world, if only for a moment. And I began to remember having that same feeling the few times I played piano in its own right at college. Practicing voice had only ever been a source of stress and fear and frustration. Playing piano had been so lovely and calming that I had avoided it because it was 'wasting my time...' if I wasn't in a state of maximum stress while doing it, it probably was because I was using it to procrastinate on doing something useful... right?

But now, nobody is grading me on my voice or my piano skills, so I'm continuing to practice piano and relish the peace it brings me. I still don't have a space to dance in (and at the moment, I also do not have a healthy back to dance with), but at least I have this, this one modicum of peace in a world that feels increasingly and heavily against me. I'm only sad that it took me this long to realise that piano is what I should have been pursuing all along.

Music Day - Ten Thousand Lightyears

After the disco/dance/pop reign of Boney M., they took a page from ABBA's book and did some rather more serious and introspective work, and in fact they stuck to it longer than ABBA did. What you hear on the typical 'greatest hits of Boney M. album' is NOT the whole story, in fact, those albums only cover the first (and more frivolous) half of their career.

Perhaps their greatest (and most unrecognised) work is the first half of the album Ten Thousand Lightyears, a song cycle about escaping planet Earth for a better world in a plot that foreshadows Halo (assuming I understand Halo correctly, which I probably don't). This song cycle culminates in the epic title track, a slow burner of an anthem that so perfectly captures the sehnsucht for a better world that only Terry Scott Taylor/Daniel Amos can match that level of intense emotional longing.

The song starts with what sounds like a real live string bass, immediately followed by a slow sparking synth melody, then some gentle, airy percussion. This builds slowly for well over a minute before Liz Mitchell's warm voice soars out over the canopy of stars that the synths have laid out before her, painting a picture of a utopian world ten thousand lightyears somewhere out in space... they practice love and they know what it takes... lightyears away, far from pain... came to a place full of grace and of peace...

And it somehow keeps building. Some lovely harmonies follow, then some soft brass in the chorus. For all the mellowness and heart-wrenching lyrics, this is still very clearly Boney M. -- the percussion still somehow recalls hits like Rasputin.

In the second verse, the dreamer is awakened back into a rude and very not-utopian reality.

Suddenly it's ringing in my ears

Why is it now; I don't want to be here

...how I wish that this dream could go on.

By the second chorus, the voices have doubled into what sounds like a small choir, and the music continues to grow richer and fuller, sprinkled with some pizzicato strings and given added richness and polish with the brooding brass section.

Liz Mitchell is capable of incredible vocal depth and emotion, and by and large Boney M. underexploited this ability (probably the only thing they didn't exploit). One sees it on the infamous Christmas album a little bit, but this song was the best opportunity she had to do it with Boney M. proper and boy, does she ever seize it.

Title: Ten Thousand Lightyears

Artist: Boney M.

Album: Ten Thousand Lightyears

Year: 1984

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Obviously this song resonates a lot with me, as I often feel the exact same way. There is a place beyond the stars where Brittney and M and my cousin all live, and I so desperately want to go, to get away from the pain and abuse of this world. I'm not even thirty yet, but I am so, so world-weary. I understand what old people mean when they say they're 'ready to go.' I get it. I am too. I want to go beyond the stars and rest for the first time in my life -- rest from the constant terror that I'm going to breathe wrong and offend somebody or that I'm going to have someone at my throat because I did the literal exact thing they had asked me to do the day before and rest from knowing every single second of my life that I will literally always be a failure and a disappointment. I want to go there so badly it often brings tears to my eyes.

I'd give all I've got if that's where I could stay...

And I would. I really, really would.

The Annual Goalpost

I kind of dislike the annual goal-setting. It's hard. Part of it is because a lot of these goals are pretty abstract and difficult to measure progress in, but part of it is also because I genuinely have no idea what province I'm going to be in this time next year. I graduate (hopefully) in April... and then what? I have three viable options, and at the moment it's a waiting game to see which will pan out.

As far as that goes -- I want to stay in the performing arts. I've already got a few auditions lined up for 2019 -- the second is in less than a week. So I guess that counts as a goal. But what do I want to do around that -- when I'm not actually at rehearsal or practicing or performing? What do I want to work on in practice?

First -- dance.
If I do end up moving, goal #1 is to find a practice space. I'm spoiled here right now -- I have relatively unlimited access to a studio a five-minute walk from my house, and I have a connection to another studio in the next town over if I need it. I've had the opportunity to practice literally every day for the past two years and I would not be where I am now as a dancer if it wasn't for that. In dance, perhaps more than any other discipline, daily practice is absolutely CRUCIAL even just to maintain technique. Dance technique/ability gets lost faster than technique in any other discipline I've attempted.
Goal #2 would be to find classes (and a job to pay for them). If I can't find a studio to practice in on my own time, this would be the next best thing, plus it's also important to have a trained teacher looking at my technique and giving corrections on a regular basis even when I am practicing on my own regularly. I know at this point a career as a full-time classical ballerina is not likely, but I would still like to train toward that level, just for my own strength and enjoyment (and also to prove to those who said I couldn't that I can).

I want to do more choreography. Of course this includes National Choreography Month in January, but it also includes more dance videos. For 2018 my goal was to make multiple new dance videos (I believe I actually said 'one per month'), but unfortunately I only accomplished one (plus two live videos). I do want to continue the videos into 2019 though. At least two videos? I hope? Hopefully more, but realistically (financially) I might only be able to pull off two. I'd like to do at least one ballet one (to show that I'm not just a tapper -- then again, I'm definitely stronger in tap than ballet and I don't want the ballet videos to suffer artistically because of my lack of ability).

Talking of choreography, I've been wanting to make a longer story-show for a while now. Like maybe a half-hour to an hour of dance that somehow follows a cohesive story or at least a theme. I'm not sure how to approach it or what exactly to tackle, but I would really love to do something like this at some point in my life -- why not lay some groundwork for it now? I've already begun work on this a bit -- choreographing the first side of Daniel Amos' phenomenal album Doppelgänger as a long(ish)-form work to start.

I want to make a proper memorial dance for M. Ideally I would also like to actually have the opportunity to stage it (still haven't been able to stage Brittney's, my cousin's, or my grandpa's...).

I want to start doing more live (dance) performances. Right now I'm thinking competitions, coffeehouses, talent shows, et cetera (in addition to the one college recital). Just to get more audience response to my performance and choreography so I can see what needs to improve. Plus it'll keep me comfortable with live performance as opposed to the safety net of video editing.

I want to continue working on my flexibility. I feel less tight than usual (overall), but so far it's not translating into actual flexibility. This is still my greatest hindrance as a performer. Not just as a dancer, as a performer, full stop. I have had theatre directors pass over me even though I'm technically excellent, fairly expressive, and relatively strong simply because I'm not flexible. I'm so so close to my left front split and it's absolutely driving me crazy that I can't get those last two inches (I've been stuck there since probably about late September/early October).

I need to work on allegro more. I have some level of natural gifting for it, but I don't push myself in it nearly enough. It's hard to get up that much energy when practicing by oneself.

I also want to work on my wings (in tap), both single and double-foot. I'm decent at them actually... what I need is stamina. On that topic, I want to work on my stamina in general. It's MUCH better than it was when I started college (I couldn't even get through the first side of the Intermediate port de bras without literally collapsing), but it's still not great. Again, if I would actually just do allegro instead of avoiding it all the time...

I'm realising lately that I have a lot of mental tension around dance, of all things. I think at least part of the reason I don't push myself in allegro a lot (*cough* at all) is because I'm not confident I'm doing everything correctly (which is why I need dance classes with actual teachers, not just self-directed practice...), so 1. I'm scared I'll get incorrect technique in my muscle memory, and 2. I'm scared I'll injure myself. The one and only dance injury that ever actually sidelined me (ankle) happened during allegro. I'm also starting to wonder if mental tension is at least part of the plateau in my stretching. I notice during one stretch in particular that I can push myself farther without pain, but when I do, I just really, really dislike how it feels in my body -- so much that I actually feel slightly sick -- so I ease off it. So far I've only noticed it in that one stretch (on only one side... the other side I can push it fine), but maybe there are others I haven't clued into yet.

Regarding voice...
It's hard to set goals here. I still know very little about singing and what I should expect of myself. What's reasonable? What do I even want? I don't know. Until very recently, my only goal was to not suck. Now that I'm getting past that point, I don't really know what's next. I'd kind of like to learn more opera and musical theatre (mostly to challenge my acting skills, actually -- since I don't really know what to strive for in actual sound/technique).

And piano...
Oh yes, by the way, I started piano this past semester and absolutely fell in love with it. I took one semester at the beginning of my college career in 2013, but I was too angry and tense and perfectionistic and easily frustrated to enjoy it so of course I didn't really get anywhere in my abilities. Now I'm in a better place to receive the joy that playing piano brings me. I really just want to learn as much as I can. I just get lost in playing, and before I know it, a whole hour will have slipped by. The only other thing I have EVER done that with is dance.
Over Christmas break I've gone through my sister's earlier piano rep (she's a few grades ahead of me) and pulled out probably about a dozen songs that I feel are around or not insanely far above my current level of playing. I'm trying to think of a piece that I can set as a reasonable goal for the end of the year that won't be too easy for me to get by April, but also won't still be completely out of reach by November. I feel like I don't have enough of a sense of my growth trajectory yet to really make any solid long-term plans here so for now I'm just trying to take this a few pieces at a time, while consistently challenging myself.

Writing...
Of course I'd like to do NaNoWriMo in 2019 as well, but I'll ponder that more after graduation (I usually start percolating ideas around June).

I want to continue work on Kyrie. I had some momentum on it before NaNoWriMo this year, and it actually influenced my NaNoWriMo novel quite a bit because I couldn't quite get out of Kyrie brain during November (at one point during the month I said 'this novel is basically Kyrie but less good').

Theatre...
Basically the plan at the moment is 'audition for ALL the things!' I'm currently lining up my audition schedule for the next few months (I have one next week) and I have to say, I am VERY excited.
I want to work on my acting skills. I don't quite know how that looks yet. I'm trying to figure something out, but it's hard when I don't really know what the goal actually is, or even how you 'practice' acting.

Goals for life in general... These are the ones that are hardest to attain. The performing/artistic ones can be so easily incorporated into a schedule -- go to a practice room/studio for a few hours. But these are harder -- 98% of my life is wrapped up in the arts, so to do anything outside of it feels clunky and unnatural (well -- more clunky and unnatural than my artistic endeavours).

The biggest one is keep in contact with my friends.
This is a hard one. Due to depression, the way I was raised, and the way I was treated by my peers during my teen years, I have this deep-seated belief that nobody has time for me (and this belief is strong in my mind whether I'm in a good headspace or not). People have better things to do than spend time with me. So 99% of the time I don't even try to initiate contact with other people, even my closest friends. I'm terrified I'm going to wear out my welcome and then I'll be truly friendless, and I don't ever want to go back there again. I'd rather have a 'friend' that I'm too scared to talk to than overdo the talking and end up with no friends at all.
I think a subgoal of this might be to quit apologising that I'm spending time with them on the rare occasion that I actually do convince myself to spend time with them.

The other one is to not move back home immediately after graduating.
As much as I love my family and my friends at home and my home dance school and the city and the landscape, I don't dare go back too soon and settle back into my pre-college rut. I did that after I graduated with my Associate in 2015 and it almost literally killed me -- I had a $60,000 degree that I was doing literally nothing with and I was living the same dead-end life that I had before I went to college. I wound up feeling like my life was a waste and that I was a waste. There's an overpass I drive over on the commute from my home dance school and I cannot even count how many times over that next year I almost pulled over and jumped onto the busy highway below. Knowing this, I need to make a life for myself outside of both home and school, at least for a time. Once I know that I can survive on my own without school to set my routine, maybe I will end up back around home, closer to my family. But if I do it too soon, all the growth and excitement of what I've been learning out on my own in college will fizzle and I'll dead-end again. And that's so dangerous for me. I need to keep forward momentum, and I won't be able to do that if I move back home immediately after graduation.

I need to nail down my 'why.' Why do I perform? Why do I keep practicing? Why do I do this? 'Because I love it' is a good start, but I'm not convinced that it's really enough (it sure isn't when I'm struggling to motivate myself to practice an allegro that I know nobody will ever see me do). That reason seems inherently selfish to me, so I feel guilty about it. Which of course makes me second-guess myself which makes me tense and frustrated which of course means I continue to suck at performing. I need a strong reason to keep slogging through when it's tough. I am definitely the type of person who absolutely WILL NOT do something unless you can give me an extremely good reason to do it/do it this way. 'Because I said so' has never worked on me, even as a kid. 'Because it'll make this easier/sound better/look better/give you a better foundation for what's to come' resonates with me. Tell me why and I'll do it gladly. But so far I haven't been able to tell myself on the hard days why I do this. I love it. I do. I have never known joy like the joy I (usually) have during performance runs. But somehow that doesn't feel like a good enough reason, and it's keeping me hesitant.

Trust, Continued

As I mentioned around the end of last year, I was thinking a lot about trust.

It's a word my professors here use often -- 'trust yourself,' 'trust the process,' 'trust God,' 'trust your practice,' 'trust (teachers)' -- and I couldn't do any of it. Years of manipulation and emotional abuse had told me very clearly that nobody could be trusted. The decimation of everyone I ever cared about in 2015 led me to conclude that even God could not be trusted.

When you can trust nobody else -- not even God -- all you have left is yourself. This terrified me. I knew I would let myself down, but I had nothing else. So I trusted only myself, and if I screwed something up, I did what I had learned in childhood, the only way to maybe escape a tiny amount of the consequences of failure -- I beat myself up about it. (If you beat yourself up about it enough, sometimes the person you've disappointed/angered will be placated... Sometimes.) There was no forgiveness until there was improvement. Of course, this kind of pressure makes improvement almost impossible, but I knew no other way. To forgive myself for a mistake before I had seen improvement felt like accepting mediocrity. I have been overlooked and ignored and passed over my entire life because there is always someone better than me. Mediocrity is a death sentence. To accept it was unforgivable.

In the end, I could not really even trust myself, and I knew this. I kept letting myself down, but in the absence of any other viable options, I kept re-placing my trust in myself... knowing it was fruitless and I would end up frustrated. Trusting myself wasn't the ideal option, but it was the best option out of a very limited pool of choices.

This cycle wound me up so tightly that all I wanted was to make it stop. I wanted off the merry-go-round of constant failure. And the only way to stop failing is to stop trying...

I attempted suicide on 8 March. The knowledge that I could no longer trust myself took on another, very vivid, meaning.

By the end of the month, things had gone about as far as they could go. It was no longer a matter of if I was going to die, it was a matter of when. Something had to give. I could not trust myself, and I could no longer pretend that I could. I had to find someone.

At the beginning of April, I expanded my circle of trust to two -- myself, and a prof. I told him what was happening -- trusted this prof literally with my life. And then I trusted another teacher with the story. And then a counsellor. And then three friends. I could almost physically feel weight coming off my weary heart with every retelling of the story, every connection with someone who -- it turned out -- cared about me.

But trust isn't a switch that flips on and off. It's a habit. I had spent twenty years building a habit of not trusting anyone, of questioning everything anyone said (especially if it was nice) because they were likely to go back on it anyway, of figuring things out for myself because sooner or later those who said they'd help me would give up on me. There were moments now, acts of trust, but not a habit. I still didn't really believe any of these people who knew the story were in it for the long haul -- nobody ever was. I figured I might as well plan to keep carrying it myself, because eventually that was what was going to happen anyway. Twenty years of being used for sympathy had taught me that the phrase 'I'm here for you' has an expiry date.

I was trusting a select few now, but I was cautious. With my heart in such a fragile state, I could NOT afford to have my trust broken again -- it would mean almost certain death. They say to choose your friends well, but everyone looks good on the surface, How do you know who really will stick with you? Does any human even have that much patience?

Although the darkness I was in in March never really lifted to begin with, in September it made another violent assault, and at the end of October, its fury increased tenfold. I lived for weeks on the verge of complete (mental/physical) collapse. There were about five consecutive days where I would sit in the living room and wonder if I should call 9-1-1, if I would survive the next twenty minutes.

Trusting only in myself for so long means I can be very self-disciplined. Last school year I had begun to be particularly intentional about daily habits like dance and voice practice, eating healthy, and getting fresh air (most of these I was trying to do anyway, but last year I began to keep track of how much I was actually doing any of this). Upon returning to school in September, I returned to more or less that same routine -- practice voice, practice dance, walk to school and back, keep track of nutritional intake and make meal adjustments throughout the day as needed, at least attempt to go to bed earlier than 2am, doing all of these even when I really did not feel like any of it mattered to anybody.

After a while, I found myself thinking, 'if you do this (daily discipline mentioned above), you'll feel better.' At first a common retort was, 'no it doesn't. It never does.' But by the end of November I actually began to feel joy again -- for the first time in a long time. I distinctly remember bouncing around the kitchen one day, then suddenly asking, 'what am I so excited for?' I still don't know what I was excited for, but I decided not to question it. For the first time in literally years, I was happy.

And I realised that implementing all these little things, even when I didn't feel like it -- that was trust, on some level. That little voice saying 'you'll feel better' was onto something. I was trusting that maybe eventually it would result in something or mean something. It's fairly widely known that singing, dancing, fresh air, and good nutrition all improve mood from a scientific perspective... and over time, they actually do. They don't tell you that sometimes the effect is cumulative. I feel like that knowledge would help a lot of people, so here it is -- keep doing these things. Trust that the benefits come after consistent practice, not after one session.

Once that clicked in my head, suddenly a bad practice session was no longer cause for suicidal thoughts (I am not kidding -- a bad practice session would literally end with me writing a prototype suicide note. This was not an infrequent occurrence -- my attempt in March happened immediately after a frustrating dance practice). I was suddenly able to tell myself that one rough warmup did not mean my voice (or my body) was shot for the rest of the day -- and I was actually able to believe that.

Make no mistake -- everything is not perfect. I'm still reluctant to say it's even 'okay.' Trusting all that practice to actually result in improvement sometime down the line is still difficult, especially in singing. I still feel so far behind to begin with, and because I was in such a dark place for most of the semester, my singing suffered greatly. As a result, so did my performance. As a result, so did my self-confidence. As a result, so did my professors' trust in me to take on any responsibility at all onstage. I may never get another speaking role at this college (or possibly anywhere) because I showed very clearly this semester that I do not deserve one. And as much as it pains me to know this: that is absolutely fair. That whole downward spiral this semester makes singing so much harder now, with all those horrific performances in my very recent past and my instinct to beat myself up -- to only forgive when improvement is made -- still so strong. I'm trying to take solace in knowing that the concept of 'trusting' -- in the way my teachers/professors describe it -- makes more sense now.

I only hope it isn't too late to do anything with this understanding -- that I haven't managed to sink my career for good.

Music Day - Twist In My Sobriety

This is one of the few songs I bought for the musical arrangement, not the lyrics.

It's muted, hollow, deep, brooding, and can we all just take a second to appreciate that velvet alto vocal?

There's a lot of space in the mix, which gives the whole piece a sparse, haunted feel. There's enough sass in the lyrics and enough body in the vocal to give the song plenty of substance. To make it stand out from the myriad of slow '80s songs, this one features an oboe sting in the chorus that's almost sultry. The lyrical approach throughout is almost Beatle-esque, which of course adds to its appeal.

Title: Twist In My Sobriety
Artist: Tanita Tikaram
Album: Ancient Heart
Year: 1988
Label: Warner Music
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Look, my eyes are just holograms
Look, your love has drawn red from my hands
From my hands you know you'll never be
More than twist in my sobriety...

Too Good To Be True

Written 24 January 2017, 12.55am.

A common observation by one of my college profs is that I 'fight' a lot. Not 'fight' as in 'make trouble/argue with people,' but 'fight' as in 'struggle.' Multiple profs in my program have noted that I'm stubborn and passive-aggressive. But it wasn't until Christmas break that I began to figure out why. Over the break, I was talking with a friend and somehow over the course of conversation the thought came to me: 'I'm scared it's too good to be true.'

I've loved music and dance all my life. The theatre has always drawn me. I've always loved stories. But I also grew up in a Baptist church, where the performing arts were Absolutely Forbidden (except hymn-singing and the annual Sunday School Christmas skit). Very early on my natural empathy for people (don't laugh) and my ability to memorise and understand the Bible (relative to my age) convinced people -- including myself -- that I would grow up to be a missionary.

I was okay with that -- excited, even. I loved hearing stories of other missionaries and I thought 'wouldn't it be so cool to be able to lead people to Jesus?' This was something on my radar well into my teen years, although I wasn't so pretentious as to decide exactly where I was going. I was content to wait on God for that.

In my mid-teens, performing made a resurgence in my life. It gained a further hold when I went to college and found myself almost accidentally swept into the musical theatre program. I loved every single second of it. I've made posts on this blog to that effect. But even as I was pursuing the performing arts and even as I was justifying my degree to my Christian acquaintances by saying, "The art world is so dark -- it's a mission field too," and even as I was telling myself I was training to be a more effective light in the darkness, I was scared. Not of the darkness -- there was so much of that around me I was more or less used to it. Rather, I was scared that at any moment God would snatch the performing arts -- my deepest love and often my only solace -- away from me, plop me into a 9-to-5 office job, and forget about me.

I knew God uses the arts. I've seen Him do it. There is no doubt in my mind that God loves the arts. But I had trouble realising (or perhaps believing) that maybe... maybe I was one of them. Maybe the one thing I longed for the most was also the very thing God had created me for. I knew God does need artists, but as much as I wanted to be one of them, I couldn't bring myself to believe that maybe He wanted me to be one of them too. To think that God might have actually wanted me in the performing arts was too good to be true. So I tried to ruin it for myself and get my no-doubt-impending failure over with as quickly as possible. I have almost succeeded.

I was so scared of having it taken away from me that I began to self-sabotage. I far overloaded the fall 2016 semester with classes and then added a couple fairly sizeable creative projects with deadlines on top of that. Every time I practiced voice, I would almost subconsciously do exactly the same thing as before, and then complain that I was not improving (this, I think, was at least part of the 'fight' my professors were referring to -- they kept telling me what to do to improve, and I kept not doing it). I started turning in half-done papers and skipped more classes in the last two weeks of the semester than I ever had in my entire education up to that point. I absolutely stopped trying in dance class. During voice recital/performance/finals week (when I should have been sleeping the most for the sake of my voice) I stayed up for 65 straight hours working on four major projects for three classes. My vocal master class prof straight up told me after the final dress rehearsal for the class final performance, "Go home and go to bed," to which I replied, "I can't." I wanted nothing more than to do exactly as he said, but I had a presentation to research and create before 8.30 the next morning -- a presentation that would have already been done if I hadn't overcommitted myself so badly elsewhere. I was texting my best friend back home things like, 'would it really matter to anybody if I killed myself?' -- texting her these things because I knew she was too far away to stop me. I was in a complete tailspin, and it was pretty much self-inflicted.

I fought my professors' advice and/or help at almost every turn, even though they probably wanted to see me improve just as much as I did. But I couldn't believe that might be the case. I couldn't bring myself to trust them, and I certainly could not bring myself to believe that maybe God wanted me here, in the arts, in this program, developing my skills. I kept telling myself the professors were only investing any time at all in me because I was spending money to be in their classes. After all -- that's all I've ever been good for, right? As for God, I had long since given up on His love for me.

So I subconsciously kept myself from doing what I wanted more than anything, so that God wouldn't have to break my heart again. If my life was going to get screwed over again, I was going to be the one doing it. I didn't need the church or my relatives or God breaking my heart anymore. I started breaking my own heart, berating myself on their behalf, to save them the trouble. I told myself everything that everyone else had told me for all these years: 'you're only worth something if you have a good job and make a lot of money,' 'you're annoying,' 'you're in the way,' 'nobody likes you,' 'nobody wants you around,' 'nobody asked you,' 'we don't need you here,' 'who said you could talk?' 'you can't do anything right,' 'maybe it's time to give up.' After all, even God's church gave up on me -- telling me, however, implicitly, that God doesn't want artists.

And I believed all of it. I believed that this love for the performing arts and this tiny seed of talent that I did have meant nothing, that God had simply put them in me to confuse me and to make it hurt more when His true purpose for me -- which, obviously, would probably include an office job and many early mornings and no alone time whatsoever -- was revealed. It wasn't until this semester (note that it's still only January) (EDIT: It was January when I wrote this, although many of the sentiments remain the same now, in May) that I began to wonder if maybe there was a reason He built this into me. Maybe He wants me to be a performing artist. But I'm too scared to believe it. It seems too good to be true.

Singing and Dancing

Written 31 January 2017, 11.19pm.

The thing with being primarily a dancer in a musical theatre program that emphasizes singing SO heavily is that you're kind of caught between two worlds. On one hand, dance is my first -- and biggest -- love. It is the one thing I have found that can keep me alive when my entire life is falling apart around me.

On the other hand, I want to be a good singer so I can get better roles at this school. At this school, weak singers get lesser roles (if any) and that's all there is to it. I, of course, am one of the weakest singers in the program. But -- singing is not my love and my joy. After all, how can someone enjoy something they're so mediocre at? I don't exactly enjoy watching people flounder and struggle to find something, anything nice to say about my vocal performances.

If I'm honest, I feel singing is a necessary evil if I want to be a performer. Right now I'm just fighting to get my singing to a passable level. I know I should be having fun with it and enjoying it, but if I'm honest, I often dread practicing voice. If it happens to go well once I get going, then I kind of enjoy it, but the bad days far outweigh the good and I feel like I'm going absolutely nowhere.

I'm torn between wanting to focus on my voice -- my weakest point -- and strengthen it, or on dance -- my strength and love -- and attain higher levels of true excellence.

I should love to sing. So many people do, whether or not they're good at it. Why don't I? Can I ever be any good at it if I don't love doing it -- or at least sort-of enjoy it? But how can you love something that you're not that great at? Will joy come with time and practice, or will it never come at all?

A Voice of My Own

Originally written 5 November 2016.

I have a fairly intense singing semester at college this year: choir, voice lessons, and vocal master class. I'm spending more hours a week singing than I ever have dancing. The music students and faculty I interact with keep saying I'm improving, but I don't hear it and instead of gaining momentum I'm actually shrinking back. I haven't really sung in two days -- I've been in the practice rooms, but I've been doing breathing exercises or lip trills or speaking the text for the songs I have or playing the melodies to 'get them in my head'... but no actual singing takes place. I've mentioned before how I hate the sound of my voice and it seems that no matter where I turn I run into my voice, this awkward, clunky, wooden thing that can hit a note but sounds like the screen door on your grandma's old farmhouse in the process.

Their big thing here is volume. Because I hate my voice so much, I speak and sing as quietly as possible so people won't have to suffer the fate of hearing something so ungainly. I've done this for so long that I physically can no longer speak or sing very loud. My second year here stretched my volume boundary a bit, but not as much as is expected of me. I'm in this constant battle between wanting to sing more loudly because that's what my teachers ask of me and never wanting to sing again so no-one has to hear me.

Where did this come from? Nobody has ever outright told me they hate my voice. I've gotten 'I hate you,' and 'you sing flat,' but never 'I hate your voice.' Even the person who told me he couldn't stand me and basically wished I would go die in a hole told me I had a nice voice -- in the same conversation. (Come to think of it, that probably explains why I have such a hard time accepting compliments.)

It must have come from experience... The experience of being in that youth group and not even having a name. The experience of telling my parents I was NOT okay with a certain arrangement they had made and having them ignore me --- thrice (even after watching me spiral downward dramatically after the first two instances). The experience of constantly being ignored and shushed (and rebuked for the things I did say) in the youth group and having the God-card pulled on me at home. The experience of screaming to God for help, comfort, peace, anything for months when hell broke loose in 2015 and hearing nothing in response.

Nobody valued my voice -- literally or figuratively -- until I came to this college. I spent twenty years being systematically silenced and told I meant nothing, that my opinion didn't matter, that my voice was pointless. And now I have to sing loudly? Are you crazy? Who wants to hear that? Nobody.