I saw a meme recently which described my life rather perfectly:
Sees a painting - I want to make that
Hears a song - I want to make that
Plays a video game - I want to make that
Eats a tasty treat - I want to make that
Holds a figure - I want to make that
Uses chapstick - I want to make that
Watches a craft tutorial - I want to make that
The fact is that I have always been really creative and interested in things deeply, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I have had the chance to learn about and create so many wonderful things. Curse because it means I have trouble planning ahead in many ways. I have always been so sucked into the wonder and depth of the moment that the future either does not exist, or is a momentary vision which is a flash-forward of the very current moment of temporary inspiration, not a more reasonable projection of the long-term reality.
Since a very young age, I knew that music would win the battle of the obsessions. My historical reenactment self and and linguist self and dancer self and scholar self and author self and whichever other selves I dreamed up for whiles have always known deep down they were in second place, no matter how real and central they became.
My musical self knew since elementary school that it would be a violinist, really, I think, before I ever had a violin of my own or took a lesson. There was a sense of destiny about it, and one that I did not question, because it fit so well.
Which sort of violinist self would be the self which came out on top was never clear. I was always so wrapped up in the violining of the moment that I could not project one of the violin selves definitively into an adult future. Each special violin event - holiday group concert, summer institute, masterclass, side-by-side youth orchestra concert, chamber fest - the wonderful, tingly intense excitement pushed me straight towards music school. Music school was the quantifiable goal, because it would be all violin all the time all day at high intensity. I knew that's what I wanted.
I did not have a vision for what came next, only that I was, without question, a violinist. Conservatory was the only tangible goal. For many of my peers, conservatory was a stepping stone to an orchestra job or a place to try to find collaborators for a chamber career or a launching pad to work toward a pedagogy career. For some others it was a natural outgrowth of their high school studies, then disabused them of the notion of making music into a career.
When I was very young, I knew that teaching was a deep interest. I really liked the organization and order and progression and analytics of the thing, which complemented my leaps-of-intuition way of being.
I also loved the music itself - the moods it created, the complexity, the counterpoint, the history, the harmony.
I did some composing, which I really cared about, partly for the sake of posterity, and partly as a way to play with understanding what I was delving into; it may really have been a way to process the exetential crisis of the temporary nature of history, life, the universe, and everything - a sort of religious act. I lost the thread at some point, because the field of composition in Western art music is so wide open right now that there is no agreed-upon armature to build upon. I might have been an interesting and creative composer in the Baroque era if I had been given the opportunity, but in the 20th century I was lost floating on the jetsam.
I loved playing the instrument. The sensations of the physical technique was satisfyingly complex and malleable, and the first-hand engagement with the music itself and the feelings it was created to produce were intoxicating.
I was asked, when I once auditioned for an arts high school where I was headed with the violin, and I told the questioner that I did not know; I loved all of it. This was true, if not perfectly honest. My skills did not match each of my ever-shifting dreams. My dreams were not conceived exactly as goals to be worked toward; they were visions of what might be if "stars aligned", and were subject, metaphorically speaking, to the astronomy of the month. I always felt that I did not want to work towards a specific point, but wanted to wait and see what would happen. I was alive just for today, in this very moment, and that was overwhelming enough. To head for a goal was primarily to close other doors, and that was a pain I could not willingly subject myself to.
In conservatory, I still had no specific ambition outside of Do all the Violin Things with great love and passion, and Push myself to Excell in all of them. My undergrad thus flowed naturally into graduate school.
My graduate school teacher asked me where I was headed. And I still didn't want to commit, because I couldn't fathom stomping out the possible alternate realities. He suggested a specific trajectory - auditioning for concertmaster spots in small orchestras. I pretty much rejected the idea out of hand without considering it. I did not know how to go about preparing for and pursuing that course of action, and it did not occur to me to ask. I could not imagine what that life would be like short- or long-term, so it just did not exist in my mind.
I knew I would love to teach dedicated students at the conservatory level, but I never considered what sort of paths one would take to get there. One possible path to that end would have been a doctoral program. I did think about such a thing for close to a week once after most of the application deadlines had past. But I was so tired. Tired of school. I let those thoughts flit away without considering if that path was for me - (it probably wasn't) - why I might be tired, or what to do about it. Life was what happened to me, not what I chose to make it. And though I come from a place of privilege in the global experience, that thought is very much the way of being for most who have very little power over their circumstances.
I knew that a life of playing chamber music was a dream which seemed worth pursuing, and in fact, a quartet which some friends and I put together was offered a starter job at a small Midwestern college. In the end, it came to nothing when one of the other members got cold feet about the specific duties and the rather small compensation package. Life was just what happened. I was mildly disappointed, but more importantly I was not committed to that version of reality either.
Graduation came round and I still had no plan. I wonder now what my teacher thought. He believed I had a lot of potential, and he was poised to help me knock on any doors I wanted; I just sort of wandered off into a proverbial field. Through sheer apathy, or more likely lack of decision-making skills, I decided to stay in Cleveland and pay my rent, as it involved the least decision making and change. My teacher helped me reach out to some people so I could teach kids locally - and it was anyone who came through the door. I think that resonated with my sense of equity.
...Recently, one of my undergraduate teachers wrote something celebrating one of my former classmates who was a couple years younger than I. Apparently at their first lesson together our teacher asked this young person what he wanted to do with the violin, and he said he wanted to be a soloist. Our teacher thought he had the potential to fulfill this in a small time career, and together they worked together towards it. Said former student is now off happily doing what he wanted. For some reason, this story shocked me. It seemed presumptuous to have such a specific plan and to name it and work toward it. But was it really? I think I just could not image putting myself out there - the fawn response has been strong in my life - and I could also not imagine making choices that would exclude other choices. It may have been fear of failure, but probably it was more what gets termed executive dysfunction - a grey clinical description of an active, creative, dreamy mind lodged firmly in the here and now. If I were to have pursued such a path as my colleague, I could only imagine it happening because my teacher thought me suited to it and ushered me in. Yet that is rarely the way of the world....
After school, I was unmoored musically, but I made up for it with the sudden intensity of wanting to get married. I don't quite know how that came to be the beacon on my journey, and I never considered any alternatives except for the possible horror of remaining unmarried against my will. I could not imagine staying single on purpose. I could not imagine merely having a long-term dating relationship. I could not imagine pursuing a career first and then considering marriage later. It was an intensity that was like a spell had been cast, and fortunately for my sanity, it somehow came to pass.
And the music was still there. I was at the height of my teaching career from a resume standpoint (maybe not so much from an experience standpoint either musically or psychologically), and I was getting to play chamber music concerts several times a year. In certain ways, maybe I was living the dream of my late 30s. But I was in mental crisis. I had not lived up to my potential and my training. I had arrived at my current station by the tides of time, not because I had chosen a destination. It was not so much the expectations of others that weighed me down; it was my own failure to launch. Yet I still had no specific idea of where I thought I should have been launching to. I just knew that wherever I was I was not "there". The prospect of turning 30 weighed so very heavily on me in the years leading up to that milestone. I had not found myself living any iteration of the violin dreams which had haphazardly projected themselves into my consciousness, and we were also not in a place to have kids, another milestone which had inexplicably appeared in my mind with relentless intensity. I obsessed over caring for my students, and I almost couldn't bring myself to attend professional concerts. I would weep silently during the music with missing out on everything I had wanted and trained so hard for. And still I had no notions of taking action to remedy the pain or where exactly I wanted to be. Life was what happened, and my job was to deal with it.
Eventually Jared got one job, then another, which were theoretically what he had aimed so single-mindedly for all those years, but they turned out, partly (maybe largely) due to poor economic timing, to be essentially career ending. I did some musical things alongside what we had presumed to be Jared's big steps in the right direction, but I had largely lost my passion, and I spent a lot of those years resting, reading, knitting, walking, running, enjoying our cats, and wondering whether we might ever even have kids.
Then things got really crazy as we became unemployed, moved across the country on a sort of whim, and became parents in the space of a few months. Life is what happens to you, and it happened all at once. We both started trying to rebuild a life from essentially scratch, and it felt so hard in Seattle. Our little bit of family and the amazing great outdoors and our new children were the things holding us from the brink. I won't go into all the things holding us back from music; there is more than I really want to write about. We found ourselves living in a more-or-less Classical music desert compared to our previous communities in three states, and we had very little way to get connected in. We were miles and miles from the centers of Classical music-making, and the efforts to keep up with the bills and an opinionated newborn and nearly no child care was pretty much a catch 22. For the first time in my life I went days without practicing on a regular basis, because musically speaking there was nothing to live for. I felt a lot of guilt about this, and I felt a lot of contrariness towards the "shoulds". I pretty much just gave up and accepted that this is what had happened, and this was my new life. Jared, being a creature of routine and dedication, kept up his practice schedule, but I imagine he, too, fell into a pit of meaninglessness with it. Playing with others and performing is the fun part, and how could we enjoy the craft without outlets?
Life just stayed chaotic in a way that is hard to convey, and violin took a back seat. Sure, I was teaching as many as 30 students a week at times, but that with almost no childcare and the adage that there are no life hacks for three kids in five years. Once or twice a year I would have the opportunity to mount a concert that I arranged myself pro bono. I would practice for those as the inspiration struck, but the rest of the time my skills would fall into disrepair and I could go weeks without practice. Three kids in five years in tiny spaces where we were also trying to earn a living without childcare was really a nearly impossible order.
And then after many years of intense work just for survival, things calmed. The kids grew up just a little bit, and at Jared's nudging I gave myself permission to dream again. Now I am at a point in life where so many doors have already been slammed shut, and I have missed out on certain types of experience and opportunities, that I am less worried about that aspect of decision-making and am ready to march forward again with the experiences and opportunities I do have to work with. Maybe this is what they call a midlife crisis? Or maybe it's just a natural outgrowth of where the tides have carried me.
When I was in the middle of my first professional rehearsal this fall, I found tears springing to my eyes as the words scrolled across my mind: I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this.
