I have decided to make something inspiring of myself. Coming out of a nearly debilitating depression, I feel like I'm starting from scratch. At other times in my life, I've been unquestionably happy, artistically active, well-adjusted, beautiful, talented. I guess what I've been going through is a quarter life crisis brought on by the recently-shattered, unrealistic self-expectations everyone in my generation is supposed to have? I guess existing in the elitist, competitive world of classical music performance fed fuel to the fire?
I made the choice two years ago, as a late-blooming soprano on the brink of college graduation, to get my masters in my home state, where I could study with a fabulous voice teacher I knew would help me and where I was offered a scholarship on top of in-state tuition. It was also the only place I got in.
I was excited to start a new chapter of my life, but when I got to school, the program was mediocre, I didn't know anyone, I hated the town I lived in. I was 22 and I'd never had a real job, but I'd need one soon if I couldn't become good enough to get famous, which seemed like a more remote possibility than ever. I was diagnosed with health problems that affected my day to day life and threatened the quality of my singing. I couldn't enjoy my life in the present when I had no idea whether I'd be able to achieve what I wanted in the future. I freaked out. I went minorly insane.
The thing is, before graduate school, I'd prided myself on my ability to roll with life's punches. I had always been the person calmly reminding everyone else to focus on the journey, not the destination. I had grown up watching my concert-pianist mother doing exactly what I'm doing now. Throughout my childhood she lamented not having been good enough in the past to become one of classical music's few chosen ones. Simultaneously, she subsisted on a toxic, addictive, nutritionally-barren diet of negative self-talk that convinced her she couldn't become any better. Even as a kid I understood how futile and misguided this was, or I always thought I had. I've always had my bouts of melancholy, but, at least as an adult, I've known how to deal with them. I entered graduate school with a positive attitude; as each challenge presented itself, I did the best I could to find a solution or a bright side and keep my spirits up. But as time progressed, a mild situational depression that I could deal with slid into a chemical one I couldn't shake.
So here I am, wallowing in compulsive doubts about my own worth and telling myself I'm nothing if I can't achieve a predetermined goal--struggling to work through issues I used to know how not to have.
At least now, the reasonable part of my brain is resurfacing. I've recognized that my feelings of hopelessness, anxiety and self-hatred don't reflect reality, and that's half the battle. There's still a lot I need to do in order to get to a higher-functioning place, but I know what needs to be done and I know I'm capable of it. And so I would like to write this blog.
I love to read blogs of many kinds, but sometimes I think they're bad for me. For a creative person, I've created remarkably little over the past year and a half. Instead I've fallen into a pattern of seeking passive stimulation through things created by others, rather than staying entertained by doing the things I love to do. This has been a major factor in my forgetting that I'm here to live my own life, not a life that looks like or is equally good to someone else's. I've almost started a blog a million times before, but it makes me nervous. It makes me think how little I have to show a readership. How if I don't look like Tom and Lorenzo plus The Beauty Department and cook and eat like Girl's Gone Child and have impressive career progress to report every few posts like Anne-Carolyn Bird, I don't deserve to enjoy my life, let alone write about it for an audience.
But that's wrong. So in life, I am going to try to stem my voracious media consumption, addiction to the music industry inferiority-complex crack pipe, and tendency to hold myself to fantasy standards. Rather than continuing to fill my brain with these toxic things, I am going to concentrate on doing things that make me happy. In the blog, I am going to write about the things that I do.
