I've been thinking a lot lately. Always a dangerous pastime. (Insert lines from Beauty and the Beast here.)
I'm really wondering why I'm a music major.
I absolutely love being involved in this much music and talking about it all the time. I enjoy being consumed by it.
But lately I've been feeling as though I'm drowning in a sea of it.
For one thing, it's really, really hard to be a music major. I have to attend and perform in over 15 concerts per semester. As a singer, I have to memorize a lot of words in languages I don't actually speak. But I also have to pronounce them correctly.
All of that would be fine if I had better work ethic.
I feel as if I'm waiting for something to inspire me to be better about things, but nothing happens. And I get discouraged because I want to be the best and it feels as though I can never make it into the top five. For anything.
What's the point in trying if I can't at least be one of the best?
That mentality is incredibly frustrating, but I don't know how I can shake it.
I feel like no matter how hard I work on something I will still fuck it up. It will never be perfect. And I don't want to try and fail because I ultimately feel as though that is worse than not trying at all.
I don't know what to do. I love music and I'm definitely not tired of it. I'm just tired of failing at it.
The whole "not trying is better than trying and failing" mentality is pretty much why I'm almost 28 with no college degree. Don't let it get to you. You were born to sing, in my humble opinion.
ReplyDeleteThank you. :) I'm just having a really hard time dealing with trying to actually work at something I feel should come naturally (and used to come naturally and easily) when I'm not even used to having to work that hard. Plus, I've always been terrible at doing work for school, anyway. For some reason I'm a great employee and a bad student. I really appreciate your inspiration.
ReplyDeleteTrust yourself girlfriend! You might never acheive perfection in performance, but you will definitely find things to come to you more easily with time. Do you have to take a diction class at some point? I find the IPA site helps me the most with the language issue, otherwise I would be flailing helplessly in french repertoire right now. You'll survive the flood. :)
ReplyDeleteI think I have to take two diction classes next year. I'm required to write translations and IPA in each of my foreign language pieces. Language has never been a huge issue for me; I was just mentioning that it is one of the many annoying and time-consuming things required of me as a voice student. The issue isn't even so much the multitude of things I'm required to do. It's more than I feel inferior to every other singer in the world. And there are so many. So I don't know what I'm even trying to accomplish by being here anymore.
ReplyDeleteI know the feeling, dear. I have wondered why I am doing what I am doing many times, but then a few months pass, and something reminds me. I feel at home in my major more now than ever, since I'm finally almost done. It's hard to transition from community college, where you're the best, to University, where suddenly you have competition. I think you're probably just being hard on yourself. I have tons of faith in you, and I have never even heard you sing!
ReplyDeleteI'm in an awkward place where my competition is younger than me, too, so that's not really helping my psyche. However, they started here as freshman and I did not. I'm not really even used to going to school anymore. I know I'm being hard on myself, but my teacher expects just as much out of me as I do. I really want and need to figure out how to deliver that to the both of us. I know you're right. I know I would die a little inside every day I tried to do something else. The knowledge that I can't and don't know how to be perfect is just a hard pill to swallow.
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