On Anxiety - Overcoming Uncertainty

I feel nauseous and have to fight back the tears threatening to burst. The butterflies in my stomach are making me sick and I can’t breathe. My hands are shaking as my eyes dart wildly around the room.

The edges of my consciousness frantically scramble; clawing and tearing at the last sliver of control that is rapidly being blown beyond my reach. My fingertips feel bloody and raw when I am suddenly overwhelmed by the futility of my effort and the grasping becomes half hearted, eventually stopping altogether.

I shudder and fold over, fold inwards, hiding inside of myself.

With no control and half blind with fear I hold my breath as the strange wind continues to rage. It tears around me, propelling me forward, farther into the unknown. But where is it taking me?

A single tear slips out, immediately torn off my face.

There’s no turning back now.

Gritting my teeth I widen my eyes and take a step forward. 

Suddenly the wind stops. 

I can breathe again. 

One step at a time.

On Perspective: Waking Up in the Middle of the Bed

I often get terrible migraines. The type of headache that make you feel like you're going to vomit, that make your eyes throb and your teeth hurt. These headaches can last for days at a time and leave you in fear that they might recur at a moments notice.

My migraines are triggered by many things: what I eat, how much I drink, what I drink, how much sleep I've gotten, whether or not my neck is out of alignment, and sometimes they strike for what seems like no reason at all. It starts out harmlessly enough - a slight tension in the neck and head, a flicker of light, an inexplicable feeling of dread. But soon my eyes begin to feel sore and heavy, my temples start to throb, my forehead (just above the sinuses) begins to feel thick and tight. The migraine has begun.

The problem is that I get headaches frequently - it's even become a bit of a joke with my friends. "Oh, sorry, I can't have that. Red food dye gives me migraines," I'll say as they roll their eyes. There's always a bit of a headache hidden behind my thick skull, so it's easy for me to mistake these regular headaches for an incoming migraine.

After so many years you would think I would know better. Unfortunately my body is constantly changing, what was once a trigger is no longer, and what is a trigger now may never have been a problem before. This causes a host of new problems when I find myself, say, in Korea experiencing a new culture and environment - a new climate, new diet, new physical demands on my body, new everything - each of these exciting new experiences have the potential to be a new trigger.

But this is where the durability of the human body and mind reasserts itself.

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I woke up in the middle of the bed. You know, there's a wrong side and a right side. The crab-ass in line at Starbucks woke up on the wrong side; the whistling jolly woman woke up on the right. But here I was, in the middle and not sure which way I would turn.

On one hand I had just awaken from an eleven hour migraine-induced slumber. My neck was tight, my head felt raw, and I was more than a little afraid to move. On the other hand, I was awake. I no longer felt tears running down my face from the pressure in my skull. It was a new day.

I stood up. This is always the first test. Does standing make the blood rush through your body re-establishing the throbbing, pounding pain? Today it didn't. Bathroom break. Back to the bed. Sit down. There. I had just stood up twice and sat down twice and the headache hadn't returned. Success.

The right side it is.

 A big breakfast followed by a delicious homemade latte left me the smiling fool walking to the bus. The world was clear, lacking the migraine haze, I was happy. 

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It's amazing to me how such pain can leave me feeling so happy the next day. It's as if my body attacks itself as a way of reminding me how fortunate I am. By crippling me and leaving me craving the merest of essentials (water, adequate food, sleep) it allows me to appreciate the rest of my experiences.

The migraine that I loathe, the pain that I hate, and the experiences that I could do without never cease to remind me of the beauty in the world. It sounds cliched and it probably is, but without those negative and awful experiences I wouldn't be as ready to marvel in the mundane.

I hate to say it, but sometimes I'm grateful for my migraines. They force me to remind myself to take care of my body, to release the tension and stress from my perspective, and to appreciate the world for what it is - a hard and relentless place where one can find beauty and pain. Happiness and stress.

We have the choice. We all have different problems, whether physical or mental, and we all struggle with them at times. But I've learned that I have two options: I can dwell on the negative and wish things were different, or I can allow for the bad things to happen and let them remind me of all of the good things. I can do my best to make sure that the migraines don't return, but at some point I will slip-up, something will happen that I don't expect, or my body will change again and I"ll have a host of new triggers to look out for. But I can be happy, even with all of that.

It all depends on which side of the bed I decide to roll onto when I wake up in the morning.

Some thoughts.

I know it's been a while since I have posted, but lots of things have happened in the last few months. Here is a little taste of some of the things I am going through right now.

After devoting six years of my life to the study of music and philosophy, achieving a Bachelors degree, philosophy minor, and Masters degree in flute performance, and now attempting to enter the professional world I have encountered many a raised eyebrow. Most people simply ask how I, a semi-professional musician, expect to be able to repay my student loans. They wonder why I would waste six years of my life on degrees that are unmarketable except to very specific positions: orchestral musician, collegiate music educator, freelancing musician, or private teacher. They argue that none of these positions have job security, high pay rates, or the potential to support me, my student loans, and on top of it all a car payment, insurance, rent, a phone bill, and food. What a mess I have placed myself in, they exclaim.

And lately I can’t say I haven’t had moments where I agree with them. Everyone suffers from moments of self-doubt, uncertainty, and to be completely frank fear. As a classically trained musician who is questioning whether that is the future she wants, I have definitely experienced many new doubts and worries in the last few weeks. But through this turbulence I can feel myself getting closer to my destination.

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I have recently started hiking and “climbing” at Vedauwoo, an awesome rock formation near Laramie. I put climbing in quotes because I haven’t been throwing on a harness and climbing up sheer rock faces, but I also haven’t simply been walking around the awesome rocky outcrops. Instead I have been hiking up them, climbing over and under massive boulders, and fighting to reach the tops of the formations.

This is extremely rewarding both physically and mentally. Knowing that I’m capable of pulling myself up and over a giant boulder, climbing up a tiny crack and crevice, crawling under a huge rock, and essentially just exploring and having a good time at 8000 feet above sea level is a rewarding physical activity. But the mental rewards almost outweigh these physical ones. In my time at Vedauwoo I have learned that sometimes to reach the top you need to descend down the mountain, in order to get from point A to point B you have to walk in a roundabout manner and land at point C first. I have learned that you need to creatively assess the situation in front of you and sometimes, often in fact, take what looks like the more difficult path in order to reach the top. Sure the easy looking line might make it to the top, but it often hits a dead end at a cliff or sheer rock face, so rather than take that path, one might need to take the scary and impossible looking route instead.

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I didn’t start climbing (yes we will call what I’m doing climbing despite the linguistic complications of the word) with the intention of finding some cliched sensation of inner peace, but this is exactly what I have found. I have realized that, despite taking one path up until this point there is exactly nothing holding me onto this path. I’m not saying music is a dead end, or a fatal drop to the rocks below, but I have realized that I can stray from this path and still make it to the final destination at the top.

My studies of music and philosophy have made me a complex and unique person with many different marketable skill sets. My 8+ years in the fields of customer service as a cashier at Fleet Farm, a cook, a server, and ultimately a bartender have given me invaluable insights and life skills that are essential for every field. All of the work I have devoted in the last quarter of my life has brought me to an interesting new place and I can go many places from here.

I have no regrets with what I have done with my life so far and I am definitely not limiting myself in any way to this field. I will continue to pursue music because I love it and maybe someday this will take me somewhere extraordinary and unexpected. But I will also start to pursue my passions in other fields: humanitarian efforts, cultural exchange and discovery, and environmental concerns are all things that I have been passionate about my whole life, so perhaps now is the time to tap into that passion and try to find a career where I can have an impact on these elements of the world.

Being a musician, a bartender, a teacher, and a student of philosophy all have one main thing in common: the desire to alter the experiences of others in a positive and impactful way. I have always wanted to make others happy whether through my music, my service, or my educational approach to students, and this desire is going to continue to mold my approach to the world.

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So for now I’m going to make a list of what I have to offer potential employers. This is a first draft and will continue to grow as I reflect on my experiences so far, but it has been an intellectual exercise that has helped me find peace with my current situation. I have been blessed to be given the opportunities in life that I have and it is time to recognize what I have to offer the world.

Here it is:

·      Minor in Philosophy

o   critical thinking and the ability to take complex texts and reduce them down to easily understandable, less complex increments

o   openness to different ideas especially ones that conflict with my own, to analyze and understand them in order to either agree or find specific elements with which to disagree

§  creative and flexible mentality: able to suspend my own beliefs for a period of time as I attempt to first understand the other ideology and second to incorporate elements that I agree with into my own and to have clear, explicit reasons for disagreeing with the other elements

o   writing and editing skills: the study of complex texts, unique philosophical discourses, and other elements of philosophy such as the study of logic all combine to give me a unique voice informed by many different styles

§  also the ability to edit comes from writing dozens of large scale papers that need to be cohesive and clear while simultaneously expounding upon often complex philosophical ideas

§  the ability to point out inconsistencies and lack of clarity in my own papers is directly applicable to the editing and revision of other texts

o   the drive to understand different cultures and the willingness to acknowledge that my own perspectives and beliefs may be flawed

§  in our global world we are consistently confronted with differing cultural beliefs and ideas and it is essential for us to be able to not only understand and listen to others, but really make an effort to understand their viewpoints and question our own

§  to avoid narcissistic and ignorant conceptions of the world I think it is necessary to be able to question ourselves as well as others

·      Major in Flute Performance

o   Studying music has many benefits in terms of creativity, teamwork, organization, time management, cooperation, communication, and the ability to take a large complex task and break it down into doable smaller increments

o   The self-discipline required to succeed in music, working for hours behind the scenes for one brief moment of acknowledgement in a recital/concert situation, is directly applicable to the type of work that one needs to do in different facets of life

§  having the ability to see the future benefits of the hard work your putting in now—often work isn’t instantly rewarding so one needs to be able to look to the future where the hard work being put in now will pay off

§  the individual self-discipline to hold yourself to an extremely high standard in the music world has obvious applications to ones work environment

·      the advanced musician can’t simply expect their teacher and colleagues to hold them to a higher musical standard, instead she needs to force herself to continue to work hard in order to obtain her goals.

o   Teamwork is essential for all facets of music performance, except for the occasional solo instrument/voice piece

§  The construction of an orchestra or large ensemble piece is really a unique and extraordinary social phenomenon: taking dozens of individually talented and focused musicians and molding them all to the pursuit of one specific interpretation and task, which many of them may not agree with or have personally sought after, is an interesting social phenomenon

·      we are trained to have our own musical interpretations, we all have different musical experiences and goals, and yet when we are in an ensemble setting we are not only able but also willing to set our personal inclinations aside for the work of the whole shows a level of teamwork and emotional maturity that isn’t often awarded to such individually focused people

·      this teamwork is also present on the small ensemble (2-5 players) level and requires clarity of communication and willingness to listen and understand the perspective of the other musicians

o   Passion. Musicians are extremely passionate about what they do and what they are pursuing- this passion can be applied to many different facets of life, not simply music, and makes a musician an excellent employee for organizations with causes that the musician can resonate with and feel strongly about

§  this might also be why I, as a musician, am loathe to enter a workplace that doesn’t have a mission that I believe in or agree with. Working for a bank or something of that nature does not appeal to me nearly as much as working for a humanitarian organization such as the UN or UNESCO.

o   Education! As a student of music I have been effectively studying how to educate future generations of musicians while also studying music as a student myself. Music pedagogy courses, understanding creativity, and writing my Plan B paper for my masters degree on education and the ways in which to teach young students of flute have all enabled me to understand the complexities of music education

·      Working in customer service

o   I have spent the last 8 years of my life in the food service industry, thanks to my wonderful family and the purchase of a resort and the construction of a bar and restaurant. This means I have been in a semi-public eye for most of my life and have had to represent the family business in front of customers and strangers

o   Working as a cook, server, and bartender instills customer service skills of epic proportions: one must do the best that one can do in order to keep the customer happy and satisfied.

§  not only do we have to, but after so many years in the industry, we want to. Seeing a customer satisfied, making sure that they are happier when they leave than when they arrive, and doing your best to have a positive impact on the lives of strangers are all personal characteristics that are cultivated in the food service industry

o   Multi-tasking! One simply does not cut it as a server/bartender or as a cook without the ability to multi-task.

§  A cook needs to understand how different foods cook in different ways and balance out the timing, assembly, and presentation of many different meals in order to have them reach the customer at the same time and in a satisfying way

§  A server needs to be able to gauge each customer and be able to anticipate who will need something at certain times. The efficient server will make herself available when the customer needs her but leave him alone when he doesn’t need anything. When balancing multiple different tables at once this requires complex multi-tasking abilities: understanding who exactly was given what at what time from each table and making sure that each table has exactly what they needs is a complex process

§  A bartender often needs to balance all of these things, making sure each customer has the drink they want, mixing it to their specifications and to a high quality, being aware of all of the customers present as well as the new ones that come in. There is nothing worse than a bartender who is unaware of her surroundings and who doesn’t acknowledge you when you are a new customer at the bar: effective bartenders are extremely aware of their surroundings and capable of balancing the needs of everyone present.

water

“Looking in the mirror thinking I can’t believe what I’ve become. Swore I was gonna be someone. And growing up everyone always does. We sell our dreams and our potential, to escape through that buzz. Just keep me up, keep me up.”

Yesterday I got the opportunity to visit Tivoli with my festival friends. I was excited to get out of Rome and spend some time in a different area of Italy, one that is a little less tourist-centric and crazy. I was not disappointed. Tivoli was beautiful—the parts of it that I saw were thick with waterfalls, beautiful caves, amazing scenery, and green. So much green trees starkly contrasting with the beautiful blue sky. The power of the waterfalls overwhelmed me throughout the day as I realize that these caves, these hills, these valleys were all a result of the waterfall. The beautiful Sirens Grotto was a result of a devastating flood way back in the day. As I’m sitting there enjoying the view and thinking about life I read the sign and it tells me that, that the flood was a hugely damaging moment in history and it makes me wonder how something so beautiful and good can be the result of something so awful and bad.

 A constant trickle of water from a waterfall, from a faucet, from a stream, has the power—when combined with time—to completely alter the landscape around it. Something so small with the patience and stubbornness to keep existing will change the way the world looks around you. Sometimes this happens and results in beauty, like the grottos and waterfalls at Tivoli, but other times it results in ugliness and decay.

This makes me think about the clichéd concept introduced by Ms. Niemi in my Advanced Placement Language course in high school: man’s inhumanity to man. I often ask myself how people can continue to live and treat others in the ways they do, whether it’s racism, gender bias, homophobia, or simply close-mindedness and a lack of empathy. How can these people not see that those they judge are people too, that just because someone is gay does not make them a lesser being. It happens everywhere, on the global stage of cultural genocide, the national stage of homophobic marriage laws, and on the personal stage of judgment and stereotyped treatment of strangers. And yet why, why does this have to happen?

Because that’s the way it is and that’s the way it always has happened.

That’s always what I hear. “Things like this just happen when you get a group of people together,” or “Yeah, that’ll happen you just have to ignore it,” or whatever weak excuse blaming something external for a personal bias and the unwillingness to take responsibility for your actions.

If we keep telling ourselves that it’s okay to treat each other like this, that it is okay to clique up and bash each other simply because that is what always happens, then it will never stop and we will never change! Don’t tell me that I’m naïve, that I just want everyone to like me, that I don’t understand how people work. I am very aware of how people “work,” one does not bartend for as long as I have without learning about people. One does not sit and watch as much as I have in different settings, comparing the actions of people at the bar, in the pool hall, and at the casino to the people in college, the professors, and the musicians on stage, without drawing connections and learning more about people in general.

The lame excuse of letting things continue to happen because they always have is not good enough for me anymore. We are killing the world with our pollution, we are killing each other with our close-mindedness and lack of empathy, and we are killing our selves by blaming everyone else instead of taking responsibility for our prejudices and preconceptions. We fear that which we don’t understand and in order to avoid that uneasiness at the unknown we simply place everyone into neat little boxes in our minds. It’s a mechanism of self-defense. Nobody wants to admit that it is fear that drives their actions, but I think that is a big part of it. We are afraid of that which we don’t know, we don’t understand something and it makes us angry because it shows us our weakness. Lack of comprehension means that we don’t know everything, and not knowing everything is terrifying for some people because if you admit that you don’t know something you can easily begin to question the things that you think you already know. Descartes started this struggle as he tried to find his one clear and distinct perception. We fear that a slippery slope of doubt and despair will result when we begin to question ourselves, so instead we pretend to know things we don’t for the safety and comfort it brings us.

But it does not need to be that way. We can change the way we approach each other. We can alter our excuses and take responsibility for our actions. We can teach our children to do the same, or our friends, or even our friend’s children. We can be kind to strangers and open to new ideas. We can quit being so self-centered and let others live their own lives. We can learn to work together, even if we don’t like each other. We can put a tiny pebble at the beginning of the river and let the new trickle form a completely different waterfall.

We can slow down our lives and open up our minds. We can find creative solutions to our problems. We can change the world. 

Performance

Over this last weekend I had an audition with the Fort Collins Symphony for their newly open principal flute position. I was looking forward to the opportunity to practice the audition process for orchestral gigs, because despite wanting and trying my best to win the audition I knew that I was guaranteed an enlightening experience, even if I didn’t win the job.

Performance for me has been a strange journey these last few years. When I was younger I was excited and willing to play for everyone, a precocious child with no uncertainty or shame, and with a passion for simply playing. I would play my flute for everyone, whether they wanted to hear it or not. But around high school and into my college years that gradually began to change. I still loved to play but something in my mind shifted from a concept of playing to one of practicing—rather then the freedom of play, I was confined to the strict standards of practice/homework. Although I understood that one needs to focus on the negative aspects of ones playing in order to progress, I missed the joy of simply playing my flute and learning new pieces. Something snapped within me in my sophomore year of college in a small performance for the woodwind studio—nerves I hadn’t felt before the performance sprung up in the midst of it and I lost control. My flute started shaking, my lips were quivering, and my breath control was nonexistent. This was the worst experience one can imagine, for not only did I sound bad and embarrass myself in front of my colleagues, but I completely lost all control over my body. That was the bad part. When you’re young you don’t think about being old, I never think about the possible day when I tell my body to do something and it can’t or won’t. But at that moment I was telling my body to stop shaking, to calm down, to keep going, and it refused. This was the moment of truth, and I have been shaking myself of its aftereffects since.

But on Saturday I made the trek to Fort Collins with a few friends of mine for an orchestral audition. My first “big-kid” audition, and I was surprisingly at ease. In the last six months my life has been going through a wide variety of changes: physically, mentally, emotionally, as well as interpersonally. All of these changes became very clear to me as I woke up Saturday morning and went through my morning stretching routine. I was cool, calm, and collected as I showered, dressed, ate, and hopped in the car. The weather was a definite help as well, the first beautiful sunny day in a long time enabled me to wear my skirt and top without a jacket. I realized that the baggage I had been carrying for the last few years may just be gone. However, I had been optimistic before and didn’t want to have these hopes dashed against a wall when I reached the audition, so I (un)wisely ignored these feelings and took off down the road.

Here’s an interesting revelation about myself: I get edgy, unhappy, and stressed out when I’m in one place for too long. Why is this factoid relevant? Well this trip was the first time since December that I left Laramie. It was the first time I got into my car and drove down the road for location X, and it felt good. Damn good. Perhaps this is why I put 80,000 miles on my car in three years—driving just feels right sometimes.

The most beautiful part of my Saturday was the audition itself. Despite the fact that the warm-up rooms were hot and so live that a note resonated in the air for five minutes after being played (note the hyperbole) whereas the audition room itself was completely dead (even the ceiling had carpet!), and despite the omnipresence of earlier winners from earlier rounds, obnoxious practicers, and blatant show-offs trying to get in your head, I played well in my audition. Not well enough to land the gig, but I’m not quite at the place just yet. However, I played in that audition just as well as I ever have in a practice room. Sure a few notes cracked from dry lips and the keys on my flute clicked and clacked like it was possessed, but my musicality, my tone, and my technique were my own. I was not overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. I nailed it. This might not make sense to those of you who think that winning the job would have been “nailing” it, but sometimes it’s the experience that matters, not the performance.