Chowder

 Almost two years on, I feel like I should bring up a list of things and see where we are... What is this, an appraisal already?!

Well, dear reader, I have rolled the dice on the DM sandal game and have come out rather the better this time (although I should probably have one of those little knives people have for taking stones out of horseshoes, what with the amount of grit I pick up on a daily basis). I've been in a new job, pushing pieces of paper around and making sure those emails hurry along, since September last, and still keep my hand in with some ongoing hospitality work (because actually... I like it?). I think my relationship with singing is it its worst place so far really, especially miserable after what should be some totally unmitigated triumphs (new teacher, doing my first Messiah as soloist with a real orchestra) but being faced by the fact that I might just... not be consistently good enough? Maybe this is as good as it's ever going to get and I'm struggling to make sense of that at the moment? It's one thing bad enough to torture yourself with it but to get some external validation of that has really come at quite a time after another go on the audition->interview->non-appointment merry-go-round. It never rains but pours, after all.

Which of course leaves me wondering about where to go next? "How to go". It's been a legendary crash-out recently, as I grapple with the fear that I can't improve enough, or show positive results to a satisfactory. I'm a hack who's out of practice, a by-product of both personal and external non-investment, and in an incredibly brutal and competitive world that obviously just doesn't really stack up. I've spent at least the last decade, and certainly most of my life not taking myself really very seriously, because to do so is to ask questions about worth and selection and rejection and what it really means to measure up to any of that, whether from within or without. The countertenor voice being played for a joke, whether genuinely or seriously, hasn't done my chosen voice type and mentality a world of good. Every now and again I have this feeling, but this time I really do wonder, what it's all about? This year was my 27th year in the Anglican music system, and as much as the old adage goes that you'd get less for murder, I can't help but wonder. Conventional wisdom says that a change is better than a rest, but I do need a holiday - continually working myself down to the bone outside of my regular desk job and service time hours isn't doing me any favours at all. But like I say, how else am I to afford this water bill? Ridiculous...

But we all love a spot of drama, don't we? As much as this has hit me pretty hard it's probably all deserved (and far quieter than some of the things I say to myself in the mirror regularly) and so I need to do something constructive about it somehow. Making the time and the money up is the real difficulty, and at least I could take some small comfort from the fact that it is just really a money problem (and I'm so glad it's a money problem!) rather than something, anything more strenuous and sinister.

~

As with many of these navel-gazing journal entries, there's about a month between when I started and picking it back up. The depression, frankly, has been killing me and almost everyone I know is actually genuinely worried. I have finally started the process of getting a medication review, but if that comes in before Christmas it'll be nothing short of a miracle. I have been borderline terrified of opening my mouth to sing as I don't really feel like I can trust myself on what constitutes meaningful good practice - you can't really bandy about terms like embarrassing and how simple it is to "absolutely ruin" things without it having a catastrophic effect. I cried on the drive home at the start of the week (through Bakewell! Of all places) because I thought a little too hard about how much of my life I've wasted through the simple act of being a disabled person and how many opportunities I basically have never known existed to straight up couldn't cope with when I was younger or even now would present a significant difficulty (who can forget having a screaming fit in the Quad of Keble College, Oxford? Thanks for telling me you can't help me) - nobody really cares if it's far enough outside their comfort or ability. And I am tired.