On May the 4th I sang for a grade and since then I have not sung a note. Not with the radio (I have only listened to Jon on sports talk radio) and not in any other way. I had been asked to help a friend do a fundraising recital but that never happened so I just never sang.
I really love to sing. I thought my juries went well this semester and for once I felt pretty good about the whole thing. Since then I have been busy and my focus has been on jury duty, chemistry, family stuff and not on singing. Today I had a voice lesson and as I drove home I realized just how much I love to sing and how much I had missed it. You know how sometimes you are hungry, but you are so busy you don’t even realize it until you take that first bite? Well, that was me today with singing.
The hard part is that I still, after all of this time, have no confidence in my singing. I know I have gotten better- I have had amazing teachers, workshops, and a lot more opportunity to sing. Anyone would have gotten better! The people at school who actually consider me a singer and ask me to sing with them are probably my best motivation, but others at school who are negative still can get me down in a hurry! (And they aren’t really negative about my singing per se, just about me in general.) And although I have learned so much and done so much better at school, today back in Homewood, around my old friend Scotty T, I realized I am still almost as critical of myself as ever. I held back and got back into old habits that I thought I had outgrown.
Maybe we never really outgrow our insecurities. Maybe we can ignore that little voice in our head who tells us negative things. Maybe we can put in a new voice that is louder than the old one, but the old one is still there, waiting. Waiting for us to let down our guard, waiting for the right situation to come back full force.
By the end of the lesson I did feel like I was beating back the voices and letting my voice sing out a little bit. When I got in my car I realized how much I had missed singing. I don’t know that I will ever think I am any good. I don’t know that I will ever be confident enough to actually say I am a singer. I do know one thing- it makes me happy to sing. My whole problem is worrying that it is not making the people listening happy. But it is true what they say, the older you get, the more you just don’t care. In many ways we get a little closer to our childhood as we get aged. When we are kids we are free to just sing and dance when the spirit moves us. Then we become inhibited, “domesticated” as one of my professors tells us. But you start to get older and you realize, “Oh, what the hell!” So I love to sing and if Scotty T can stand it, I will sing on Thursday afternoon for the next few weeks and I will enjoy it!
