As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, my identity was tied into being an organist from a pretty young age. I suspect a lot of artist/musicians find this to be so because the work and time required to get to a high level in the arts starts very early. Advantages include being driven from a young age, going through the process of getting good at something, and a built-in community of like-minded friends. Disadvantages include rigidity of future planning, crap self-esteem because you’re constantly comparing yourself, and losing out on some time in exploring other interests. Both my husband and myself went to a prestigious conservatory for college, so we both experienced these factors first-hand. Of all the difficulties forging your identity in your teen years presents, it’s the rigidity you may hold onto it that I want to think about today. Half of my life now has been spent as a legal adult, and it’s really only now that I’m unmaking that childhood identity in a way that no longer feels like a freefall.
I started music training in kindergarten, but it wasn’t until I was in fourth grade that the training became more formal. Once it took me however, I was gone. I practiced on my own volition, attended concerts, and other enrichment opportunities that were not often of interest to tweens and young teens. I went to music camp in the summer (actually organist music camp 😳) and for the first time really felt like I’d found my people. That’s a great feeling for a young person, and I know so many young person support programs out there are specifically trying to help kids find that. But along with finding my people came imposter syndrome and all the other fun things young people in general, and women in particular deal with. The organ world is far from equal-most ‘top posts’ are held by men, particularly when those posts are part of the boys choir/choral scholar/high church tradition. Small digression except that I knew somewhere deep down that I had to do some fighting for my place in it all.
In truth, I’ve wondered a lot over the past 10 years of this slow disintegration if my ‘failure’ wasn’t because I wasn’t fighting harder against the glass ceiling. I watched myself get passed over for a lot of things, and really a lot of it I didn’t have much control over. But I also watched myself make deliberate choices that have made me demonstrably happier: get married, have a child, say no to an opportunity, leave a job, move, lay low, practice only when I wanted, try out another job, have another kid, finally admit this job (all organist jobs?) just wasn’t for me. This process has been slow but it has been filled with the constant drumbeat of “fight for it, you’ll prove yourself, you need to work harder, practice more, sacrifice more, this is who you are, don’t give up.” And once I finally became willing to stop plugging that dam, it burst, and I’m feeling freer, happier, and better able to see what actually matters to me. I have literally been telling myself for years now that if I wanted to pursue my supposed musical performance goals, I just needed to practice more. But I’d step outside of myself and see the sacrifices to my family time required, and my deep inner knowing would say unequivocally that I wasn’t willing to do that. The trade off wasn’t in my favor, and it didn’t feel right to me. For years I’ve known this. Yet I’ve been too scared of stepping away from it to put my energy where I actually wanted it to go until the past few months. I’m not mad, and I don’t regret it. I do believe in the process and in the accumulation of life experience and wisdom that I’ve acquired. I think it will only grow in usefulness. But I wish I had sewn the seeds of flexibility earlier in my life. I think it would have softened some of these blows, and I think I could have had a more active imagination earlier on regarding what I saw for myself in the future.
Something I think we get wrong in ‘helping’ young people forge their identities is focusing too hard on being driven and working hard. A lot of middle aged adults wake up and discover they weren’t super thrilled with act 1 and there’s little template out there for helping them discover act 2. We all deserve more time and space to forge and reforge our identities, because ultimately that’s not how others see us but rather it’s our primary relationship to our very self that we’re seeking. So now that half my life has been spent as a legal adult, I’m looking at paths that set me freer but also invite others into community from a greater sense of freedom. Developmentally, I don’t think I could have handled this much possibility as a teenager. But now that I’m stepping into it, it’s so great. I’m basically happily floating in a body of water, unable to see the edges or bottom except for where I’ve been. At some point, I trust I’ll put on a mask and snorkel or find an edge to swim up to. But I’m not forcing any sort of direction other than to read, absorb, explore, and then recenter myself. So to bring it back to the day’s prompt, I think I would want my teenage self to know that she had this intuition in her, and that whether or not she ‘made it’ as a musician (whatever that even is in a capitalist society), or put her efforts toward something else, she’d be anchored how she needed and when she needed, anxiety not necessary.
As part of this new thing, whatever it is, that I’m doing, I’m writing and sharing weekly contemplative prompts. If you like these daily writing prompts and want to go deeper, I encourage you to follow the hashtag #contemplativeprompts and check out the latest prompt.
Actually an Artist 
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