The Life of A Mentally Ill Musician- Day 4

My Wednesdays are usually pretty packed and today wasn’t much different. Though if I’m honest, instead of practicing this morning, I slept. Which I do normally feel really guilty about, because obviously practicing is really important. But sleep is also very important! I’ve found that my sleep schedule always gets messed up when I start a new anxiety medication and the new one I’ve been on for almost 2 weeks now is no different. They always start by knocking me out and leaving me exhausted and sleeping for HOURS. As long as this one is the same, it should be wearing off and going back to normal (fingers crossed). But after I finally woke up, I headed to my theory class once again and then left to teach my 2 back-to-back biology classes. Today it actually went by pretty quickly, but they’re always fun classes. I have one student in my 2nd class in particular who always gives me funny answers when they don’t know the answer, as well as small doodles that are always fun to look at. Fun answers from them this time around were: one of the kidney’s functions being to make kidney stones (I mean kinda) and that a property of enzymes is them being “awesome maybe”. It always brings a little smile to my face when I’m grading.

After biology, I usually go grab dinner with some “flute + biology TAs”. We went to a burrito place (where I may or may not have seen one of my students). It’s always nice to do, especially for someone who hasn’t had many friends in the past few years. I’ve never really had people I would just go out with, so that’s definitely been a nice change this semester 🙂 .

Then I’m back home for the night. Since I didn’t do a “real” practice session this morning, I did a lazy-person practice session. Which pretty much involves me listening to the pieces I’m playing and fingering the notes along with it. I feel like this helps with memorizing, but especially expression within a piece to hear how other people are playing and shaping the piece. I also did a suggestion by my professor to help with memorization and went through my piece in solfege, which will hopefully help the few weaker points of my memorization. I still count this kind of work as practicing, because it is important and definitely helps with the piece, but I can do it in the comfort of my own home. Sometimes I’ll listen to recordings and try to take notes on it, or I’ll listen to my own recording (this is more likely) to figure out what I like and didn’t like. If I’m really feeling it, I’ll even get up and practice my movement within the piece (my dog must think I’m insane) since that’s something I struggle with. But I did discover something, as I finally listened to the recording of my studio recital performance. It really wasn’t that bad, I blipped on like 2 whole measures, but man it felt like an ETERNITY up on stage. The other part I felt not great about was because for some reason I booked it through the fast section, I don’t know what I was on, but when I was listening and heard how fast I decided to take it I was like “girl no wonder it felt scary, why did you start so flipping fast??” So, lesson re-learned, you may think that something went terribly, but in reality it probably wasn’t as big of a deal…at least when it comes to music.

I’m writing this before doing this, but I’m probably going to do some yoga as well. I actually did an entire research last year in my undergrad on the benefits of yoga for musicians and there’s definitely SO MANY benefits. There’s obviously the physical ones, stretching sore muscles, strengthening muscles, posture, and even relaxation, but there’s also mental benefits. Many people who struggle with anxiety and depression have found a bit of relief in yoga. Now I would never say yoga could cure all anxiety and depression, because I know that’s not true, but it can help. Even if it doesn’t help someone mentally, it’ll help them physically, which is pretty nice. The other thing I’ve begun doing (now that I have an apartment with a tub) is take baths. I always thought they couldn’t be that great, but man are they relaxing! Either way, I’m pretty tense and sore so I’ll probably pull up a good “Yoga with Adriene” video before bed.

Until tomorrow (with a studio performance and lesson in one day!!)!