The Life Of A Mentally Ill Musician- Day 5

I always think Wednesday’s are the most busy until Thursday comes along lol. Started today once again with my 8am class and then heading over to teach my final section of biology. Today was my very last biology lecture. I have no more. It’s bittersweet if I’m being honest. I didn’t expect to like it at all, but I did. I think I’ll miss teaching my students, but I’m probably going to love the time back (and man right now it’ll be so much free time since I’m struggling to find a job). It takes A LOT of my time. I already know I have one student who told me to be prepared for them emailing me next semester 🙂 . I definitely have really enjoyed teaching, as much as I hated spending so much time on grading. This class in particular is always interesting and fun. They’re an interesting mix, but a lot of them have other classes together so they’ll mess around with each other (as well as talk to me).

After I teach on Thursdays, I have my flute lesson! I think today’s was especially nice, talking about connecting “huh” point to note fingerings and finally to solfege. It’s a lot of layering, but I think it’s really going to help me improve in general as well as my performances when I play by memory. I’ll be re-watching my lesson video (hopefully tomorrow) and taking more detailed notes, but today in the lesson I could really hear and feel a difference in what we were doing. After my lesson, I have a short break before studio class. For today I performed Tchaikovsky’s Paraphrase for flute and piano from “Eugene Onegin”. It’s a piece I’ve actually been wanting to play for years and I’m so happy to finally be doing it. I also felt pretty good about the performance, we had a small music mix-up, so I ended up having to play off my laptop without any of my notes, which allowed some errors to happen. But it was still fine. Definitely taught me the importance of memorizing your movement! The big thing with recording is it shows my improvement on placement, especially in the low register that I’ve been working on, and that’s really cool. (I really wanted to post my recording on this but my website says it’s too big to upload and I don’t really wanna put it on YouTube…but my prof put up a recording if you’re interested, it’s on my facebook page as well as the WVU flute studio page!)

After studio class, I did a little “memorization pod” thing with 2 other flute players. We basically stayed after to play our pieces from memory for each other to help ease anxiety about playing from memory in front of others, as well as help identify the weaker points in our memory. That was definitely helpful for me, especially since I’ve worked out the memory blips I had in our recital. With this recording I’ll be able to tell if my work, well, worked, or if it needs more work, or even if there were other weak spots.

After that, I went home pretty exhausted. I usually don’t practice Thursdays, as my only free hour in the day is right after my lessons, or after studio class when I’m exhausted from a full day of work. I do think I’m going to do more solfege work on my Chaminade, as I’m actually feeling quite motivated, which hasn’t happened in a while if I’m being honest, so I want to take advantage of it.

I really don’t have anything else to write. Thursday’s are just so busy I usually don’t even have time to think about anything that makes me anxious or depressed. I don’t really feel anxious about lessons either and I honestly think after the first lesson with someone, I’m fine. I think my mindset has just changed to understanding that I’m going to make mistakes and not always sound great in lessons…and that’s the point. I don’t think I’ll have much to write tomorrow, as my Friday’s aren’t usually eventful. I also think I’m going to combine my weekends into one post as well, so it’ll be a combined Saturday and Sunday on Sunday.

See ya!