The Life Of A Mentally Ill Musician- Day 8

It’s dead week everyone, my last week of classes this semester. Which means I basically have a million things to do, but I’m trying to be better this semester and not procrastinate. I am usually a HUGE procrastinator, but I’ve been trying hard not to. Or at least not procrastinate as badly. Also totally off topic, but I wanna share the fit from today because I wore my new shoes again and I love them and wanna show them off a little lol. They’re great, even though I’m starting to get good ol’ doc martin blisters from them.

So today once again started with me in the practice room. I found myself getting frustrated with myself a lot today during my practice session, which used to be a pretty common occurrence. In the past, this frustration has turned bad fast, ending up with me basically telling myself I’m the scum of the earth, suck at flute, or am just plain stupid. It was not a fun time and I didn’t like that. I used to only be able to practice for an hour before I’d end up thinking so toxically, eventually I was able to do 2 hours, and now sometimes 3 (with smaller breaks inbetween). So I found ways to not get to that point, which usually is just taking a break and coming back to practicing later. Or just “simply” redirecting my thoughts and trying to get down to what’s really bothering me, which can be scary. Did I not practice enough and now I’m frustrated? Did I wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Did my dog make me mad? Am I feeling insecure about something? It could be anything, but usually when you get to the source, you can redirect your thoughts a bit. Today’s frustration was with my memorization on the Chaminade Concertino. I’ve been working on memorizing this piece all semester long and. I was getting frustrated with myself because I’m still having memory blips even after playing it from memory daily for probably months. I just couldn’t understand why I can’t memorize it and why it’s not already perfectly memorized. I’ve worked hard on it, so why isn’t it perfect. But the truth is, it’ll never be perfect. I might never have a perfect run when it comes to memory because I’m human. But this is also one of my first times memorizing a piece, I’m still learning what works and doesn’t work with my brain and memory. So I need to cut myself a little slack here. The other frustration was just in general with my sound, which also happens pretty often. Today it was the usual, this sounded so good yesterday, what happened? And that’s where I need to remember that progress isn’t linear. Just because I didn’t sound as good today doesn’t mean that I’ve fallen back to square one. The frustration today surprisingly lead me to be a bit more motivated though and when I got home today one of the things I did was completely redo my memory map with solfege and sing along with it (though I also played this in my practice session thinking about solfege).

Honestly, that normally doesn’t happen. Usually, after a break I’m good to go for a while longer, or honestly sometimes I just take the L and don’t practice. I’d rather not bring myself down through practice and it really won’t make it be an effective practice session. So I do honestly think sometimes it’s better to just not practice if I can’t fix my mindset, instead I’ll go home and do something fun or cuddle my dog.

After practicing and my class I came back home and pretty much just worked. I have a presentation tomorrow in my class, so I ran through that, as well as worked on my final portfolio thing for my lessons, which took a while. Then I worked on my memory map (for those that have no idea what this is, I didn’t either. Basically, it’s a version I wrote out with only a few core notes to help my memory), and lesson notes. Now I’m here. It wasn’t supposed to be a busy night, but here I am.

I do want to talk about something and that’s how much nights can suck, after I’ve blogged. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but it seems that every night my brain just decides to pour out all the nasty feelings. Those words of insecurity, frustration, anxiety, loneliness, depression and everything creep in. It’s really rough if I’m being honest. I don’t know what it is about night time, but it’s usually night time when the thoughts run rampant. I don’t even have a way to fix it now, other than distracting myself in some way or willing myself to fall asleep (which can take a long time when my brain won’t just shut up, yay insomnia). Maybe I should finally listen to my doctor and get off my phone sooner, listen to music or meditate. Even meditating is hard though because then it’s like I’m asking for my brain to just yell everything at me. Either way I guess I just wanted to throw it out there as something that’s been occurring that I maybe didn’t really want to share, but now am sharing a bite of it. Night time can be scary.

And that was my day pretty much. Tomorrow should be interesting, with my presentation, bio class, and studio… bye I guess lol