Whenever I realize I have to commit to something, my first natural tendency is to overcommit to other smaller things. Things that I wouldn't really enjoy doing on a regular, genuine basis, but nevertheless keep me from pouring my heart into something I care about.
This, of course, gets me even more stressed. And then I regret committing to those smaller things. And then I just stick with them because I keep worrying about letting so many people down and having become a pain in their asses due to my unreliability. I stick to those small things, half-heartedly, telling myself that I love these things in order to make the rest of the world happy and feel secure that I am where I want to be. And then I back out, at the last possible moment, thinking that it's the right thing to do, only to realize that I had been letting people down but also wasted a valuable amount of their time.
It's how this whole mess of "me" got started in the first place.
Piano. At the age of six, a nice wooden upright piano showed up in my family's living room. The next thing I know, Mom's sending me to classes twice a week with a woman who never carried a frown on her face... no matter how many times I screwed up. I couldn't sight-read music to save my life, and at home, Mom would sit next to me and play the scales and point to the sheet music to make sure I was following along. She would hover over my head and to this day, I remember her voice echoing things like "follow the liiiine nooote" so harshly that it would send a ringing to my little six year old ears.
I grew up around the piano, and played like it was a chore. Like it was the same thing expected from me as much as making my bed in the morning to brushing my teeth at night. Clockwork. The fact that I couldn't pick up sight-reading in music was what frustrated me, and so at some point I just backtracked into playing music by ear.
Does that note sound right? Wait. No. How about now? Or now? This got me through my [expensive] piano lessons, while right behind me, my sister was picking up sight-reading like a third language. She swept the scales and slammed onto those keys like she meant business, the callousness in her fingers already showing more music potential than me. I improvised and tried to figure out how to play popular theme songs from film... always by the right hand. Playtime at the piano. It made something that I had considered a chore to have an element of fun. And then came my overall guilt of making something out of all these lessons.
Dear God, I thought.
I just need one song to show that I have a little bit of talent in this thing. What song could I do that will at least prove that I learned something all these years? I didn't exactly find it, but I borrowed it from my cousin (another grand pianist) because I was too lazy to look. She had been practicing "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven during the time that she came to live with my family, and of her many acts of kindness, she taught me the first part to that piece. Sight-reading had nothing to do with it, for me. My cousin basically held my hand with those piano keys, and my teacher thought I had built a passion overnight. She thought it was a gift that I was learning this piece so quickly and so emotionally, where in reality, I was doing it because someone had already learned it. The gift was that I knew how to pretend it was mine.
Wouldn't you know, I entered a piano competition in eight grade and played that piece (with sheet music, for presentation purposes) flawlessly with my fingers. When I got the voice message from my piano teacher telling me the good news: I won a gold medal!, my face didn't change. Maybe my heart skipped a beat, but that was it. Cool. I won big! But it wasn't the matter of life or death to me. The piano was something I just grew accustomed to seeing and playing every day, like I enjoyed those fun moments when I sat down to it, but in the end... it didn't carry my soul. What's funny is that I look back and think about pianos as inanimate objects with
so much soul in them, waiting to be opened by the person who manages to sit there.
My sister had that gift naturally, and my other sister had her brief stint at trying it out, too.
It's amazing how you can find a piece of creative self-expression and immediately feel like it's home to you. Sometimes you can dread picking it up because the practice is brutal, but you eventually can start feeling the noise of your reality just fade and become relaxing and quiet.
I feel it whenever I write and when I draw.
That's probably why it's so emotionally frustrating to commit to them day-by-day.
Because if that's where your soul is, it's going to take a lot of digging and experimenting and practicing in order to get home.
Things are looking up.
