A Learning Experience

I am home from having had a lovely Thanksgiving meal in a Spanish restaurant with my partner (it is also our 35th anniversary, give or take a few rocky years). In addition to the leftovers from the restaurant, I had made a dish of sweet potatoes and apples (she had served it to me that first Thanksgiving and taught me how to make it) and we bought a pumpkin pie. She is extremely thin and eats very little, and I am a medium size (could lose 5-10 pounds but am not into that right now) and while I certainly eat more than an anorexic model (or than my partner does), in no way can I finish a "serving" of food from a 21st Century restaurant.

So we had enough food to give a mini Thanksgiving meal to my partner's downstairs neighbor who is even older, thinner, sicker, and possibly poorer than my partner, and had not been able to go out.

This made me feel good.

Getting to the topic of this post, over the past few days I had a very bad experience with my pseudonymous blog, which I may be beginning to outgrow.

That is where I began to write about singing and about all the emotional turmoil I was experiencing post-Valentine's Day 2004 (which you can read about here).

It was there that I met "real" singers for the first time. In the past I had only personally known the sort of amateurs who sang with me in "the opera underground" or had read about singers from the Met. I enjoyed my time singing with those amateur groups and if I compared myself to anyone, it was to the women there who were singing the roles I was singing, or to an objective standard of what I thought the music should sound like, or to recordings.

When I began singing again in 2004, pre-blogging, I was living in a bubble. There was The Mentor, who was an exacting task master, often reducing me to tears, but I was not comparing myself to anyone (because the only singers I knew were the one other trained and the 5 or 6 untrained, singers in that small choir), or my life to anyone's except his, of course, and in retrospect I can see that for all the anguish, he was probably one of the 3 or 4 greatest influences on my life, from my singing to my choice of sheets and towels.

Once I began my involvement with the pseudonymous blogging community, I met singers who, while not big stars, were singing all over the country and beyond (some were expats living in Europe). I learned some things about singing both from them and from various online singers' forums, for which I am grateful. I learned about vocal technique, about repertoire, about interpretation. I also heard more than I wanted to know about some of the more "glamorous" aspects of being a singer (as distinct from learning about singing). I don't think that this did much to enhance my life (or improve my singing or inform my choice of church solos or arias) and did a lot toward making me dissatisfied with myself.

As a result of this latter, I seem to have ended up making enemies of all these people and they have "unfriended" me (or I them) from the community in question.

After feeling angry and embarrassed (not by the "unfriendings" but by some of the things that were said to me - or rather written) I decided that all of this was really a blessing in disguise and that it was time to reevaluate my relationship with other singers.

As I am probably only going to be singing either church solos or in various operatic concerts I produce myself, my only relationship with other singers should either be as colleagues (i.e., people who might be interested in participating in some of these things with me or whom I might ask for advice about what to sing - although the first person I should ask about that should be my teacher), or as real mentors, either direct (like my teacher) or indirect, like the renowned teachers and coaches who have blogs with many bits of wisdom about everything from vocal technique to attitude.

Or I need to talk to peers. I so far have found one, a woman who stumbled upon this blog, who started serious classical singing in her late 40s, and who has many of the same daily concerns that I do (mostly about church repertoire).

And of course I am always happy to talk to my colleagues in the choir, some who have vocal training, and some who don't, but who for the most part are supportive and appreciative of what I have to offer.

So what I'm saying is, I think it is a positive thing that I have now been forced to let go of some of the voyeurism that was making me unhappy. It wasn't helping me sing better, or feel better about my life.

ETA: I just deleted that pseudonymous blog, which I had been writing for about six years. I consider that to have been a much needed form of "cleaning house".