Confidence?

This morning was actually the second time I had seen my therapist since she came to my concert, but I guess we were talking about other things, because today was the first time she gave me feedback.  What she said was that I had so much talent, but so little confidence.  She said there were moments when I owned the stage (singing "Liber Scriptus") but then other moments when I looked shy and unsure of myself (interestingly, she said most of these were when I was not singing).  I was not offended by this comment any more than I was offended by my teacher saying I was singing too softly and that this disappointed him.  The question is what to do with such feedback.

Which brings me back to what I said in earlier posts about not having had the advantages that conservatory students have, even though by now I have studied voice as long as someone with a Masters in Vocal Performance.  Those people are in performance classes where they get feedback on a regular basis about everything from how they look to how they pronounce languages.  I have not had that experience.  My teacher gives me feedback about my singing and about the style of what I am singing (mostly if it's Italian opera).  The choir director mostly just wants me to sing "pretty".  The choir does sing things in different languages so we get drilled in how to pronounce words in German, for example, and the Spanish woman helped me with my Spanish (although I felt most of what she had to say about vocal production was wrong, so I did some of it but didn't incorporate it into my singing when I was not singing for her).  But that is not the same as having to get up in front of my peers (what peers???) every week and sing something, starting with the Italian songbook, and ending, maybe six years later, with some dramatic arias.  As I've said, the two groups I went to that were supposed to serve that purpose were filled with people younger and more confident, so I just felt depressed and irrelevant.

I was telling my therapist that the issue of confidence is in some ways a feedback loop.  I felt more confident in the beginning when I was working with the Mentor and everyone was bowled over by how I sounded because the choir was so talent starved.  And I felt reasonably confident when I started out in this avocational choir and was one of the, oh, let's say three best singers there.  But the more I see how I don't measure up, even as an avocational opera singer, certainly in Manhattan (or the outer boroughs - people will travel there to sing a leading role, i.e. nothing is just for the local talent any more) the less confidence I have.  And I have been trained to be make myself look humble and self-effacing when I sing choir solos.  I have never really been encouraged, except briefly by the Mentor, to strut my stuff in any way.  If it isn't the choir director telling me to sing softly (even when I'm singing a solo) it's my partner telling me to cover up my cleavage and dress like a "mature professional woman" (barf).

I also think (insane as this sounds) that I underrated the extent to which seeing all those equality signs everywhere made me feel ripped off.  That was my private bit of daring 30 years ago and now it's a litmus test for how "with it" the stodgy urban middle classes are?

Which is not that afield from how I feel about singing.  Is there no little patch of ground I can stand on that isn't occupied by a bajillion people?

It would be so much easier if I were "from" somewhere else and I could just "go home" where there was less competition, fewer singers with large operatic voices, fewer pretty Lesbians who were "out". But I am in fact a third generation apartment dwelling, subway riding, non-driving New Yorker.  And so much of what once was "metropolitan and cosmopolitan" has now moved out to smaller cities and larger towns that I would have to go somewhere very very very small indeed to feel special.

I want to run away to Ogunquit.  Sometimes that's what I really really want to do.  With my partner.  Away from all the people who swallow me up and make me feel invisible, anonymous, and irrelevant.