The View from the Shallow End of the Pool

No matter what I do, I can't shake the tremendous sadness that the two online fights I got into have left me with.

It's not a feeling of loss.  The person I removed from my friends list on Facebook and the one who removed me (the subsequent two who removed me made me slightly regretful, as I had no quarrel with them, but not deeply sad) were not people who cared about me or even liked me, so it is no great loss.

All I can think of is that this is really the first period in my life when I have had no listeners, not really.  I have a therapist, whom I pay, and some friends and acquaintances who care about me, but not people whom I can bounce ideas and thoughts off of, who give me positive feedback for my incisiveness, even when they don't agree with me.

I think the overriding factor with the two people I quarreled with is not that they are singers or voice teachers, but that they are preachers, and I don't like being preached at, directly, indirectly, or by implication.  I'm too old for that.  If my voice teacher wants to lecture me about something that didn't sound good (he has done that), or if someone who loves me and cares about me wants to point out (privately) that I did something thoughtless or selfish, that is ok.  But I am not stupid and I am not ignorant, and I don't need anyone telling me what to think, how to feel, or how to define myself.

I was interested to see this article, because it spoke to a lot of what I have been doing that has fueled my unhappiness. This article refers to people reading posts from (basically web stalking) people they hate or dislike. For me, it is more an issue of stalking people who don't like me, or even worse, people to whom I do not matter.

One sentence particularly resonates:

“I usually hate-read alone, late at night when I’m procrastinating, drunk, bored or all three,” she wrote. “When I finally walk away from my computer, I feel like I’ve just binged on a butter-sogged bag of popcorn before the movie even started: I’m slightly nauseated, but still can’t help licking my fingers for more fatty flavor.”

It is not a complete one on one match:  I am never drunk, and I don't do this type of reading late at night.  I do it when I am bored to near suicidality by having trawled through pages and pages of work cleaning up punctuation.  At that point any emotion is an improvement, even a negative one.

But I am left feeling exactly as if I have had an unhealthy binge.  This is, in fact, how I felt after those two escalating online quarrels.  I don't take back anything I said, it is all true, and I meant every word of it, but why didn't I just remove, particularly the second person, from my friends list before I got into all that?  Why do I keep combing over her every word, even now, in my head, which, in fact, is where I got the title of this post.

The message I have been given is that if I (or people like me) don't want a shark to bite off my toe I should stay at the shallow end of the pool. Over the weekend I gave that a lot of thought.  Is that giving up?  Never to sing anything except art songs and church solos in a limited range?  Never go to any more opera auditions?  Never sing "big girl opera rep" except in my bathroom?

Now I don't for one minute regret having sung the Habanera in the bookstore, basically, to get a Youtube video.  Even though now it has another "dislike".  I said I didn't want to die anonymous, and so that will be there, forever, for posterity.  And I am still planning that spoken and sung Carmen (even if out of self protectiveness I decide to transpose the Sequidilla down). But I have gotten burned once too many times to go to any more auditions.   Really, what's the point?

Here's the problem with the shallow end, and here's what still surprises me.  There don't seem to be very many people there, certainly not ones who are talking about and sharing about their experiences and supporting each other.  If there were, I would be happy to stay there.  Or if we had our own little "Forum" and our own little soapbox exchange.  Did online journaling and bucked each other up.  But that doesn't seem to be happening.

I know I have said this before, but my two biggest surprises when I started singing again were:
1. The level of the singers auditioning for the no-pay opera companies and
2. The level of the singers babbling and navel gazing via blogs and online fora.

I had really thought that those things would have been the shallow end.  The deep end, I  had thought, would have been interviews in Opera News. I felt so terribly sad all weekend, not because I don't sing as well as I want to, or because some blowhards don't like me, but because I keep feeling that none of this matters. 

How could something (by "something" I am referring to the transformation I underwent that is described here) that was probably one of the five peak experiences in my six decade and counting life, not matter?  If I'm supposed to shut up and stay at the shallow end (where there are apparently few swimmers and fewer sightseers), what was it all for? This weekend I was so unhappy I actually threw myself into cleaning (for my SO, not for myself).  I didn't feel like singing, not at all, for at least four days.

Tonight I went into my bathroom and sang through "Amour Viens Aider".  And I know that God is not done with me yet.