Healthy Denial. Is this an Oxymoron?

As one of my goals is not just to keep singing better, find opportunities, and stimulate my right brain, but also to be in a better mood, I have cut certain things out of my life.

In addition to the Facebook "friends" with whom there was a mutual unfriending as a result of ill will, I also unfriended several working performing artists who basically ignored me.  Why do I need to read about what they are doing?  Added to this, I "unsubscribed" to the email lists of two of the small opera companies I had had dealings with: the one who gave me feedback that included telling me I was "not a future investment" and the one that cast me in a tiny role and then ripped me to pieces.  Apparently when you unsubscribe to something they ask you why, so I gave them an earful, the point basically being that I didn't need constant reminders of things that had been hurtful.

Where "denial" comes into the picture, is that more and more, I am trying to shut out the whole world of small opera companies here in  New York.  They do not want me.  This was very very painful for me.  I never thought I was good enough to have a "career" singing, starting at this late date, but I really really did think I could be good enough to sing leading roles with the groups that don't pay people.  I had sung with these sorts of groups 30 years ago when I did not sound nearly as good as I do now, and these groups at that time featured many people my age who looked and sounded about like I do now.  I am not going to audition for any more of these groups, and quite frankly, I can't see anything to be gained by going to see them perform, other than the pay to sing group that my teacher occasionally still helps out with, as there are some very very good avocational singers there (who sound as good as professionals) who are only a little younger than I am, and whom I am not too proud to listen to and learn from (I am not interested in trying to learn something from singers under 35 - what would be the point??)

So I made a decision, for example, not to go to this year's reprise of this.

They are going to be performing practically on my doorstep again next Wednesday at noon.  I can't really see that going to see them would enhance my life or improve my singing or performing techniques in any way.  My time would be better spent staying in and working and then devoting a two hour chunk later in the day to practicing my church solo and my September 11 pieces.

So is all this denial, and if it is, are there times when denial is healthy?

I was telling my partner the other day that going to museums and looking at visual art is so important to me because it is something that I can enjoy on an aesthetic and spiritual level, whereas music and performances are what I work at so there are always mixed emotions involved when I am in the audience.  In fact I have almost entirely stopped going to the opera, even though it is on my doorstep.  I mean I would go if someone offered me a free ticket, or if a friend wanted to go and we bought cheap seats to go together, but that's about it.  My partner and I, no matter how broke we are, always get a subscription to the ballet because it is something she loves.  And if I can scrape together the money, we sometimes see a Broadway show, which we can do for a discounted rate because she is unable to climb stairs, so we get orchestra seats at the balcony price (which btw isn't always all that cheap!)

So the question is, can my denial make a big enough ring around me that I can believe that where classical singing is concerned, I'm the real deal?

A Toxic Environment

Yesterday I almost lost it.  By "lost it" I mean got into such a rage that I crossed some kind of line between mental health and mental unwellness.

I hesitate to use the term "mental illness" because these are serious illnesses.  Severe depression kills, as was evidenced by what happened to Robin Williams.  Severe depression cripples.  Mental "unwellness" is another thing, a state that I can get into frequently if I have enough external triggers (I am never one of these people who says "everything is going so well, but I'm miserable").  If I'm miserable, it's because I'm having my nose rubbed, on a daily basis, in other people's talent, exciting careers, large families, interesting travels, new opportunities, you name it.

Yesterday I was in a situation that was a metaphor for everything that makes me angry and despairing.  No, I don't feel suicidal.  I am more apt to want to kick out a window than slit my wrists, quite frankly.  So yesterday I was bringing my SO home from a doctor's appointment in Soho.  I forgot just how awful Soho is.  I have written at length about how living on the Upper West Side, I feel about the size of a gnat, and about as relevant.  But Soho is where everyone seems to be glamorous and, oh so young!  So, waiting for a cab with my SO on the corner of Houston St. and Broadway, I was virtually trapped under what I will call a tsunami of young, glamorous, people ignoring me and my SO, some of them trying to hail cabs.  A seemingly nice young man started to help us find one (with no luck) but abandoned the task once his eye was caught by an extremely glamorous and trendy looking heavily made up (yes, I usually am that, too) woman in her 30s, probably, who didn't speak much English (was she Italian? maybe).  So he began chatting her up, was rebuffed, and scarpered off.  And then, when this (expletive deleted) started hailing a cab, I just bloody lost it!!  I tried to gesture to her that I was trying to get a cab for someone elderly (I pointed to my SO's cane), but who knows if this woman even understood my words.  On the other hand, she could see, right???

I truly think I was saved from committing a murder (I wanted to throw her into the traffic) by my SO grabbing me and our skittering across the street to an island, where, Heaven be praised, a taxi appeared.

I did not feel good about myself after this.  My SO was angry with me.  Later I realized that this was not about getting a cab (although I have been known to almost get into fistfights with young healthy people who try to take cabs away from me and my SO from under our noses) it was about my endless frustration at feeling at the bottom of a tsunami of talented young people who suck up all the opportunities, the attention, the concert attendees, the water cooler conversation at the church, and the list goes on.

Last night I had a dream I was in prison.  Not a hardcore prison and I don't think I was expecting to be there long because I was trying to figure out how to get hold of someone who could pay my rent.  At the crux of the dream was my anxiety that I hadn't been given intake forms to fill out, which was supposed to happen.  I know that that was a stand in for my desperately wanting people to know who I am; that I am a performer too, that my life revolves around what I am singing and where I am singing, and sometimes about my photographs and my writing.  That I am not ordinary.  

Overall, I have been in a better mood than usual.  My therapist always comes back to that a lot of my bad feelings stem from living here in New York, where the best of everything is in my face 24/7.  Well, that's just the way it is.  My maternal grandparents moved here in 1919, and I'm a third generation apartment dwelling non driver.  I have a cheap apartment.  At my last session my therapist used a phrase I had never used either aloud or too myself.  She said "well, so let's start from that you are in a toxic environment and then take it from there".

I never used to feel that way and I have lived here all my life.  The city (so it seems) used to be full of ordinary people who lived in cramped apartments and went to ordinary jobs, who weren't especially stylish, and who, although they may have loved to go to performances, did not and had no plans to work in the performing arts.  So where are those people now?

For the most part, things have been going well.  I have two definite solos for the September 11 concert: Handel's "O Had I Jubal's Lyre" and "Domine Deus" from the Vivaldi Gloria.  The concert producer is happy with them.  There will be seven singers on the program, four classical singers and three musical theater singers.  I am able to hold my own quite nicely in that setting.  And on Sunday August 31 I will sing "Erfreute Zeit" as a solo in the church service.

And I keep singing better and better.  Those exercises with the "h" have really done something to open up my voice.  I am singing regularly up to a high C again.  I had a nice time singing with the informal summer choir.  "Little Miss Conservatory" is not there.  She is away performing in a real opera with real singers who are going places.  I don't have to think about that.  So I wonder how things will be when she is back?  Will there be "room" for me as a serious performer?  Another issue is that I think one unwritten mission that this church has is to be a "home" for "young people" who have come to New York to work (for pay or not) in the performing arts.  So OK.  What about the older people who want to perform, who want to be taken seriously?  This is a continuing source of discontent for me.  Finding visibility.  Finding visibility in a toxic environment.  Without ending up in prison for real.

Requiem: Further Musings on a Loss

The loss of this coach has hit me very hard, much more than I expected.  I didn't cry over the news, the way I did the day I heard that my 91-year-old violinist colleague had died, but that was a different situation.  I truly loved him and saw him dwindle day by day.  I regretted that I hadn't visited him one last time.  But it was not a shock.

I suppose much of this is about "why is she gone and why am I still here"?  She had a musical career that I can only dream of (it wasn't a big career, but she was always in demand playing for operas and concerts, usually ones in which the singers are not paid but the pianist is) and she had amassed quite a few regulars coming to the studio for coachings, myself among them. So she got to do what she loved on a regular basis and had the respect of her colleagues.

And then there is the mother/daughter thing.  That's a touchy subject with me.  One thing I have to remember is that however bad my relationship with my mother was, most of my friends and acquaintances' relationships with their mothers was as bad or worse.  I think it's a generational thing.  Mothers born at a certain time, even ones who fancied themselves as "enlightened" (meaning in my mother's case that she used the "F" word all the time and talked about sex in a clinical manner in a loud voice in public places) were still quite authoritarian (as in "my way or the highway") and didn't know how to respect their adult children as separate people.  The women I know who are under 45 have an entirely different kind of relationship with their mothers.  They can be different from their mothers and that's ok.  Their mothers are interested in them instead of trying to control them.

I know this is childish and pointless, but I really do think if I had had a different kind of mother (and a different kind of school environment, and different peers - or maybe none; my coach's daughter who is a rising young mezzo was home schooled) I might have done something with my musical talent.  I know character is important, and I probably lacked it until I was well into my 30s, certainly, but most people's successes or lack of it involves a synergy between the person's character and temperament and their environment.

My coach and her daughter adored each other.  As I said, this young woman was hand groomed to be a singer from childhood, but I never got the feeling that she was pushed in a way that she would resent later.  One sign of this was that she was independent enough to go abroad after graduating from Juilliard (which doesn't seem to offer as much to singers, as, say, Manhattan School of Music does, as a case in point, the woman in my choir whom I call "Little Miss Conservatory" has nailed a high profile mentor at MSM whereas my coach's daughter never did at Juilliard).

So again, the question is, why is she gone so soon and why am I still here?

Don't worry.  I am not feeling suicidal.  I couldn't imaging killing myself.  Things are not that bad; there are many things I enjoy in the moment: singing well, reading, going to museums, my favorite tv programs, cuddling with my SO and my cats, to name a few.  It's just that things are not that great either.  In addition to having a perfect life, I always was in awe of my coach's sense of wonder at how things turned out.  She was always not just happy or positive, but "elated", a mood I am almost never in, or if I am, briefly, all the much of toomuchness of twenty-first century New York, particularly here in the lee of Lincoln Center, comes crashing in on me.

In a strange kind of synchronicity, the night I heard the news about my coach's death, Verdi's Messa da Requiem broadcast on Channel 13.  I listened to the beginning, then my SO asked me to turn to something else.  I got to hear "Liber Scriptus", but not "Lux Aeterna".  I think we changed the channel at the point that we had had an intermission in my concert; after the big ensemble ending in "Amen".

I was underwhelmed by the men, for the most part, but of course my eyes and ears were on Michelle de Young who was the mezzo soloist. She sang well (not as impressively as some of the mezzos I have on recordings) and looked stunning. Her very long (bleached no doubt) blonde hair hung in tight curls, her makeup was more for the balcony than for a closeup, and she had on a black lace dress.  As I have said before, I covet all that as much as I covet being able to sing a work like that in a large venue with an orchestra and chorus behind me (no, I would not be interested in being a chorister in a large venue unless I was paid; I turned down an offer to do that several years ago).  It's funny, my partner said she looked "trashy", which I suppose is understandable.  She is obviously over 40, and her hair was obviously bleached and not a length recommended for "professional women".

On a more positive note, go me for being able to hear (and remember) most of the mezzo line when they were all singing together.  I am not a natural harmonizer and certainly had to drill, drill, drill, my part so as not to get distracted by the top.  Which is one reason I am grateful to have been singing with that church choir for all these years.  If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had the musicianship to sing the mezzo line in the Requiem.  

What I wish now, is that I could find some "takeaway lesson" from this loss.  I am not sure what it is.  Interestingly, at  my last lesson (which went superbly; the big breakthrough I made has held, especially in new art songs and church pieces; too bad I am not 20 years younger with all the big girl rep ahead of me to sing well, instead of behind me with memories of singing it badly) my teacher said that what I did over the past ten years has been important: taking care of my mother (even thought I did not like her) at the end of her life, and now taking care of my partner.  In the eyes of God, doesn't that mean more than having (had) a singing career?

In Memoriam

I only just learned that one of my beloved coaches and collaborators died of pancreatic cancer in May.  She was my age.  I didn't even know she was ill.  I heard about it in an email from my voice teacher's wife, who had only just heard it herself.

This was the coach who played for my concert production of Samson et Dalila in 2008 and for my Verdi Requiem concert in 2013.  She looked fine then, although she had lost a lot of weight, which she attributed to doing yoga.  Maybe she was already ill and didn't know it.

So how out of the loop could I be?  There was a memorial service a few days after she died, in her apartment.  I know that now because after hearing of her death, I snooped around her daughter's Facebook page and found an announcement of it. I don't know where the guest list came from or where notices were posted (other than by her daughter, who only met me once or twice). (You can read more about her here.)

She apparently is now in London, singing (I don't know many details). The life I wanted; being in the performing arts and living in Europe. Even if she doesn't make it as a professional singer she will have had that experience, that capstone of upper middle class young adulthood, "study abroad"(although my coach and her husband did not have a lot of money and I assume their daughter has done all her studying abroad on grants and scholarships).

I always envied the relationship between mother and daughter.  They loved each other and my coach was always supportive of her daughter, every step of the way.

Right now I am more in shock than just sad.  I wonder what lesson there is here?