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.