I never understood why I spent my days off avoiding the world until I downloaded an app that catalogued the mileage of my teaching, gigs, and auditions. This past December (Gig-mas) I logged over 2000 miles in the car. Between November 2016 and November 2017, I took seven auditions and prepared for eight. When I’m in audition mode, I cannot devote my day to an errand that could possibly eat an entire afternoon.
There are certain chores and errands I perform easily (most of them actually) and certain ones I struggle with (most of them actually). I had the opportunity to travel to Ireland and the UK this past summer with a friend and needed to get a passport. After quite a lot of procrastination, I showed up at the UT Passport office with my birth certificate. I waited in line for twenty minutes and then was told that my birth certificate was no good. It was a photocopy, not the original long-form birth certificate. I had to go to the Vital Statistics office at the Department of State Health Services to get a long-form copy of my birth certificate. Fortunately! I was told, the DSHS office was only a short trip away and most people in my predicament only needed an hour to make that trip and come back to the passport office! Once I had that, I’d honor the important system in place and be able to properly start the process. I nodded and smiled and went home and didn’t go to the DSHS office for a week. I had energy for one errand, not three and I spent all of it that day. “I wish I were better. I’ll probably have to pay a fee to expedite my passport before my trip because I wasn’t able to get it done sooner,” I thought as I went home to take a nap, exhausted from the whole ordeal.
I complained once to my grandmother that it took a lot of effort for me to get up and go in the mornings, that I’ve never been a morning person in my lifetime and that I also procrastinate with running errands. I dread getting out in the world sometimes, as if joining society sucks the life force out of me. My grandmother floated her hypothesis: “Well, it’s because you mom held you too much when you were a baby.”
I told this to a friend recently who replied, “My mom never held me or told me she loved me and I still procrastinate and hate waking up early.” Touche.
So much of adulthood consists of exercises in making up for what you didn’t receive as a child. I wasn’t taught how to take care of myself. This isn’t a failing on my parents or teachers: I know how to keep a budget and clean up after myself and pay bills on time. More accurately, I wasn’t taught how to monitor my limits while pursuing a career that regularly pushes me past them. I didn’t realize that the engine fueling me forward, my love of music, wasn’t enough to sustain a happy and healthy life for myself. The nature of any creative endeavor involves radical self-acceptance of your own limitations. I’m reminded of times where I’ve set out to run five miles only to end up barely making two before calling it quits. Did I fail? Absolutely! But only if I’m only judging myself by the metric of intended miles vs. actual miles. So who cares? Who are you accountable toward? Who’s that voice in your head beating you up and calling you a lazy piece of crap for running two miles?
Another favorite friend, who’s often deliberately and delightfully contrarian (although I would probably mute him on Twitter) asked recently, “Don’t you need that voice? The small, self-loathing one that tells you to not get too comfortable with your environment?” I think of myself, years ago while preparing for an audition, after reading an anecdote about Heifetz, putting the quote his mother would tell him over and over again on a sticky note in front of me, “Jaschinka, it’s still not good enough.” I blew the audition and began the long, arduous journey to wean myself off mental abuse. As an adult Heifetz forbade his mother from visiting without prior written notice.
I think I know myself better now but I’m still surprised. I’m disappointed sometimes too. In the process of pursuing this career, I absorbed all these voices in my brain from people with different needs than I do who tried to teach me to value the same things they do. I looked toward others to tell myself who I was. I had asked people who didn’t share my factory settings how to perform a hard reset. I still have to fight through their Greek chorus of negativity to do things I want to do or to take care of myself in the way I should. In the aftermath of my sticky-note audition, I tried to explain my inner battle against burning out to a professor at UT who was laughably ill-prepared to offer advice on becoming a happy, healthy person. He told me that the only way through burn-out is to work through it, a conclusion that rang so flabbergastingly false to me that it forced me to completely reevaluate who I approached for advice. My “Are-You-My-Mother???” method to violin instruction died in that moment.
Perhaps it’s the ultimate misnomer to advise someone to work harder as the cure for burnout. This Gig-mas I made the commitment to spend a little bit extra time or money to prevent spending more time in the car. I used a groceries delivery service and walked the mile trip to the coffee shop. I completely gave up trying to drill excerpts while gigging all month and instead focused on mindfully approaching basic fundamentals during my limited practice time. For a dinner party gig, I created the goal to listen deeply to each note and see if I could lead every note of the Christmas carols. The gig turned out to be a wonderful and pleasant use of two hours; the $300 also helped. The balancing act this past month worked, I survived an obstacle course of gigs and over 2000 miles traveled with my sanity intact.
It’s a seesaw balance and sometimes it takes more energy to get me to do my basic human maintenance. I think of a moment from the third season of “Rick and Morty”, where the super genius/ mad scientist Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of going to family therapy. He begrudgingly shows up after a lengthy hyper-violent ordeal to let the therapist, voiced by Susan Sarandon, know how little he thinks of therapy. She replies:
“I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass, because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is…it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just…work…and the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people…well, some people would rather die. Each of us, gets to choose.”
I can relate enormously; some days I’d rather die in bed than join the world. I’ve worked on a healthier approach to my annoying, procrastination errands: do only one per day and use my bizarre work schedule to my advantage and get them done while everyone else is at work. I eventually went back to the DSHS office and then the passport office the next week. The whole errand took one hour. I paid the expedited fee, got my passport in three weeks, and went on an amazing trip to the UK and Ireland. A wedding gig ended up helping out with the extra fee. Perhaps when I have to get my passport renewed I’ll be a better, more fully matured human who can run errands like these with energy to spare. I hope so. Or, in lieu of “fixing myself”, I’ll have the disposable income to throw at efficient solutions. Also not a bad motivator to “work harder.” More importantly, especially if I’m still procrastinating on errands like this, I’ll have learned to be kinder to myself.