I keep having reservations about previous posts. I’m looking at my August 18 post about predicting the future and thinking that I haven’t adequately conveyed how a prediction like that isn’t just like saying something trivial like “I predict I’m going to count to three. Here I go ‘one two three’ ”. It isn’t like that at all.
When I go out on stage to perform, I am absolutely terrified. Each time I find myself wondering why I continue to put myself in that position. In 2003, I was on stage for the 2nd Boston International Piano Competition for Exceptional Amateurs and completely failed. I couldn’t finish any of the three pieces I programmed for the first round, and I ran off the stage in utter humiliation. I vowed I would never again perform in public.
As a psychiatrist, I felt some obligation to attend to this problem. After all, if I couldn’t solve it, what credibility would I have for any of my patients suffering from anxiety or some prior humiliating event? Maybe they wouldn’t know about my failure, but it was enough that I would know because that would make me an impostor of sorts. Could I really give anyone advice about how to manage anxiety or public humiliation if I couldn’t solve my own struggle with it?
It took me eight years before I could muster up the courage to consider playing in public again. In 2011, during the banquet following the awards ceremony of the 6th Boston International Piano Competition (the same competition I attended in 2003 but with a slight name change), I screwed up every ounce of courage within me to approach the winner and speak with him. The winner that year, Abel Sánchez-Aguilerra (https://abelsanchezaguilera.wordpress.com) was a student in a New England Conservatory seminar in the Continuing Education department. I knew he was soon moving back to Spain and I wondered aloud in his presence whether I might take the spot that he would leave behind.
Joining the class would require that I perform in a public end-of-semester recital. To imagine that I was going to perform again took more courage than I thought I had. Maybe Abel sensed that. He was very emotionally generous to me. He wrote letters of support to the seminar leader and encouraged me by keeping in touch. In the end, I still needed to do what everyone else did – audition for the class. That went well, and I was accepted.
You can imagine that the first time I performed was extraordinarily anxiety provoking. So was the second time. For the second time, I chose to start with the first piece of the program I couldn’t complete in that 2003 competition. I have the video of that performance. I can tell how nervous I am as I look at it.
I have now participated in twelve of these recitals. It has gotten easier, but it is never easy. One never plays as well in public as one plays without an audience. I have posted my videos of each of these recitals. In general I am pleased, though to many of them I almost never return. I do for a few of them.
My prediction is that I will be very proud of this next one. I maintain this isn’t a trivial prediction since I don’t have complete control over what happens. Some of it will be “luck”, or maybe by doing well it will demonstrate that the process I am using to achieve these results is something worth knowing more about.
I’ll continue to keep you posted.