::Anxiety -- now? Does it have something to do with getting older?
3:21 p.m. - 2004-09-01
I am hugely and utterly and completely stressed out. I am so tense that my throat is sore from the tension in my neck, and I have been getting sinus headaches at work that won't go away for the last three days.
Isn't that just brilliant?
I sang for the role of Blonde on Monday night for a company here in the city. I sang fabulously, but I blew it (yet again, another fucked audition). I had to speak some of the German dialouge from the opera, and although I've been working on in incessantly and had it memorized cold, I blanked two sentances into the monolouge and froze. I couldn't remember the rest! I was sooooo nervous. I don't know why, exactly. I never used to have a problem with nervousness, really. Maybe a few butterflies in the stomach right before I walked on, or on the very first note (at the most!), but usually after that I was totally fine. And I don't think it every prevented me from doing anything. Buit it seems with the last few auditions I have been jumpy and jittery the entire day through beforehand, and by the time I got there, I blow the audition. Maybe it isn't healthy to say so, or it's self-detrimental, but I could have kicked myself. Really, I was so pissed at myself! The minute I walked out the door onto the street, I could recite it perfectly with no problem at all. But of course, I didn't get called back.
Damn it.
I called all over trying to find the book abittergirl recommended to me, Power Performance for Singers. Noone had it, but Borders is ordering it for me. I hate to order from Amazon.com because it always seems to take 100 years for them to deliver. I was hoping that I could pick it up today. I have so many auditions in September that it's nuts. I have to try somehow to get this strange new nervousness/stagefright under control! I really don't want to keep making an ass out of myself at these things.
It seems like I always manage to make an ass out of myself, in one way or another. I relly hope that the general directors aren't thinking I'm as much of an ass as I think I am.
Oh, sometimes I get so frustrated that I really just hate myself. Isn't that horrible? I do, though. I feel like I could just kick myself for everything that I'm always doing wrong. Maybe that's my problem right there.
I'm not that much of a fuck-up! I'm not, if you put me in perspective. I just want to succeed so terribly and I frustrate myself constantly for not living up to my own expectations. Probably even if I'm not even aware of the extent of my expectations, if that makes any sense.
I think perhaps one of the reasons I'm getting nervous when I haven't in the past is that I am not performing and auditioning constantly as I did when I was in college and before. I'm working a day job, and I go home and practice, but I don't stand out in front of people every three or four days in concerts, juries, sight-singing tests, auditions, and all of that other junk. Maybe I'm just not as used to it as I used to be.
Or maybe I just don't have enough confidence in myself (which I kind of find hard to believe, but it just may be so).
I am meeting with the music director of a Lutheran church here in SF that's looking for a soprano section leader and soloist. It seems low-key, which is a bit refereshing. Maybe it will give me a more frequent performance opportunity. I'll have to see how it goes.
