Any young musician dreams of getting into music school, whether their goal be majoring in Performance, Education, or Therapy. Some students are prodigies while others can only hold their breath in hopes of passing Theory I. Any student, regardless of field, can relate to this. The spectrum of people, no one the same as the next, doing their best to be the best. Regardless of your placement along this spectrum of learners, all music majors, art majors, and passion-driven learners come across a period of time (or multiple periods of time) when they realize something is wrong. For our purposes, I'll explain this in terms of a music student.
When it hits you, you feel like you're just tired, overworked, or in need of friendly physical contact. You stop writing your own music, you stop listening to your favorite bands, you find it painful to wake up and sit in class listening to interval after interval, praying you don't get called on to flex your aural muscles. The silence is loud but it feels like the only peace you're able to get. Day in and day out, it's bearable. But sometimes it hurts. This is the moment when your passion becomes your greatest source of pain.
You don't know why this is happening. Sometimes it doesn't even feel like pain but rather a numbness. Maybe it's the cold you caught last week making its way out of your system, maybe it's a full moon, maybe the water is a little more metallic than usual and you know what, I'm fine so that must be the reason. Or maybe, we're not feeding our passion. We're using its resources, tapping into our deepest love and greatest relationship just to use it for purposes that are dictated by professors and academic facilities. Rather than stepping aside and doing what we love to do in the free moments, we're sucked into a cycle of exhaustion and expectation. Original music? You should be practicing. The pressure of perfection, the GPA, the "There's no way I'm going to remember these words", the all-nighters. These all account for our suppression of passion.
They say that it's hard to get into music school, but that's not the real struggle. The hardest part of being a music student is staying a music student. Getting into the program is not the hard part, but maintaining your sense of self and continuing your education within the program is. Only those people who know how to handle their own self-care make it through the system without a backpack of burnout ready to engulf them. (Note: I'm not insinuating this is every student who has dropped a program but there are many students who have fallen victim to complete burnout before their professional careers have begun.)
I bring this all up because it's more common than students think and all too familiar to myself. This semester I, personally, sat back and looked around for the first time, evaluated where I was and what I was doing. More importantly, I looked around and asked myself, "Why am I here?" Was it to get a degree? Was it to spend time with my friends? Or was it to learn about the information in front of me? As an advocate for education across the globe, I recognized that it was because I wanted to learn. But I still felt numb, I still felt drained and tired. I was embarrassed to look around and see my peers succeeding while I felt so low and uninspired.
So I spoke up. I was curious as to if I was the only one who could feel this way in the middle of a difficult semester of Ear Training, Music Theory, Proficiency Exams and Pre-Practicum Placements. To my surprise, I wasn't alone. Every person I spoke to agreed and spoke to the same concerns I had brought to them. Their passion was no longer a passion, it was a source of pain.
When you love something deeply, whether it be a person or a concept, a major in accounting or music, a decision to go left or right, you're taking on the responsibility to feed that love. Your passion for rock climbing can not be fed by sitting on the couch and your adoration of reading cannot be completed with the cover closed. So, don't let your passion become your pain. You are providing yourself a positive quality of life while fueling your love and reaping the rewards. More importantly, know that you're not alone and in the moments when you feel like quitting or that there is nothing left to run off of, keep going. There's a reason you began.
