Hi there,

This week I had a personal "aha! moment" that I thought I'd share with you. It came as I was thinking back to my high school years, and my struggle to prepare for my college auditions.

Same S#it, Different Day

Back in high school (and beyond), consistently practicing the piano was my #1 struggle. I handed school work in on time (not always easily, but I managed), but felt so much shame around my spotty record when it came to daily piano practice.

What bothered me the most was a feeling that each day, as I put it to my dad at the time, "I owed the world some practicing." Each morning greeted me with an overwhelming feeling of being behind, and having to catch up by the end of the day. It felt awful to "wake up in debt," so to speak.

I recall feeling a deep resonance with those thoughts at the time, yet dismissed them as "symptoms of my laziness" – something that had to be overcome at all costs. In my mind, I just had to find some way to wake up excited to practice, dammit!

The Reframe

After many years of bullet-biting (with decidedly mixed results), I began to experiment with different questions and framings, and arrived at the more compassionate approach that is the Freedom Framework. Yet only recently did this particular memory bubble up again, for me to see with my new eyes.

Looking back at that time, I now see a young woman who was only given one rigid model for what it meant to be a good, dedicated, successful musician, and it didn't fit her personality. I see an overwhelmed kid, buckling under the weight of an extractive capitalist system that that treats human beings as units of productivity – a system that told her that a day wasn't a good day unless she accomplished something.

I now understand that there wasn't anything wrong with me for not wanting to wake up each morning feeling behind, "in the red by default." Who wants to wake up feeling like that?! How is that feeling conducive to any learning, any discovery, any curiosity, any art-making or meaningful creation? Rather than seeing myself as the problem for not accepting (and enjoying!) this oppressive hamster wheel, I see now that the setup was the problem, not me!

The very idea that my worth as a musician (and, by extension, as a person) was tied to my output and performance was the killer of my joy, interest and passion for the piano. That’s what I hated about it, not the actual practicing! So here I am, undoing years of self-blame for "being lazy" and "not loving music enough." Sigh.

This is liberating, because it undoes the narrative that I hated working hard, was unambitious, lacked passion. As musicians and music educators, folks may say all they want that practicing is a habit to implement, yet being perfect at implementing the habit of practicing (or any other habit) ends up becoming the end result that we strive for - a perfect record, so to speak - to the detriment of our bodies, minds, relationships, etc. 

I wanted to share this with you today as a form of encouragement. While it is really sad that I spent all this time covered in self-loathing (I now regularly make space for the grief that comes up because of that), it is also exciting to me to realize that life-giving reframes are always available, and can bring so much healing.

I hope you can make some time for reframes of your own, and to hold your younger self in compassionate care this week. If anything comes up for you and you want to tell me about it, feel free to hit that friendly reply button :)

Rooting for you,

— Anne

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