Sunday blogs - on what being rendered choiceless does to you

Today, I write to you from my bed on a Sunday afternoon, listening to Omar Sosa's stunning album “Suba”. It's amazing what some genres of music can do to create instant anxiety relief by creating space in the head (or at least, I'd like to imagine it that way). There's something about the sparse acoustic piano fills and the guitar polyrhythms that feel like someone is rolling a sponge over my skull.

And where might today's anxiety come from?

First off, I'm a huge planner because I always seem to have a relatively consistent stream of anxiety running through me for one reason or another. If I can give myself a written out plan with goals or tasks I wish to achieve, achieving them gives me an undisputed, physically documented appraisal that can help me feel as if I have spent my day reaching my goals and being productive. I always like to be as in control of the choices I make over the day as possible as to not cause any miscellaneous anxiety thinking of all the things I need to get done swirling around chaotically in my headspace. It also helps me to keep my mind off of toxic or useless things that don't need my mental attention. But life being like it is, many things fail to go as planned.

Composition and improvisation teachers will always tell you that if you have trouble knowing where to start with a solo or an original work, you can try imposing parameters to reduce the number of choices you have to make in that moment. It helps to force a decision out of you, a direction to take. For example, if your imposed rule is that you start your composition in a harmonic minor mode, it will lend itself well to other chords using the same scale starting on a different note in the mode. It makes some choices for you off the bat – you know Susb9 chords will fit in this harmonic realm. You know there are several passing diminished chord options already built in to the scale. You know the two chord is a minor 7b5 chord and the three chord is a major 7 #5 chord. One can take it further from there, but of course, that's just the beginning anyway.

So today, my first goal was to go to the gym. I had been off when I was in Germany for tour, setting me behind on some PR goals I had just started to hit. I remember my occipital muscle and nerves giving me some trouble when I was at the gym two days ago, but I immediately thought I was just getting a headache or had slept on my neck funny. It didn't even occur to me that it could be related to the gym, since I had never experienced any problems with occipital muscle pain and it seemed secondary to the kind of lifting I normally do. I went in for my first exercise, a KAS glute bridge, and five reps in was met with excruciating pain around my thyroid, sub occipital muscles, and the base of my skull. It felt like my muscles were perpetually cramped in that area. Feeling that area of my neck, it felt rock hard and gave me an instant tension headache. All of a sudden I felt dizzy and nauseous. I sat on the gym bench and tried to ride it out by stretching my neck and taking it easy. I started panicking at the pain not going away – I said I was going to the gym today!! - which is when I knew something was really wrong and I actually had to take myself home.

I felt so angry at myself. I planned to get work done this Sunday, to keep the wheels turning. They suddenly come to a hard halt. My head still hurt all through my 15 minute walk home and my hour and a half sitting on my bed, using a cheap reflexology tool to massage the top part of my neck in attempts to loosen up the cramping. I only felt more nauseous, and somehow, more angry at myself. Injury had already taken me out of work once this year – a bout with tendinitis caused by a combination of lifting vibraphone cases and Romanian dead lifts. (I now stay away from RDLs and have an intern help me lift my vibraphone into my car for this very reason). I had a plan for today, and now after discovering I may not only have a strain but full on nerve compression, I had no plan. I had been rendered virtually choiceless.

Sarah Wilson, physiological wellness guru and anxiety writer, has always claimed that the times when she felt the most free and at peace were when she was forced in to a situation that made choices for her. She referenced being 19 in the early 90s and getting mugged in Italy with no passport, no money, no food, and no modern technology or cell phone to contact anyone she knew. She snuck in to hostels at night, stole food from supermarkets, and hopped the train to the embassy every day to try and get a new passport in time for her flight back to Australia in two weeks. Yet, she claims that the dire circumstances left her to not be disappointed by expectation or anxious about the future, since there was no future at that moment to be anxious about and the expectations were at rock bottom. Miraculously, she was anxiety free those whole two weeks, and she made it back to Australia.

I'm not advocating thievery or going completely unhinged – note that Sarah was forced in to that situation by random circumstance. The guilt and anxiety would have piled up if she had been the one responsible for the situation she was in. That's where I felt the similarity. Although lifting heavy weights at the gym had been my own doing, I had been careful not to push it too hard, to stretch before and after working out, drink tons of water, and have good form. It's likely the neck thing was provoked by a number of different factors (I tend to hunch at the neck playing vibraphone, read my book looking down on the subway, grind my teeth when I sleep) but the gym set it over the edge. In other words, I merely found myself in a choiceless state when I had planned on a day of choices that were intended to make me productive.

Naturally, that makes the angry side of me back off a bit. It's a reminder that I'm not as invincible as my brain can convince me to be. I take a shower and watched the Great British Baking Show. Uber Eats had a 50% off promo so I didn't have to worry about cleaning or cooking. An idea came to me for a song I was in the process of writing for quartet while that happened, and I sat on my bed with my Yamaha Reface and wrote it out. Whatever else I could manage that day was whatever else I could manage with the injury and I surrendered to that, which in some convoluted way, made things easier on me.

Here's the other thing about being rendered choiceless. If you've been using a precise set of choices to maintain mental stability and keep your mind off of people, events, or work that have been frustrating you (“out of sight, out of mind”), then becoming choiceless necessitates having to deal with the root cause of your frustrations. When your mind is more idle, you have time to think about these things again and have those painful, long-dreaded conversations with yourself.

What I did come to terms with:

My current part time high school jazz teacher job is not making me happy because I want to teach advanced students, and it isn't something I should feel bad about. I keep doing it because I need the money and the one enthusiastic drum student I get to teach during sectionals who's always digging to learn more (who couldn't love that?). I didn't want to spend my time teaching music on how to tell brass how to hit partials on their instrument or where Eb is located on the guitar for the third time over. It's the first time in my life I've ever considered getting a master's degree – although not in jazz performance.

I'm not happy dating because it constantly feels like more work than it was worth and that my time could be better spent doing something else. (It doesn't, however, make you feel less lonely than before. How does loneliness abate when you only have yourself? The antithetical question remains. I'll ask Rainer Maria Rilke again.)

The reason why I'm writing these days is because a Smalls regular at Kettle of Fish at 3am told me he “observes” the bands from the back to give him something to write about, and that not making money from something professionally does not mean you are not a devoted professional of sorts. Just a different kind of professional. Before that I was thinking about deleting my blog altogether.

Also, because ADD makes me lose track of where I am in a conversation. But you can came back to writing and what you said is all still there at your disposal. These days, I am really, really, bad at verbal conversations.

I might be ego lifting at the gym and it's coming around to hurt me. This is where gym culture goes wrong - and weirdly, has affected me adversely without me even noticing.

Once I mentally sifted through the various subjects that I had been trying to avoid, my brain felt calm. Yes, it certainly helped that the Advil and edible I took an hour before were both kicking in. It was still a moment where the fate of the day in its limitations forced me to look honestly at my other points of stress before their neglect made matters any worse. (Next stage, self destructiveness!) The hand of the universe found the opportunity for unexpected interference, and boom, there goes my control.

And I wouldn't say any of it felt particularly good, but I definitely needed it.

My neck, however, did kind of feel a little better.