Sunday blogs - New Year's Eve, 2021

The growing thorn in my side began with imagining my Ph.D dissertation topics. For the longest time, I swore I would never go back to school. While I always performed well in school, and there were certain subjects I enjoyed in particular (i.e. AP Psychology in high school, Advanced Rhythmic Concepts in college), and I performed at the top 5% of my high school and college classes, I found the whole process of school unnecessarily arduous and unrewarding. I never felt like I could be myself in school. It was always about what some teacher or professor wanted you to be, some projection of what they think defines merit – musically or academically. The one thing I learned from 2021 is how quickly I have grown tired of teaching anyone under the age of 17. I didn't want to babysit my students, and I didn't want to convince them of their passion or lack thereof. I wanted to teach those whose passion was established, even if it did wax and wane with the ebb and flow of life. It's pretty hard to be enthusiastic in these relenting Covid conditions, especially considering I have not known time outside of college – or any school, really (I had not taken any gap years) when Covid was not a thing. It's like having a tentative career, a kinetic potential that only partially gets resolved before accumulating inside of your skin again.

The change in heart that resulted from the inevitable conclusion of what is required to teach at the college level and above. I had to start looking at Masters and Ph.D programs. Ironically, it didn't give me the ick feeling that it normally did when I imagined my past schooling. I think that much of it had to do with the fact that some Masters and most Ph.D programs in music allow you to conduct your own research, defend your own dissertation and central interests, and craft an educational program around the kind of person you want to be. It has a flexibility and a personal initiative factor that I never got from high school or undergrad, and when I'm given the chance at a future in which I can write my own curriculums and pave my own artistic-scholar future, I know I will run with it.

Many of the Ph.D programs I'm primarily interested in are for performers with scholarly, research based influence driven by the inquiries I seek to answer in my life. It also accounts for how performance can take on alternate approaches or realms to create structural change. Obviously, systemic struggle is a minor component in my personal life – I am white, cis, and from a middle class family. Those are the facts, and in such ways I benefit rather than face hindrances from the world around me. Nobody needs to make more space for me on those bases. Systemic struggles are issues I care deeply for and actively assist in, whether it be trans rights, prison abolition, police brutality, or income inequality, and naturally intersectionality accounts for being cognizant of these factors and their interplay. But I can't claim any of those as my own experience, and those who can deserve to be at the forefront of sociopolitical movements to disseminate them. What I can talk about is being a woman in my industry, being pansexual, being the child of a deadbeat generation who has left my generation to exorbitant rent prices and environmental chaos. The thing is that this is not a new conversation, and a Ph.D dissertation seeks to explore something more nuanced – and possibly, more painful, when searching deep inside myself for what drives performance as a means of generating change. And then I am brought to the ice cold cloaks of mental illness and sexual harassment.

It has been hard to come to the realization over the years that mental illness is something I will exist with for my whole life, and yet I have neglected talking about in a public manner because of the ridiculing I have received for it in the past – that I'm doing it for attention, that I'm doing it to get more leverage in my musical career, things that have made me turn inward and only increase the amount of harm I felt I deserved towards myself. Furthermore, it was harder to confront the amount of influence my sexual assault has had on my mental health, and the fact that I was once so desperate for self worth and optimism that I turned my back to my own sexual coercion from an older musician who exhibited sickeningly pedophilic, stalker tendencies. And yet, the music community, across genre and occupational role, has remained apathetic in the face of vulnerable victims who have spoken out to an empty room. The number of times we have retreated back in to ourselves, afraid of the consequences of the truth, a difficult relationship with self expression, and an educational infrastructure that has failed to empower these individuals as pioneers of creative expression – and even better – leaders of the curriculum, drawers of the board, constructors of the empowering and liberating spaces that are so far and few between.

I must have hit my own nerve, because I thought of that fragile girl, who had only just turned 18 that summer, adolescent physique and terrified frozen of the world in which she crumbles in the perpetual eye of failure, manipulated like a ball of weak clay, and wanted to cry knowing she was still inside of me somewhere. She deserved to heal, to see through to the other side of failure, to no longer be told who she should be, where she should go, other than by her own compass and musical-educational pursuits. As much as uncovering this truth was deeply upsetting, this was the start to opening a long calcified wound and holding her hand in victory at the very top of her world, a fearless musical discography and a wealth of knowledge to form as the very steps.

This is only the start of the process. The severity of my black-and-white thinking that has dominated much of my own personal agony and anxiety still exists. And that night, on New Year's Eve, it was on fire. Annoyance turned in to the kind of bubbling-over irritability I experienced before I went on medication that led me to throw things, storm out of situations, be a loss-adverse sore loser, and take everything exceptionally personally. My flight home from seeing my grandparents (a trip I only took because I had recently recovered from Omicron) felt like overly invasive flight attendants and a million screaming babies. I felt the same kind of insomnia that has been plaguing me at 12am every night like clockwork. I panicked about all the performances I was so excited for in January that had once again been lost to Covid. A mom pushes ahead of me to get off the plane for no apparent reason only to wait outside of the gate, and the suitcases don't show for 30 minutes. I remembered a family member's whistling at my dresses that stirred the defense mechanism in me and the text I sent that never got me the response I wanted, a dear friend explaining that love is overrated and the era of experimentation is upon us as if she had not just broken up with a boyfriend she fell out of love with and this was precisely what would make my current distress evaporate at the whoosh of an iPhone message. The whole month of December, I felt many occasions of deep upset and unsettling change of pace with no physical release, and as the woman pushed past me on the plane, all the sudden the tears welled up like flooding wells. I didn't want anyone in the airport to speculate what might be wrong with me, so I stay 10 feet away and dry my eyes in the privacy of my mind. Best hope is that I just look tired. Aren't we all tired?

I had plans to go out for New Years, driving straight from LaGuardia to a friend's gig to get, how they described it, “piss drunk”, but after arriving at 11pm to the pickup lot for my car, I longed to be alone. In that moment, I felt like the only person who could heal myself right now. I drove home in the rain and greeted my cat, who had torn apart and gobbled an entire bag of treats in my absence and left it by the front door. In some much needed comic relief, I laughed and scratched her head until she returned to her needy, vocal self. At least one of us always knew what she wanted.

With five minutes of 2021 left to spare, I decide to scour my fire escape barefoot in the rain to get a better look at the fireworks that had started up around Brooklyn Bridge and New York harbor. I wasn't sure if I would be able to see anything in the obscure rust-gray clouds that had brought on the rain, but I was wrong. I climbed up to the roof of my building for the first time, despite the fact that fire escapes give me an irrational amount of anxiety, and to my surprise could see the whole of Brooklyn erupting in fireworks in five different places. I had never seen anything like it, and in that moment on the rain soaked white slick of the irregular roof, I had it all to myself. And then two fireworks erupted only 50 feet away from me, scaring me into a nervous giggle fest and making my way back down the dark metal fire escape ladder to my window ledge, where I heard the kids of Kensington tooting cheap kazoos and furled party horns, tooting back in forth in a silly, lopsided exchange, under the holiday string lights of their front doors. I smoked part of a spliff and just let myself sit under the night mist before curling up under my beloved $20 comforter.

When I go on Twitter on January 1st, there's a thread on using numerology to calculate the tarot card of the year. In standard numerology fashion, you add up your birth month, day, and the year 2022 to produce a number corresponding with one of the 22 Major Arcana cards. Unlike numerology, this number did not need to be condensed in to a single digit unless your number exceeded 22. Although I always felt like tarot was always to be taken with a grain of salt without any real scientific foundation, my 19 year old astrology-obsessed self was curious to try it for fun. My number produced 14. The 14th tarot card is Temperance, the image a genderless angel in a light blue robe with a triangle circumscribed by a circle, one foot in the water, one foot on the land, filling a goblet in their hand. The water often coalesces in to a thin stream which leads to the image of a glowing crown in the distance. The suggestion of the card is about balance, patience, stability, the power of gestalt, and most of all – divine purpose.

All I could think was, this might not be the answer I wanted, but it could be the answer that I needed.