My life is a little in flux these days. I love my work, the music that permeates it daily. I love the art, and not to be too egotistical, I am very good at what I do. It is, however, an oddly stressful job. It's not brain surgery. What I do won't change the world, or even one person's life to the extent that even someone who works at setting bones in an emergency room's work does. I am not making the world a better place, am not curing cancer, or helping the handicapped get better.
This is pointed out to me on a regular basis. Old high school classmates sarcastically comment from time to time when I bring up research on vocal issues in a public forum. Of course, these are people who have never been nice to me, so this is no surprise. Yet even the administrations in my outside-the-house jobs will make comments from time to time: again, no surprise. One is about results-oriented training (e.g., how many kids pass into the great choir in the sky), the other about money for their "more important" endeavors. (Quotes mine - they would never dare to say it outright, but fact is, if it helps to pay for their orchestra, they're all for it; if it actually benefits the voice students, but costs money, less so.)
Still, I would like to think that I matter. The fact that I don't - neither my needs, nor what I do - is a little discouraging from time to time.
Contrast that with a recent job interview I had for a university. The professors there were so pretentiously serious it was a little off-putting. Maybe I've spent too much time being reminded that what I do doesn't really matter, but the utter seriousness with which they addressed their tastes in music, and put those tastes forward as if they were the word of God made me a little happy I didn't get the job. Not to mention the lifestyle issues.
That said, I would still prefer to teach in a university/college than where I am now. Why? Well, pretentiousness aside, being valued for something seems to be an important part of the human experience. Sure, I'd rather be valued for being a good person, for making someone's day better, for being a loving, caring, world-changing being. I'll settle for being valued for being a good voice teacher.
This year will be, I hope, the transition year. I end one stage of my career, either way - either to go forward, and accept what I thought was my destiny before it got derailed - or to stop the quest. This is not because of some need to feel valued, by the way. This is about cold, hard common-sense. The arts in the US are in disarray, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to feel that I'll be ok working 4 hours in one place, and fifteen (or 10, if place one has its way) in another, and hoping to work 10 in another. I digress - this is, as I've heard someone say, "another show."
Also "another show" will be why it seems so important, for me in particular, to be needed and acknowledged. But that, I fear, might be too much for me right now.
Suffice it to say that in this year of endings, there will be a new beginning, one in which I hope to be reborn. I won't say "reinvented" because a) I hate that word, and b) I'm not inventing anything. I'm just waiting for the light to shine.
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