Recently, I had the opportunity to go to Boston for the semifinals of a classical voice competition, to perform arias pulled from Baroque opera. Though I was excited about the ability to perform in front of a professional audience, I also feared judgement and the possibility of failure. A week prior, I had caught a cold, and the chilly Boston weather only worsened matters. The kind of cold that sits in the throat like wet wool and reminds you, every time you swallow, that your instrument is not quite yours today.
In workshops, I heard perfect voice after perfect voice, and I felt sick. Every singer I passed in the corridor seemed to have arrived from a longer, more disciplined life than mine. Was I unprepared? Should I have spent more of my childhood learning Dido's Lament in place of learning phonics? I, the ever prepared, the ever studious, was, for once, inexperienced. Could I face the crushing waves of anxiety and fear that overwhelmed me?
In the end, I came to a decision. No matter what happened, I would take it to be a part of my journey, not its finale. That was the sentence I repeated to myself in the corridor, one hand on the wall, waiting for the door to open. A performance is a moment in a life, not a verdict on one, and I refused to let a single afternoon in a strange city speak for a decade of practice.
Though my performance wasn't exactly the material of a soprano debut, it was a stepping stone for me. I sang, alone, in a room of four professional judges, refusing to let their judgement cow me. I stood in front of a small panel of listeners who had heard a thousand versions of the piece I was about to sing, and I offered them my version, cold and all.
Furthermore, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Boston. The city was cold in that specific East Coast way where the wind finds your coat, but the streets felt full of a life I only get to visit. Coffee shops with old wood floors. The T rattling underneath everything. A different kind of evening than the ones I know at home.
Though the experience wasn't frame perfect, I still think I wouldn't change a thing about it. The audition itself was smaller than the story I had built around it. The story I built around it turned out to be the point.
