Welcome To Your Breakdown!

It's interesting how we can continually convince ourselves that we've prepared for ever conceivable possibility, doubled down against every possible inconvenience, and fortified our resolve to the point where we can handle everything.  This despite all past evidence that, no matter how hard you try, one cannot do everything at once.

I cannot do everything at once.

In the past month, I have sung 9 auditions, travelled 2,000 miles, finished my MM, quit my job waitressing, ended my TA "career" at Johns Hopkins, left my home and moved 100 miles away.

Oh, and then I figured it'd be a smart idea to break up with my boyfriend, spend every penny I have, and do all of the above without any gainful employment lined up in advance in my new home.

In short?  I hurt.  I have the ideal apartment, I'm living in a city I love, and a universe of possibility is laying itself out before me.

I hurt.

When my mini-breakdown amid all this change happened, I was at my best friend's Brooklyn apartment.  She'd invited another friend, Deborah, over for dinner.  She happened to walk in just as I began to sob.  (Not the best first impression I'd ever made.)  I hid in the bedroom until I felt ready to talk, and in the meantime my best friend explained to her why I was so upset.

The exact trigger of that spate of crying was because the truck company called two days before my move to inform me that the truck I'd reserved a month before wasn't available.  Oh, and I didn't get a callback for an audition I'd had that day.  That was the trigger, but it wasn't the cause.

As Deborah explained to me kindly, a person can only take so much.  Apparently there are five major causes of stress in a person's life: financial, romantic, living situation, job, and life changes.  I'd taken on all five in a short amount of time.

Deborah smiled at me, and I smiled back, already in on the joke.  She opened her arms expansively and proclaimed, "Welcome to your breakdown!"

I couldn't help but giggle.

Coming off the adrenaline rush of Thanksgiving, breaking up, auditioning, traveling, and moving has been worse than the insanity of being in the middle of it.  Thank goodness I moved to a city where I already have many friends, but it is proving very difficult to change everything at once and keep my sanity.  Staying productive wasn't a challenge when I was still working off of that psychotic burst of energy I got from taking on too much, but now, having finally caught up on sleep, I see my finances.  I go to call my (now ex) boyfriend and realize I can't.  I go to ask one friend to come over and realize she's 120 miles away.

I am only human.

It's hard in these days to remember that.  We are surrounded by so many puppets, so many media representations of what life is supposed to look like.  We think of emotional suffering as being attached to times of great strife, of terrible danger and loss.  My anxieties are all too mundane.  Is anyone going to hire me?  Am I going to get into a summer program?  Do I want to get into a summer program?  What is my career going to look like?  When am I ever going to get laid if I don't have a steady boyfriend?  Will anyone else ever love me?  How am I going to find a new teacher?  Where am I going to find the money to pay for a coach?  I have two roles to memorize, when is that going to happen?  What about the concert tour I've organized that no one seems to be willing to work on but me?

And on and on and on like a carousel that keeps spinning until I'm sick to my stomach.

Sometimes it seems like this all would be so easy if I just had him back.  My partner-in-crime and my go-to guy for a year-and-a-half isn't waiting on the other end of the phone to be my calm reminder that things are fixable.  He can't fix things for me anymore--which is perhaps a good skill to finally learn for myself.  But I miss him, and while the mountain of other concerns gives me precious little time to mourn the loss of that relationship, it also makes the loss of it more acute.

I feel the absence of my peers.  I long for someone who knows what I'm going through, even though no one such person exists.

It's such a mundane pain, but it helps so much just to itemize it all here.  I went through my quarter-life crisis this year, and I know I'm on my way out of the panic.  That helps.  These thoughts are a little scary, but for the most part I'd already worked most of them out.  But I can't ignore them.

We all feel the need sometimes to reduce or expand our emotions to meet expectations.   I make the proper comic offended noises, or I feign outrage, but I don't really admit to anyone in real life anymore that I just hurt.

Part of the process I've most hated about becoming an adult was learning to control my feelings.  I always considered it a skill akin to lying.  But I've somehow managed to master it and most of the time in real life lately, I can pretend not to feel as much as I do.

But here, at least, is a safe place to admit what I can't admit to the people who love me.

I took on too much.  No one, even with the best and most logical reasons, can expect to take on this kind of change and be unaffected.

Yes, I am doing fine.  I am lonely and overwhelmed, but I am handling everything very well.  I'm making all my plans and doing much better than I ever expected.  I am incredibly organized and most everything is crossed off my to-do list.

But I hurt.

I miss my Irish pub.  I hated working there sometimes, but when I walked in everyone knew me.  It was comfortable and easy.

I miss Peabody, even though it hasn't really been "mine" for a half-a-year.  I miss regimented schedules and teachers telling me what to do and clear expectations.

I miss him.  I miss him so, so badly.  I hate this internet age where I can read everything he's doing but not ask about it.  I hate that there are so many ways to break down and try to contact him.  I hate that not being with him is the right thing to do even when we both love each other.  

I miss his voice on the other end of the line.  He was so often infallibly patient when I needed it.  I miss running ideas by him.  I miss the physical comfort of him.

It's so hard to remember why not being with him is right when it's impossible for me to remember what was wrong.  We were always best in tough times, so we would have been brilliant right now.

I'm only human, so I hurt.

Even if it's only here, it's nice to have somewhere to admit it.

A New Home

I've been recently reminded that this blog exists.  

I was so proud of it in the beginning.  I diligently updated, I had a list of ideas to conquer at some point, and then, as it always seems to happen, I stopped thinking I had important things to say.

A part of it was the fact that this blog was originally conceived to be completely anonymous.  Well, I screwed the pooch on that the instant I created it because I started this blog at the behest of a very good colleague and friend.  Then I was going to try to be cryptic and veiled and generic and hope that my semi-anonymity would be a bulwark against dishonesty.

But writing under a nom-de-plume is a kind of dishonesty.  I'm at the very beginning of my career, and I worry that venting my frustrations will appear unprofessional.  Frankly, though, this industry needs a revolutionary.  Heck, it needs an army of them.  Change will not come because a bunch of sock puppets will it so, it will come because real people acknowledge and openly argue the fact that the parts of the system are unsustainable.

My name is Jessica Lennick.  I just handed in my last assignment for my M.M. from Peabody Conservatory this week--a story you'll hear about later--and deeply mired in the pay-to-play system most young artists find themselves struggling to find a place in post-higher education.  I've always been deeply curious about the world around me, which is how I found my way into classical music.  Nothing else in my life so far has been sufficiently complicated to keep my interest except singing.

My story this year has been a most interesting one.  I sang Pierrot Lunaire, which is the first piece I ever learned that actively scared the crap out of me.  I appeared (mostly) naked on stage.  I had my first nationally-publicized project, which proved to me that cross-marketing in classical music largely does not work (another post for another time.)  I began and ended the best romantic relationship I ever had and suddenly acutely understand the sacrifices this career will require of me.  In the last fiscal year I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on trying to find a place in this industry, and I'm finally feeling it as my loans come due.  I just moved up to Philadelphia both because I was accepted into an (not-for-pay) apprentice program and because Baltimore was growing stale.

I want to tell you about these things.  I don't want to have to say "moved from one East Coast city to a bigger one" or "am singing a role for a new company in the mid-Atlantic region."

Like anyone else in the performing arts, I went into this in large part because I want to be known.

My name is Jessica Lennick.  I am a singer.  I am profoundly in love with what I do.

I'm looking forward to meeting you.