We have somehow decided collectively that once we’ve studied classical music, even just for a little bit, it somehow gives us the right to offer our opinions willy-nilly in the meanest possible way about anything that happens in the field of music. We say really mean things about other musicians, about performances, about recordings, about people, without any thought to the consequences or how this might come across. We have somehow decided that this is our right as musicians, because we simply know what is Right and what is Wrong, and we’re only doing what is Right for the Art Form, and we are only speaking the truth about what is correct.

This has been happening for so long that it took me years to even recognize it. But I know the exact moment that my eyes opened and I thought to myself: What are we doing? It was the early aughts, and I was sitting in a hallway at Boston University. BU has a relationship with Tanglewood because they run a high school music institute there, and so some faculty members spend time there during the summer and take graduate students there as teaching assistants for this program. They also hear performances by the Boston Symphony and their guest artists on the main Tanglewood stage. So early in the semester, folks had returned from Tanglewood and were chit-chatting in the hallway, and I overheard a conversation where a faculty member and several students were absolutely shitting on Bryn Terfel, the international superstar who had performed at Tanglewood that summer.

I am not sure what grievous offenses against the Art of Music Mr. Terfel had perpetrated that summer. These people were seriously unkind in their critique of him. I think he was out of tune. I think they hated his repertoire choices. In any event, if this conversation is to be believed, he probably should have been swallowed up by a great flaming hole in the center of the earth, never to be heard from again.

And I thought to myself: upon what grounds can these people eviscerate Bryn Terfel, one of the luminaries of our art form? What have you done that gives you the pedestal from which to sneer down at this person who is just trying to do what we’re all trying to do, which is make art, make a living, and do something with some kind of meaning and purpose?

And that was the moment when I decided for myself: You know? I’m not going to shit on artists anymore.

I’ve recently started following an adorable Instagram account where a mom shares videos of her 4-year-old son, who is in love with classical music. In this week’s video, they did a drop-the-needle-style music identification quiz with this Wonder Child. You might remember drop-the-needle quizzes from college where the professor randomly chooses pieces of music, and you have to identify them from a tiny snippet. I repeat: this is a college-level exercise that a 4-year-old is doing with his parents for fun. This is amazing. This kid is enjoying himself. His parents are enjoying it. They are posting it on the internet for us to enjoy. It is so delightful and cute and wonderful. In the comments, some troll from the depths of hell had the audacity to say: You know, there’s a lot more music than these basic blah blah blah blah blah and tried to imply that the parents were not doing a good job educating this kid and should be playing a different quality of music for him. And I just thought to myself, listen, bub. What are you trying to prove here? What do you have to prove to this mom and her 4-year-old about how smart you are, and what professor so-and-so had to teach you at the conservatory of self-loathing in 1978? Why do you need to show up here on the internet and ruin what is a perfectly joyful thing? What is the point of this?

And so I ask us, as classical musical artists: Why do we think that we need to prove that we are so smart? What do we think that this will get us in the wider world? Do we think that it will make us look smart? Because I have to tell you, my dear bunny rabbits, what this makes us look like is petty, mean, elitist, and cruel. It does not make us look like people who care about our art form. It does not make it look like classical music is a wonderful, inclusive, and caring place where all are welcome. It does not make it look like this is a thriving art form that deserves to exist in an evolving world. It makes it look like this is a cruel and hostile environment where if you don’t speak the language and know your shit, there is absolutely no place for you. It makes it look like if you are here for enjoyment or fun, you better pick something else.

Is this the image that we want to perpetuate about this art form? Are these the people that we want to be? Are these the colleagues that we want to make music with? Is this how you would like to be known as a colleague? Someone who is nice enough on a gig but who probably goes home and talks shit about you to anyone who will listen? I wouldn’t want to work with that person.

Of all people, we know better than anyone how hard it is to try to keep making music when all of the odds are seemingly stacked against you. WHY, in the name of every sacred being, would we then tear people to shreds just for doing the very thing that we are out here trying to do? If you go see a performance, how could you not put yourself in the very same shoes of the person on stage that you are there to see? How could you not spend 30 seconds to think about all of the things that that person has gone through just to be standing there, making music in front of people? So to then go out for cocktails with your friend and talk about this vowel that you didn’t like, this aria that you hated, this eye-rolling repertoire choice that is so overdone... How could you in good conscience sit there and tear that apart?

And my real question is: is that even really you?

In your real life, is that the person you are? Are you mean and nasty in any other facet of your existence? Are you cruel and petty and nitpicking? Usually this answer is a very surprised no.

Of course, with my clients, I gently reflect that if this is the mindset that you carry to other people’s performances, I know for sure you are doing this and much worse to yourself when you are trying to practice. So it is absolutely no wonder to me that you have no enjoyment of music-making for yourself, and you can’t get anything done, and you can’t move forward in your work because you hear yourself over 3,000 cocktail nights and glasses of wine. And you hear your teacher in the hallway shitting on Bryn Terfel and 300 other recitals that they’ve heard, and you’ve got this all playing on endless loops in your head. So no wonder you can’t sing a five-note scale without feeling like you are an utter piece of shit too. If Bryn Terfel is a piece of shit, what hope is there for you?

To be honest, if this is your mindset, then: none.

But what I’m telling you is: this is probably not your actual mindset.

This is some water that you fell into without even knowing that there was a pool nearby.

This is a culture that exists that we don’t even know about until we are already drowning in it. These are not your ideas. You are probably a very kind and very sensitive person, like most people who go into the arts.

This is why I got so interested in separating The Voice from The Person. You have a voice, but you are not your voice, and the workshop I’m presenting in November is about beginning to uncouple voice from identity, so that we can pick apart the knot that has begun to consume not just your voice, but your entire ability to make music in a free and joyful way.

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When we sign up to study music, we don’t realize it will touch so many facets of who we are as individuals, and for many of us, we leave training having utterly lost any internal sense of self we may have had when we started. So just when we leave the confines of the structured school environment, we realize that we have no other way of navigating a completely unknown environment, and so it makes complete sense that we can not just sing without all of this other nonsense getting in the way and taking over what should be a relatively simple act. But believe me: when this snowball effect takes over, I know that it is anything but.

I had to do this unraveling for myself many years ago, so I absolutely know that it can be done. And this is how we do it: by picking apart the knot, one thread at a time.

For almost a year now, I’ve had a very mild case of what I call “The Fever.” I keep thinking about writing another book. I finished rewriting Trauma and the Voice for the third time (ha ha, not kidding) in February of 2023, it was published that August (which is shockingly fast), and then in December of 23 I left academia, moved to Colorado and totally changed my life. So there’s been a lot going on since the birth of that book. But last fall when I sat down to think about what I wanted to do during the 25-26 year I thought “eh: maybe I’ll write a book. I’m kinda getting The Fever.”

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The Book 2.0 didn’t materialize the way that I thought it would (as in: on my imagined schedule, ha ha) and I didn’t want to rush it. I don’t think The Fever is as delicate as a muse, and I’m not a hundred percent sure that I believe in muses unless they just boop you on the head and give you an idea that continues to re-boop you over and over until you finally start making an outline, and compiling a research list, and making a writing schedule. I’ve still got a very demanding church job that I’m continuing to settle into 2.5 years in, and I’m continuing to build this business in sustainable ways, so those things took priority last year along with my health. I’m no longer willing or able to work beyond my own capacity, so it’s been slow and steady as I build sustainable structures and reliable systems. Future me will thank me. Current me is already thanking me.

Trauma and the Voice focused a lot on how we teach singing, and how we could do it better. As a first-time author, I wanted it to do everything: I wanted it to be for teachers, I wanted it to be a self-help guide for singers, and I wanted it to instantly revolutionize the way that we teach singing and the way that we understand trauma in relation to the performing arts.

Aww! She was so cute.

I see now that nobody knew who I was! Nobody knew why they should listen to me talk about this topic that is (justifiably) a little bit scary for voice teachers. Very smartly, my editor Michael Tan at Bloomsbury advised me to seek contributions from other people working at the intersection of voice and trauma. And across the board, these wonderful, thoughtful, overstretched people said yes - actually they said YES! and they wrote some really amazing stuff. Really selfishly, I call Trauma and the Voice “my book,” but it’s not. It’s a compendium of everything I was able to gather from the best experts in the field at the time. And also, three years is a long time in an emerging field. And also, still nothing else like this exists in the field of voice to my knowledge. And I’m really frickin’ proud of that, and really grateful to all of the fabulous colleagues who contributed, and I also see all of the baby author things that I did and that I am eager to update/amend/rework when I publish a second edition.

BUT FIRST:

It’s time for a book that is just for singers, since that is where I have been focusing my work lately. That’s what I’m great at in these one-on-one settings - sitting with people, observing that sense of urgency they carry that nothing will ever be good enough or right enough, that they’re too old or too tall or too gay or too smart or not smart enough or not pretty enough or not skinny enough and giving us some time to go WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA.

First we breathe and take a freaking minute.

How long have you been feeling like this?

Have you always felt like this about music?

Are you interested in feeling something different?

I do this every week with clients and I see now that there are some patterns, and some questions that are worth asking for all of us.

The next book is going to be for you. It will be for self-exploration, it will have exercises and questions and practices. It will be something you can return to over and over. And you can help.

On Saturday, November 14, I’m going to host a workshop where we work through some of this material. I’ve been reading and researching and I want to bring you these tools and ideas and see what you think. Eventually this will become the next book, and eventually eventually it will even turn into a group class where people can do this together to see that indeed: you are not the only person who has ever felt this way.

Do you have a story about Trauma and the Voice? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I love you and you’re doing great.

How did this happen? Why am I doing this? And why in the world do I insist on talking about it?

There are actual reasons. And none of them involve me being a super athlete or really really loving to work out.

You heard that correctly. I will voluntarily swim for a mile, bike almost 25 miles, and run a ten K, all in a row in one day, but I do not love working out. Let’s discuss how we got here.

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We will throw it back to the sad ol’ days of 2023 when ya girl was in a not good place! emotionally, and I was routinely sending my husband pictures like this:

We were 2.5 years into our long-distance marriage, which I hated with the fire of a thousand suns. I was busting my ass as a tenure-track assistant professor, and I had spent the summer preparing my portfolio for tenure and promotion. It was an outstanding portfolio. But the process felt… hollow? Unsatisfying? I can’t find the right word exactly but my spirit was so unsettled by the idea of working my ass off for my students, singing like a total boss, writing a damn book, presenting at conferences, and then having a bunch of people sit in a room behind closed doors and discuss whether or not I was meeting expectations. I mean: they voted yes. But still.

On paper: I was killing it!

But y’know. Look at my dead face.

At the end of this semester, a job opportunity fell into my lap and I got to move to Colorado, the actual state where my husband lived. This was massively huge. However, the obnoxious thing they say is true: unfortunately I had to bring myself with me. And I was still really sad.

Aside from my medication, the best thing I can do for my depression is exercise.
Aside from my medication, the best thing I can do for my anxiety is exercise.
Aside from my medication, the best thing I can do for my ADHD is exercise.
Aside from my medication, the best thing I can do for my migraines is exercise.

I cannot tell you how much I hate this and wish it was not so.

And since I am already on medication for all of these things and since I was still really sad and pretty sick, I figured I needed to do something.

I tried some other things. I tried High Intensity Interval Training (or HIIT), mostly because people bragged that you could do like a 20 minute workout and get results! I was like yeah! Please let me do as little as possible. I maybe should have thought about the phrase “high intensity;” I’m autistic (though I didn’t know that at the time) and my nervous system gets super overwhelmed really fast. So doing an exercise as hard as I can - even for 30 seconds - is not good for me.

But I also found that just exercising because I “should” was not working. It felt like a chore and kept me feeling like I was a misfit toy with broken parts. It was impossible to motivate myself and so I quit.

Then I remembered a couple of things: I was a competitive swimmer from age five through the middle of college and I always liked it; and I used to always watch the Ironman Triathlon Championships on TV when I was a kid. I kind of always wanted to do a triathlon (probably not an Ironman… we’ll see). I’m also 46 now, so whenever I hear my brain go “I’ve always wanted to…” I try to just do that thing. Because if I’ve always wanted to, well then I should unless there is a medical or legal reason not to.

So in 2024 I started working on my running again. I had started during the pandemic but stopped when I had to do life again because it was too hard for me to do both. I live near Boulder, Colorado which is the endurance sports capitol of the universe, so of course there is a friendly neighborhood event called the Stroke and Stride where you do a half-mile open water swim and a 5k run. I decided to train for a few of these to see if I could even swim and then run. Turns out I could, but it was really hard.

So once I had proof that I could swim and then run without causing my own death, I decided I would learn to ride a bike. I had not done this since I abandoned my ten-speed somewhere around age thirteen. I saved up my bucks and got myself a sweet Canyon and fell off it a bunch of times.

So then I started following an actual off-season triathlon training plan. An app tells me when to run, when to ride, and when to swim, and for how long, and thank christ because I have ADHD and like three jobs so I have read some books about training but if I had to create my own workouts I would never do this. If you really wanna know, I use Fascat, and I love it. I couldn’t do this without that thing.

I mentioned in a recent instagram reel that I was seriously blessed by my friend Billie Jean right at this time: she trained for and ran a marathon and she said “now that I’ve done it, I just wanna do another one because now I know what I’m doing.” And I thought AHA. I’m going to sign up for triathlons this summer but I’m going to sign up for THREE of them because then I will:
a) maybe not put a ton of pressure on myself at any one race because I’m doing a bunch
b) try to treat each one as an experiment/learning opportunity
c) keep learning and adapting as I go.

This worked!

My last race at the end of last summer was kinda no big deal because I knew what I was doing and I actually had fun.

At the end of the tri season, I did a 10k run training plan because I still really sucked at running and wanted to get better. This worked! The plan kinda sucked and was very hard, but I ran a real slow but mostly successful 10K in December. I define success by my personal mantra which is “Finish with Dignity,” which mostly means try not to be crying when I cross the finish line, be nice to people while running (like thanking volunteers who are handing out water or people who are holding traffic and preventing cars from killing athletes), and try not to poop my pants, which I guess is very common among runners are you freaking kidding me?!

So anyway, I’ve been doing this very systematic progression of goals and distances, and this summer I am experimenting with the Olympic triathlon: mile swim, 40km bike (24.85 miles), 10k run. I did a practice tri by myself last week at my gym: I swam in the pool, rode my bike around outside on a course that my hubs mapped out for us, and then ran around the public trails that are so bountiful where we live. I’ll do an official organized race at the end of August. Then I’ll do my half marathon training from September to December, then my off season tri training, and then I will try a half Ironman next summer I can’t believe I am typing those words.

So here are some frequently asked questions!

Q: Are you like, super duper fit?
A: not really. I’m an above average swimmer because that was my sport as a kid, but I only learned to ride a bike last year and I am very slow at running.

Q: Wow, you must be like, so motivated.
A: This is false and this is an important thing I want to talk about. First let me hit you with some photographic evidence from last month.

Yes I still send my mopey ass face to my husband all the time. Poor guy. I swear there are times when it is nice to be married to me. But my point is this! Just because I have now been in the habit of exercising for a couple of years, I don’t want you to think that I am magically motivated all the time to do this thing. Because you might not be either and I don’t want you to think that there is something wrong with you (like I did). So in the picture on the left, I was actually in the parking lot at the gym and I just needed to let my hubs know that I was there, and I was gonna go inside and do the stupid thing, and I really really really didn’t wanna do it. I just needed to register that with the complaint department. Sometimes people (ahem like my spouse) will be like “sure you say you don’t want to, but then when you’re done, aren’t you so glad that you did?!” and honestly, usually not really. Let me be clear about that. Some people (maybe neurotypical people? Or people with fewer diagnoses? Or people selling things on the internet?) talk about exercise like it is a magical cure for everything that a brain has ever done to make you feel bad. And I can’t really tell you that it’s like that. I will tell you the good things later but I need to be honest because people use shame and bullying to try to get people to exercise, and then we try to do it and it doesn’t feel like magical fairy dust and then that just feels like more proof that we are garbage people. And I need you to hear me say very clearly that that’s normal and you’re okay.

Back to my sad faces above: in the photo on the right I was moping and maybe also asking for help. I had been at work all day and despite taking healthy food to eat, I got sidetracked by a bunch of things and forgot to eat for about five hours (thanks ADHD; also, I’m working on this with alarms and things). I was also in a really high stress time and super overwhelmed, and I was supposed to go do a swim on my way home. And Tad (who is usually an exercise tyrant) actually told me that it was probably not a good idea to push it and I should probably just come home.

I have a horrible lifelong habit of just ignoring every signal in my body and just doing the things I’m supposed to do. Well, at least I did until around 2017 or so when I utterly burned out and became super defiant about this. Then I swung the pendulum super hard the other way and started to refuse to do shit. And the more it felt “required” the more I got super pouty and decided not to do it, often to my own detriment. So now I’m in this weird place where I’m trying to figure out what is actually good for me to do and what is an imposed thing that I really don’t want to do. In the beginning of working out, I would blow stuff off alllllllllll the time, for some real reasons and for some quasi reasons. Now I’m basically gonna do it because I wanna get better at the races and I know the plan works. I’m not compulsive about it. And one thing I really like about triathlons is that they are slow-burn events; it’s not about pushing as hard as you can, at least for me. As someone with a super sensitive nervous system, it is really unpleasant (borderline unbearable) for me to do super hard sprints or really intense things. So if I’ve had a day where I’m at a 12 out of ten, it’s not good for me to do a workout on top of that because then I will need several days to recover, even if the workout is not hard. In this way, having workouts on my calendar almost every day is another way for me to monitor my energy expenditure. I can’t really take on too much because then I also need to ride a bike for an hour and a half.

Q: So is your mental health like, amazing now?
A: Um.

Here’s what I’m learning.

It’s possible I’m having similar ups and downs like always. But there’s a major difference. I can sort of see the waves now, and recognize them as patterns, and know that they won’t last forever.

Let me try to put that in more concrete terms.

I remember asking a helping professional if maybe being sad was just my personality? Like maybe that was just the way I was fundamentally wired and when I was happy I was maybe faking or something? Maybe I should stop trying to even think about being happy because that was making me sadder?

Ugh.

Now I mostly just kinda live my life.

Every once in a while, I’ll get like a little Eeyore cloud that comes to sit on me. I’ve gotten good about naming this because that seems to help me. So I text Tad and I say “eew, I just got a sad.” This helps me to name that it’s a fleeting thing that just appears, and also reinforces that it will go away eventually. Then just for fun I also check my cycle calendar to see what the ol’ hormones are doing because lordt those things are powerful, and as it turns out, kinda predictable. Then I ask myself what I’ve eaten, and I look at the sleep data from my watch. I ask myself what I need: nap? Snack? Break? Quiet time? How can I be gentle with myself while this is here? And I do as much as I can of that while still going about my business. And I just don’t dwell on it the way I used to.

Old me used to freak out about it.

I would feel sad and go “oh god, I’m sad again. I’m always sad. It’s because of … [my job (whichever job I had at the time) or not being with Tad or not having enough money or hating my body or being lonely or feeling unfulfilled or blah blah blah]” and then I would just spiral spiral spiral about wanting to change my life and not being able to change my life and it was very unhealthy and not very productive and I would just be stuck there and then end up binge watching tv and then usually eating too much or pouring alcohol on the problem in an attempt to feel something different.

Ah that poor kid.

So: is exercise the magical answer to all my problems? Of course not. But for my money, it definitely beats the alternative.

Sweet reader: I’m okay. I learned a long time ago that my public writing is for helping, and that’s what I do it for. The things I share with you are things that I have already processed, or that I continue to process, or that at the very least are not actively hurting me. This is sensitive stuff that sounds very vulnerable and will obviously be voiced from my lived experience and the reason I share it is because I know for a fact because of my twenty years of working with singers as a teacher and as a colleague that this is not unique to me. So I am sharing my experience to let you know that you are not alone, either.

Deep breaths!

Maybe get a snack.

At the beginning of June, my hubs and I went on a spectacular trip to New York with my Sainted Parents, my Uncle Chuck and his husband Jerry. My parents have been going to the Metropolitan Opera with Chuck and Jerry for a few years now, and annually saying “we should bring Emily!” And once I got married, it became “we should bring Tad and Emily!” This took a LOT of coordination because Tad and I are church musicians and this means that we work every weekend, so we have been planning this trip for nearly a year. I have had many feelings about this. For those of you who don’t know, I am a classically trained opera singer and I spent a great deal of my life trying to pursue a career in this very niche and very weird line of work. I say weird because it is not like you apply for a job at the Good Old Opera Company, Inc. and work from 9-5 Monday through Friday making opera for $75,000 a year. Oh man, even just typing that makes me laugh and also forms a knot in my gut.

Okay. I will try to be brief just for the people who don’t know but: there are not “full time” jobs in opera in the United States. Every opera singer in the US is a freelancer, meaning you line up as many gigs as you can in order to make money.

Ahem. There are some problems with this system.

My friend and colleague Dana Lynne Varga has written brilliantly and extensively on some of these issues at her website, The Empowered Musician, but in short, most academic programs don’t teach entrepreneurship skills to the extent they are really needed, they don’t teach budgeting or financial management at all, and they sort of assume that you have some magical way of floating around on money while you are waiting to make $500 on a job. By the way, I’m not exaggerating that figure, and if you do some math on that, you might realize much sooner than I did that even though “holy shit! I made $500 for singing!” you would have to multiply that by… a LOT in order to make anything close to a living wage. My dear sister friend, the author and playwright Monica Byrne is another fierce advocate for artists (see below) and has had a ton of smashing insights about this over the years that she has been working her glorious ass off to support herself and her work.

Byrne Notice

Fortune favors the funded.

Do you remember when, in September, I decided to audit the theatre design course at ATU-Sligo, in the hopes that I would get to present my design for OHIO! at Ireland’s national theatre in May, and thereby spark interest in the play itself…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Monica

But the thing that is sort of implied in school by the fact that these things are literally never discussed, is that somehow you are not a good artist if you are thinking about it. Somehow, needing money to live means that you don’t care enough about art or that somehow you are not fully committed to your art and this, in itself, is a sign of failure before you even start.

What.

There is also this very ugly and pervasive myth that still persists that if you just work hard enough, it will all work out. And that’s hard to write. I had to pause and grit my teeth. In the grand scheme of things, of course my life has “worked out.” I have a job and a place to live and a loving partner. Did my singing career “work out” the way I was told it would? Absolutely fucking not. (reminder that I am okay. Just telling the truth here).

So the day after the opera, we’re debriefing at Chuck and Jerry’s lovely home in Connecticut. Chuck wants to know if seeing the opera has been inspiring to me in any way. It was a wonderful production, and the soprano singing Violetta, Rosa Feola, was truly a marvel. I posted on instagram that her high E-flat at the end of “Sempre Libera” had 3 out of the 6 of us spontaneously weeping.

Was the experience inspiring to me? It’s a complicated question and actually part of the reason that my business exists.

In school, if you told me exactly what I needed to do to get a 90% on an algebra test, I would do that.

So then I went to major in music and ended up in this opera pipeline where they tell you that everything you’re doing is supposed to lead you to that very stage that I was peering at from the balcony.

And they told me what I needed to do and I did it.

Well to be honest, at first I resisted it and I thought, “can’t I just sing?” And at that point in time, at that stage of my development, the answer was a clear and resounding NO. To be honest, I did not have the technical chops to get away with anything. Maybe if I was a wunderkind of some kind I could have had a mohawk or worn my jeans to auditions or whatever, but my body was tied in knots, I couldn’t take useful breaths, and I was singing the wrong voice type. So. NO. So I contorted myself into every rule that I heard and I followed it.
Jewel-toned audition dress that hit AT the knee. Not above. Not below.
You must audition in a heeled shoe. Now I am almost six feet tall so this is a little bit silly but a heel is flattering. So I got the smallest kitten heels I could find. I can also barely walk in heels. But I did it dammit.
You must have long hair. You just must. And you must wear it out of your eyes when you audition. And of course you would never wear glasses in an audition.
Audition for all the young artist programs that you can. Sometimes larger programs recruit from the smaller programs. Sometimes agents come to the performances and recruit from there. Sometimes the understudies end up going on in the performances and that’s the day that an agent or a conductor is in the audience: you never know.
Of course, all the auditions are in New York. So you must just apply for as many auditions as you can and then get into New York to do them. (I’ve talked about this before, but I lived in New Hampshire at the time and I taught high school choir, so for me this meant taking the day off of work, taking a bus from New Hampshire to Boston, taking another bus from Boston to New York, walking down the street to that one building where they had all the auditions and humming while I walked because you weren’t allowed to warm up in the building, changing in the bathroom where you weren’t allowed to get changed, singing two arias, changing back into sweatpants, getting a burrito and riding the bus back home).
Creating an audition package of five perfect and contrasting arias that show everything you are as a human being an an artist (???) - constantly getting feedback that your aria package “needs work,” never getting good advice about what to do with your aria package…

And

...

...

...

You end up basically waiting around for someone else to decide you are good enough for something to happen to you.

And kinda the worst part is there’s not like a moment, a big reckoning with Big Opera where someone sits behind a desk and says “listen kid, we’ve been reviewing your files and ya just don’t got it”

You just kinda

Get sick of auditioning for stuff

Wearing your stupid audition dresses and the dumb shoes

Wearing your hair long so you won’t have to wear wigs on stage

And the thing that slapped me in my face that weekend is that I finally realized, like, deep in my body, it was never that I wasn’t good enough.

It’s still not that I’m not good enough.

It’s that this is a shitty, broken system.

I shared this thought with my dad and I cried a little bit. It reminded me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams, as the therapist, just keeps telling Will that it’s not his fault. At first he just brushes it off and says “I know,” because he’s not letting the thought even sink in. And then finally he utterly crumbles when he lets the truth of it actually touch him. And I’m sharing this because it is not just me, my lambs. I hear you sing. You are fantastic singers. And most of you did absolutely everything “right.” We followed all the rules and were obedient “good” students, and the thing we studied doesn’t function like other things. We can’t just follow the study guide and end up at the Met but the people in charge still act like that’s true. And it was NEVER true about this particular field of work.

It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault.

I was never single minded enough and have always liked other things. I was never going to train at the exclusion of everything else in life.

I could never live a nomadic existence and am not willing to move to Europe to pursue full time employment at a house. 20 year old me thought maybe I could or would but that is not actually true about me. I need a sense of place and community and home base.

But when you are 20 and starting your training, they kind of make it sound like you are a loser or a baby if any of these things are true about you. Do you like your family? You’re a baby. Do you want kids? You’re soft and should quit. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me at the time.

I think this is why it’s so hard for many of us to forge our own path, even later in life, even long after we’ve left the academic sphere. We’re afraid to let go, to claim what we want, because we were led to believe that wanting things is weakness, is a mark against us and our commitment to The Art. As though our very human needs and wants are proof that we don’t have what it takes and won’t Make It.

So to say, I’m sorry, I’m an incredibly well trained singer with an extraordinary voice and wonderful stage presence, but I will not be pursuing staged opera because [insert reasons] feels like a cop out? Like cheating? Like all those cruel teachers who told us we “didn’t want it enough” were somehow right? That to sing gorgeously for money on our own terms is... Somehow dirty. It doesn’t count. We didn’t really Make It, of course. Not like Real Singers.

But Jesus H what does that even mean?

Would I be more real if I had done a young artist program? Or won a competition? Or done a role at an A house? How about if I had some sort of break down or spectacular blow up onstage instead of quietly making choices that led me to where I am now?

Because there was no big reckoning, no big moment where I thought, “eh: time to hang up my spurs.” I’m still a really good singer and there’s still stuff I wanna do.

In fact, just this weekend Tad and I traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska to perform a recital. Why Lincoln? Because Tad has a beloved uncle there who doesn’t travel anymore and who has never heard us perform. It was a fantastic program: we did Chaminade, Schumann, Edie Hill, Cecilia Livingston, and some great musical theatre. Not to toss my hair but I sang really well. And as always, Tad played the snot out of everything. There were 35 people there and we made zero dollars. But it was a great night.

Is this “real” singing? Ha ha. I know that there are some gatekeepers who would say no and of course I do not care about those people.

But it is very weird that there are definitely people who do not take me or my work seriously because I didn’t go to XYZ School or attend Such and Such Young Artist Program or win the Yada Yada International. Even someone I love very dearly who has a pretty unique perspective in the academic field told me when I started my academic job search “they are going to want to know why you didn’t have a big career.” [Where is the barf emoji?!] This was especially enraging because I was applying for TEACHING jobs which silly autistic me still assumed were about TEACHING. But I guess in some places that is still not the most important thing. Or like, eventually it becomes important if you have all the right papers and magic letters and you already check all the right boxes. But can we all admit that this is a very weird system?

THIS IS A VERY WEIRD SYSTEM.

Tl;dr It’s not your fault, Will. You followed all the rules and did everything right. And it’s not fair that people didn’t explain that this is the kind of job where you can do absolutely everything right and things still might not work out the way people say they will. And that is also not your fault. You will be tempted to blame yourself and think you should have followed the rules harder, or you should have worked more, or wanted it more, or sacrificed more, or something, and I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. You did the very best you could with the information that you were given, and the life circumstances that you were in. The training system is super shitty, and the work system is super shitty, and no one prepares us for either of those things, so no wonder we get super lost and confused along the way. But I also want you to know that it’s okay to let that go now. You didn’t fail and you didn’t blow it. You’re allowed to keep singing forever, however you want. Nobody gets to take that from you. And if you really want that but you don’t know how, then set up a session and we’ll figure it out.

Love,

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You know how sometimes stuff is just like, ugh, really hard? Usually when this happens I have a short of familiar pattern:
- get frustrated that I’m not doing better
- get mad at myself for not already knowing how to do the thing
- assume that everyone else knows how to do the thing and somehow I am bad at being a human and that I am missing some essential skill
- become ashamed of myself for not being better at stuff
- maybe get a little bit sad on top of all of this because I’ve been to this rodeo before.
Does any of this sound familiar?

Of course, some of the particulars here are specific to my neurodivergence BUT I know for a fact that I’m not the only one. I have a some real life examples and then some solutions for us. The shocking and terrible news is that the absolute very best thing we can do when things get really hard is to tell the truth about how hard things are, and to admit that maybe there is something we don’t know.

I know. Take a breath. Here we go.

I’ve been going to physical therapy for a few months now because I keep hurting my back in the exact same way. And when I do, it’s bad. Like, I can’t roll over in bed, and when I try to get off the couch I get a spasm of pain and I have to yell out loud? Like: bad. And I use Icy Hot patches and a heating pad but this is not actually fixing the problem. This is reducing the symptoms when I have already gotten to a crisis point. This is not normal human functioning and this is not a pattern that should be happening. So I finally said ummmmmmmmm this is not good and I need help and now people who specialize in human function are helping me strengthen the right muscles and coordinate my body and figure out what habits are contributing to this weird debilitating pain I give myself every few months. This is really really good, but I had to be willing to say “hmm. Something is happening here and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Similarly, a couple of weeks into therapy I had to finally say to my team: lookit. You have given me like 20 different exercises to do and I’m overwhelmed and I want to be a good patient but I’m not doing these at home because I don’t know which ones I should do. And I didn’t want to let them down and for sure I had some old school gremlins yelling “FAILED TO COMPLETE ASSIGNMENT” but real grown up life doesn’t (usually) work that way, and everyone was really nice, and we boiled things down to two stretches and four exercises and now I do them most days. Not all the time, but more than the zero I was doing, so this is a victory.

[this is the exercise part you can skip if you want but I am only going to talk about sucking at running fyi. love you. Similarly, I started a new training plan because triathlon season is upon us, and I was trying to do all of the “easy runs” on my schedule and having to walk for most of them, becoming completely exhausted and not really being able to do them. I was monitoring my pace pretty closely, and I remembered that when I was doing my last run training plan in the fall of 2025 that I was running 12:30 as my mile pace. Of course what I forgot until right now when I am typing this sentence is that at the beginning of that plan when the training robot wanted me to run 12:30, I couldn’t do it and I would cry. Ha ha. So finally, I got into the chat that comes with my training subscription and was like “why am I sucking at these runs? I cannot breathe and I completely blow up after a mile every single time.” The answer was that I was trying to go way too fast. Sure, I did an off-season training plan and have been running a little bit for a while, but now that I am trying to complete longer runs, I have to go much, much slower if I want to be able to go for longer distances. For the curious this actually means between 15:00 and 16:00 per mile. Not my very best pace from the end of a long distance training plan that I finished six months ago. Oh, Emily, sometimes you are funny. }

This also applies 150,000% to singing!

I had a client come to me after a really frustrating audition experience. We debriefed the whole thing: what exactly happened and how did you feel during every step of the process? And so what we are doing now is breaking down every step of the preparation process from the audition announcement to walking out of the room and saying “thank you” to see what is working well and what could use refinement and skill building, outside of a high stakes environment. How do I learn material? How do I get myself off-book? How do I mentally prepare? There are literally hundreds of steps in this process and when you’ve been doing it for a while, there’s a lot that we do unconsciously, or just do the way that we’ve always done. It is a fantastic practice to go through that with someone - especially if you are not getting what you want out of auditions - to see where your process might not be serving you as well as it could be.

Tad and I are gearing up for another recital (yay! Happy dance!). We are doing some new stuff and also reviving some things from other concerts we’ve given. When we do this, I always act like I have never seen the music before. I do this with my choral/orchestral stuff too, I don’t care how many times I sing the Mozart Requiem of Handel’s Messiah, I will always act like I’ve never heard it. This helps me in a million ways:

- I refresh notes and rhythms and make sure that I am getting them from the source and not just “kinda” remembering them from however they are stored in my brain. That is dangerous, y’all. It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy and that is absolutely not what I personally want to be doing onstage. I also don’t think that the people who hire me would like that either.

- I learn my technique into the piece as my technique exists in my body right now. My loves, I don’t know why nor how we consistently forget that we are living organisms and we are changing all the ding dang time. I am not the same being as I was six months ago, let alone two years ago when I first learned these French songs. My technique has changed. My breathing has changed. My body composition has changed. My diet has changed. Those everloving hormones have changed. My brain has changed. The world around me has changed. How could I possibly act like things are the same and just sing these songs la la la whatever?! That’s bananas.

- I read the texts like I’ve never seen them in my life. I ask myself what the poem means, what it might have meant to the writer then, and how it might apply to my life now. We age, we learn, we grow, we see the world in new ways. The way you saw things in 2024 may not be the way you are seeing the world in 2026. I mean, maybe it’s the same, but at the very least, it is worth asking the questions.

So much of the time, we treat ourselves like we are “supposed” to know things, and we get frustrated, embarrassed, or ashamed when we don’t. But what if we gave ourselves permission to spend more time admitting that we don’t know? What if it was okay and allowed, and what if you knew it was an amazing path to true learning?

I love you and you’re doing great.

Now I’m just on a roll with the derpy pictures and I can’t stop. Kloveyoubai!

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So I am walking on my tiptoes here because depending on the lens you read through, this could come across as blaming you and that is not at all what is about to happen.

Please imagine that we are sitting together at your favorite coffee place (or bar if that’s your thing) and that I am lovingly holding your hand - but only with your consent.

Look! There I am, at a table in South Africa, waiting to have this very loving talk with you.

The very hard news is that if you wanna do this art thing, you have to find a way to learn material without treating yourself like garbage while you do it. Because you’ll be learning new stuff, mostly on your own, all the time. Some of it will be hard. Some of it will be brand new stuff no one’s ever done before. Some of it will push you to your limits. And if you don’t have a way to practice without hating yourself, you’re going to have a very hard time.

Please take a very deep breath because you’re okay and I love you a lot.

There is more.

The other thing is that you have to be able to get feedback about your art
EVEN FEEDBACK THAT IS BULLSHIT
EVEN FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT
EVEN RIGHT TO YOUR FACE
without losing your shit.

I KNOW!

This totally sucks.

But if you are making art out loud, people will have something to say about it.

if you are making art collaboratively, people will say the things right to you. And you will need to find a way to receive this, even if you need to receive it with some sort of public mask on and then go process it with your therapist. Because this is just a reality of making art that other people get to see.

Breathe, you sweet wonderful pumpkin.

I love you so much.

Now.

Here’s some important parts.

If, for any reason, either or both of these things are hard to impossible right now, that is okay and does not prohibit you from doing art. It just means that know we have some very specific healing goals. We have to help you recover your steady-enough center that will enable you to do both these things (the good news is that if you’re reading this you now know me and I can help you do both of these things). Both of these things are skills that are learnable.

You may have even been good at these things at a previous time before Professor Whoozywhatsit and Doctor McNutz treated you like garbage and robbed you of your confidence. If this is the case, it is not “too late” and you are not “too damaged” to make art out loud for other people. Those teachers were wrong for treating you that way and they don’t get to be the boss of you any longer. But you need to take back what they stole from you and you need to find a way to do your work.

breathe.

Because unfortunately, the work requires you to be digging in to these challenging states all the time. The work requires you to find your version of tenacity and call on it frequently. You might not think that you have it but YOU DO and it might just be hiding because when humans are treated badly by others, we do not feel safe enough to be brave. And performing careers require maximum bravery in unexpected ways like, all the damn time unfortunately. Bravery and autonomy and self-determination. Making lots of tiny decisions about yourself and what’s important to you all the time. Which feel impossible when you have been treated badly by others and lose your internal compass.

This is why trauma healing is so important.

Because to be a successful artist, you need a YOU in there, helping you steer the boat.

Whoopsies.

Occasionally I get a little bit like this and get kinda salty about voice teachers in general and I think about the profession as a monolith of old school jerks who need to be updated in their thinking and their methods. I am telling the truth on myself here because This is totally not fair. Are there jerks who teach voice? Unfortunately yes. Are the majority of voice teachers well-intentioned and doing the best they can for their students? Absolutely yes.

Unfortunately, in my work with clients, I hear very disturbing stories about what singers have been through in relationships with their teachers, so sometimes admittedly my perspective is a little bit skewed.

But I have to be honest and say that yes, unfortunately there are still some people out there who have some very strange ideas about how best to teach people in the arts. I don't need to go into the stories because I'm sure that if you've spent any time training in the arts you or someone you know has a story about something like this.

I also need to take a moment to say that we absolutely have to tell the truth about the fact that training in the arts is not the same for people in black and brown bodies, for people with disabilities, for people with learning disabilities, and for people in fat bodies. We need to keep telling the truth about this. We need to keep doing better about this. We need to keep calling out bad behavior that affects these artists. We need to make systemic change that makes training in the arts more accessible for these singers and all singers.

What breaks my heart is that there's a generation of artists who were treated really badly just because of who they are and many of those voices are lost. Many of those singers were verbally abused, shamed, and othered to the extent that they decided that making music was not for them and so they quit. Like I said, we have made positive strides in so many ways, and I have to believe that if many of these singers entered school today they might have a really different experience… but they would probably never enter another arts training program again because of how they were treated the first time around. I don't blame them. This is wrong and we in the arts field did them wrong and that really sucks.

So part of what my job is about is helping people who are treated badly to understand that that was not their fault that their voice does not have less value just because someone in a position of authority did not know how to value them. Just because a system was not set up to treat you well does not mean that you did not deserve fair treatment. That's wrong. That's not entitlement; that's humanity.

Sometimes people find themselves persisting in arts careers in spite of their training, and the negative experiences that were baked into their creative development continue to weigh them down or hold them back or haunt them in the form of negative self-talk or embodied tension or negative thought loops. They can't seem to break out of them even after decades of work on themselves and in the field. There's no amount of professional success that will override Dr. So-and-so telling you that you'll never make it and your vibrato is too wide and your eyes are too far apart and you're too fat and no one will ever hire you. So you continue to underperform in auditions and even though you've been working in the business for 15 years, you know you could be doing more. You know you could be auditioning better. You know you could be getting cast in different kinds of roles and you just feel stuck.

For some artists, they were treated so badly that they had to walk away from music entirely and pursue another field, and then something in their life changes, or as they evolve as a person or as they pursue healing on their own through other forms of therapy, they start to really miss their art and start to feel like that was a part of themselves that they had to give up because it was just too painful and they want it back. And quite frankly they deserve it back because it never should have been taken away from them in the first place by Dr. So-and-so. What I'm here to do is help them find out how that rupture happened to help them heal because the art is an essential part of you. It's part of what makes you who you are. It's how you see the world. It's how you make sense of your lived experience and you deserve to have it. So we look at the pain that was caused, we look at the stories that you were told, and we get to heal the wounds that were created. We get to restore this essential part of yourself and then YOU get to decide what you want your art to do in your life from now on, which always should have been yours to decide from the beginning

Honestly, this is one of my favorite things to do. It is so beautiful to watch people's faces, to watch the sparkle come back into their eyes when they realize that they get to do what they want. They don't have to create a perfect aria package. They don't have to enter the symphony solo competition. They don't have to do a specific kind of audition or sing any kind of repertoire decided by anybody else.

If you just want to sing in your church, that's beautiful. If you just want to sing to your plants, that's beautiful babe. I found a guy on Instagram who sings soprano arias in the kitchen of the cookie shop where he works. It's amazing! He's so joyful.

I saw another soprano who was succeeding at an incredibly high level, looked around and realized she was miserable and was living in fear all of the time that she wasn't actually good enough. She felt like a fraud and that it all was going to fall apart at any moment and so she quit because she was not enjoying herself at all which I think is an incredibly brave thing to do. She really had no idea how she ended up where she was and she walked away from all of it with no intention of ever doing it again. She had a baby and was doing web design and hadn't missed singing or thought about it at all, and then after five years kind of spontaneously started making sound again just to see what would happen. And of course you know where this is going. She tended to her interiors and worked on her internal life and is now having a really joyful time doing exactly what she was doing before but it is looks nothing like and feels nothing like what she was doing before.

I always tell people singing is a broadcast of your internal state and if you feel like garbage inside and you're totally afraid and you have no idea what you're doing, that comes through in your singing, whether you like it or not. So even if you're doing relatively okay, getting hired for some stuff because your voice is that good, or you look that great, or you're that fun to work with, people will perceive that there's some sort of barrier between you and them, that there's something off, something missing. There will always be this disconnect. What I'm here to do is help us clean out the feelings garage so that you feel clear here and free and whole and unrestrained, and so that you can sing the way you have always wanted to sing.

In the immortal words of NBA Hero Kevin Garnett, Get that sh!t out.

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I first started learning about attachment patterns and adaptations in my trauma training and then realized that these intricate dynamics can be replicated in the one-on-one relationships created between singer and voice teacher. Grab a snack, because we’re going on a journey here.

[there’s a chapter about this in my book if you would like a little more background information like where this information came from, who developed it, how the research evolved over time, etc. it’s cool and worth reading about]

If you are a human mammal who grew up on, like, an 80’s sitcom and whenever you got your feelings hurt someone sat down with you and gave you a tender heart-to-heart talk about your emotions, and you always felt safe, and all of your biological needs were met (I’m way oversimplifying but I think you get it) you probably grew into a person with what is known as a secure attachment style. This is what happens when you understand that you make mistakes but people love you anyway, and you learn that you can take risks because you are held in a network of care. A very great fact is that not everyone grows up this way but that people can learn secure attachment at any time. Just in case you read that blurb and felt instantly dismissed or dismissive. I see you.

To tie this immediately to the voice world, if you developed a secure attachment style as a result of super healthy upbringing, you would probably get along just fine with a teacher, and might even tolerate some eye-rolling comments or occasional bad behavior from that person because you would be able to understand that their expertise was valuable and you would have the innate resilience to not be too rattled by a weird mood or a few outbursts over the course of a four-year degree program. You’d also be quick to recognize seriously out-of-bounds behavior and would either speak to your department chair, change studios, or change majors at the first sign of really unethical or abusive language or conduct.

For everyone else in the world…

When we don’t grow up with ideal care, we develop one of several attachment adaptations. And they make a lot of sense when you think about them. These adaptations were formed when we were babies; they’re not based on rational, adult logic. You were hungry, wet, or tired, and either help was available consistently or it wasn’t. When our developing brains don’t get our problems solved right away, they sometimes conclude that help may never be available to us. When we grow up with intermittent care, it’s harder for us to trust other people or to even think about asking for help. The three attachment adaptations are: anxious, avoidant, and disorganized.

Avoidant Attachment

For most people who have developed an avoidant attachment style, their predominant experience in childhood was unresponsiveness. They cried but were not soothed, or they were left alone for too long. There’s another contributor to avoidant attachment that many of my clients relate to, which psychologist Diane Poole Heller refers to as “task-based presence;” the caregiver is present, but only when the infant is practical or functional. You can imagine this behavior manifesting in adolescence in parents who only recognize their children when they are achieving something. Some of my perfectionist and high achieving clients need to sit with this one for a little.

If this was your experience, you might find it easier to keep your distance from other people, and you might not be very interested in relationships. You might be most comfortable in your own presence because other people feel overly complicated.

If you have an avoidant attachment style, you might be super turned off by teachers who come from a flowery or emotional perspective, or anyone who tries to get you to tap into your “passion.” You might really enjoy the history and language of your repertoire but not have much of an emotional connection. You might be most satisfied by your technical pursuits and by executing your plans well.

It might also be good for you to know that when the body goes into survival energy in lessons and probably especially onstage, dissociation could be a likely response to all of that intense nervous system activation. Checking out or viewing yourself from a distance is a deactivating strategy that the body might use stress is high. When this happens, you may lose the ability to hear auditory cues clearly, or to count accurately, or to tune to the piano.

Anxious Attachment

This is also called “ambivalent attachment” in some other sources, which to me makes it sound like you’re kinda wishy-washy about attachment, which is exactly NOT how these people feel about that. So that’s why I prefer anxious.

If you are a little wee baby and you don’t know if anyone will show up to help you or if your needs will be met, it creates anxiety, doubt, insecurity, and a lot of additional stress on top of the stress caused by your original need. So people who develop anxious attachment are not secure in the belief that they are loved, and may not even believe that they are lovable, because their care was either intermittent, or wholly unpredictable.

You may always be looking outside of yourself for someone to come help you. In the singing world, you may “teacher hop,” thinking that someone other than whoever you’re studying with now probably has the answers you’re looking for. At the same time, you’re probably very loyal to your teacher and afraid of leaving them, maybe even if they don’t treat you very well. You have a fear of being abandoned and you may stay too long in an unhealthy student-teacher dynamic because you don’t want to “lose” your teacher.

Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized attachment is really tricky and is basically defined by not being like any of the other adaptations. Avoidant people couldn't count on others to help them and so you stop looking to others for help, and develop a mindset that you are on your own. Anxiously attached people are primed to seek soothing from others and want someone to take care of them, and they lose their sense of self. Disorganized folks can’t self-soothe or be soothed by others.

When a caregiver is the source of fear, or an infant is subjected to ongoing emotional turmoil, the attachment system becomes entangled with survival instincts. This can result in extreme hypervigilance, or a constant orientation toward threats; self-absorption, controlling behaviors, and a tendency to lash out. This is so not your fault; you’re basically in chronic overarousal, which the body deals with in one of two ways: constant fight-or-flight, or total shut down. This can manifest as lack of motivation, disconnection or spacing out, poor impulse control, and under-performance in school.

Your earliest attempts at connecting to others were coupled with fear. Letting go can be terrifying since controlling elements of your environment has helped you to survive. Be ready to be patient with expressive skills and to work slowly on building tolerance of the fight or flight energy that gets activated onstage. If you decide to pursue formal lessons at all, you may experience heightened nervous system states just by being with a teacher in the studio. Just be careful because that energy is over-coupled with survival response; historically in your body, that level of nervous system activation came on in response to literal threats to your life. You may see reactions to performance energy that don’t make obvious sense to you.

Okay that was a lot.

WHY AM I TELLING YOU ALL THIS?

I read a quote by KC Davis in her book How to Keep House While Drowning that is really important to how we approach voice studies. She wrote: “true skill building can only happen in an atmosphere of profound self-compassion and gentleness.” In her particular context, she was talking about how neurodivergent people will try to bully themselves into habit change, but it is also totally applicable to the voice world. Yes, it has a lot to do with how we treat our own precious selves, but there’s this really important component of this relationship to a teacher that we need to be talking about more and working to understand.

First I need to say that there are complicated dynamics inherent in the structure of the 1:1 teacher/student relationship. It was built on a colonialist, power-over model, where the original idea (I’m talking hundreds of years ago now) was that the teacher knew everything and the student knew nothing and the teacher held all the knowledge and all the authority and all the power. There are some people teaching and writing right now who have a lot lot lot more to say about this and it’s way beyond what I’m trying to do right here though the origins of this model cannot be ignored, especially for people living today who have come from cultures that have been historically subjugated or oppressed by other cultures.

The point I want to make here is that:

• we know that, absolutely yes, bad teachers have done harm in many ways

• what I think we don’t talk about enough is that when there is a mismatch between the attachment style of the singer and the teacher, the relationship can feel strained and difficult

• a singer can feel unseen, misunderstood, or that their needs are not being met by a teacher when there is a mismatch between attachment styles even when there is no obvious harm being done

• it’s okay and valid if you don’t feel quite at home with a particular teacher even though they are perfectly nice and not doing harm to you

• hopefully learning more about your attachment style might shed light on past teacher relationships that might not have felt like a good fit or in a less-good case, did not feel settled or all the way safe

• humans can always keep learning about attachment style and can work towards what is called “earned secure” where you begin to feel safer in relationships

• it’s okay if you need to choose teachers mindfully if you know you are working through some attachment stuff. There’s more detail in my book but communicating your needs is healthy and wise. For example, I suck at email so while I am very compassionate and great in the workspace, I might not be a great choice for someone with very anxious attachment because not getting immediate email responses might create a lot of stress and discomfort. I had a student express this to me after our initial consult because my follow up email to her took two days. Her email to me was super clear and regulated and she expressed that need based on where she is right now, and I told her that I had a lot of respect for her clarity and yes, two days (or more) is really standard for me and she was making a really wise and kind choice for herself based on what she needed.

• the vocal workspace is full of heightened emotional states. We sing these emotionally charged songs about REALLY intense things like being abandoned, death, heartbreak, etc, and we do this in front of people when our nervous systems are in these life-or-death states. You are building skills which takes a lot of vulnerability and determination, and it requires courage and kindness to yourself. It makes a ton of sense that we need to do this with someone who sees us and supports us, and each of us needs a slightly different flavor of support. This is also why we talk about the singer’s “team:” no one person should be the ONLY ONE responsible for helping you manage all of the things that are going to come up for you while you go through this enormously complex process. Of course, when do we start to see how really complex it is? Maybe about ten years in, when the wildly overwhelming and isolating parts are behind us. I’m still not sure how to change that part. But I just want you to know that there are lots of us out here in the forest, shining our lanterns and wanting so much to help you find your way through.

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Something unexpected happens and your sympathetic nervous system goes AAAAAA and puts all your body’s survival strategies on notice.
When your brain figures out that things are actually okay and you’re not going to die, your parasympathetic system calms everything down and gets you all back to normal.

So nice, right?

But sometimes, trauma enters the chat and things get weird.

So what the heck is trauma anyway?

This is a more complex question than you might think, because there are several variables that come into play.

A simple definition that I adapted from Resmaa Menakem, the author of My Grandmother’s Hands, is that trauma occurs anytime our system is presented with more than we can handle in real time. The variable here is that everyone’s system is different and two people can live through the exact same event and one person might experience it as trauma and the other might not. There are even instances of this happening with identical twins - people who literally share the same DNA - holding the exact same event in very different ways.

There are also two major categories of trauma:

shock or event trauma - this is something that happens as the result of one very clear, time bound event, like a car accident, a natural disaster, the sudden loss of a loved one. Something you can point to and day “this happened on x day and I know where I was when it happened.”

developmental trauma - this is the kind of trauma that happens as the result of the accumulation of events that happen during your upbringing. An example is neglect; if a baby does not receive consistent care while it is growing up, this could result in developmental trauma that could effect communication patterns, learning style, relationships with others, and other patterns of behavior.

In my work as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I need to stress to clients all the time that it doesn’t really matter what the textbooks say about trauma. If your body perceives something in your history as trauma, then it is trauma to you. And that’s the only thing that matters in our work together.

It can sometimes be really difficult for people to say “wow, I guess that was a bigger deal than I thought. Maybe that really was traumatic for me.” Usually people downplay the things they’ve lived through and assume that the word “trauma” is somehow reserved for other people and other situations.

I’m here to tell you that what you have lived through counts. If your body is holding on to it, it is trauma to you. It doesn’t need to be logical.

For some people, intense criticism can be stored in our bodies and memories as trauma.

Trauma is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, meaning it impacts our bodies, our minds, and our relationships to other people.

• we might have intrusive thoughts or memories about the trauma

• we might have flashbacks to the event so intense that we lose track of the present moment and feel that we are right back in the original event (science shows that when this happens, our brain actually can’t distinguish between past and present)

• we can become intensely distressed at anything that reminds us of the original event, including sights, sounds, smells, and our own feelings. For example “I feel my throat closing up, just like I did when xyz happened,” and that physical feeling will then prompt an intense emotional reaction even though the physical feeling was brought on by something totally unrelated, like singing a high note.

• we therefore go out of our way to avoid anything that reminds us of our original trauma (places, people, etc).

• we sometimes develop exaggerated negative beliefs about ourselves like “I’m permanently damaged,” or “the world is a dangerous place,” or “no one is safe to be around”

• we might develop a persistently negative emotional state (horror, anger, guilt, shame)

• we might feel an inability or an unwillingness to connect with others

• we might lose interest in the important activities in our life

• we can also experience irritable behavior including angry outbursts;

  • sleep disturbances

  • reckless or self-destructive behavior

  • hypervigilance (always looking around for danger)

  • an exaggerated startle response

  • problems with concentration

phew.

One of the things that’s important to note is that when trauma is in our system, the research indicates that our parasympathetic system has a difficult time calming all of those big reactions down once they are activated. So your original trauma may have nothing to do with singing, but you open your mouth to make a sound in front of people, and this activates the very same survival responses that trauma does. Unfortunately, your body doesn’t know the difference and goes into these survival reactions as though your life depends on it, which can feel very out of scale to what’s actually happening in the moment. Then what also happens is that your parasympathetic is not really able to put the brakes on these huge reactions, and it can feel like your brain and your body are really out of control.

I’m very sorry that this happens.

But there is actually a reason and there really is something we can do about it.

When a person with a trauma history gets into a high-stakes situation, it can be a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Sometimes a person isn’t aware of their trauma until they get into a high-stakes situation and they can’t figure out why they feel like they are utterly losing it.

There’s also another category of reaction: shutdown. And that’s what we’ll talk about next week.

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It has become really cool of late to talk about nervous system regulation and nervous system activation and other buzzy “nervous system” things and sometimes I wonder if we all know what we are talking about when we talk about these things? Just in case it would be helpful: (I’m aiming for simplicity and I’m not a medical doctor so don’t be offended)

Humans have a Central Nervous System which consists of your brain and spinal cord
And a Peripheral Nervous System which includes all your other nerves.

When we’re talking about nervous system regulation and all the things that are cool on TikTok, we’re talking about the autonomic nervous system, which is the duder that handles our sympathetic and parasympathetic responses, among other things.

What amazing little critters we are!

So. When things are happening like you live your life in a biology textbook, you hear a loud noise and your sympathetic nervous system responds. Sympathetic is also the one that gets called “Fight or Flight.” This is a very dramatic pal that you have because it basically thinks that at any moment, you could die. This is what it’s preparing you for. So you hear a loud noise and your sympathetic nervous system goes MAYDAY MAYDAY DEATH IMMINENT and starts preparing you to either fight for your life or run for the hills by doing all the biologically important stuff listed above. You get the tunnel vision, your mouth goes all dry, you’re pumping adrenaline so you can run really fast or hit really hard or do whatever you need to do to survive. Not to be graphic but your body inhibits digestion so you don’t have to stop to poop while you are trying to fight for your life. NO TIME FOR THAT!

Because you’re living here in a biology textbook and everything goes perfectly according to plan, you realize quickly that it was just your neighbor’s car backfiring and phew! Everything’s okay! You sigh a big sigh and you might even chuckle to yourself as you feel that huge surge of energy moving through your body. You might need to shake out your hands or even put your palms on your thighs and double over while you let the adrenaline pass. Whoa! That really got you! This happens because that sweet lil parasympathetic calms you down and puts the brakes on all that survival stuff when it knows that you are safe. Parasympathetic also gets called the “Rest and Digest” branch of your nervous system if that helps.

Now.

If you are a singer, you are entering into this heightened nervous system state all the time. It’s called “performing.” But we also do it in auditions and even lessons. Basically anytime you open your mouth and make a loud noise in front of another person, you are entering this fight-or-flight state [yes there are other states and I’m just tryna keep it simple right now because this is gonna get long enough and I promise I’ll get to those later]. It’s just a biological thing that happens. We all get a little bit (or a lot) of adrenaline, depending on how our brains perceive the stakes of what’s happening. It’s important to note that this is not decided rationally. Nobody sits down and is like “I bet this studio class is a life-and-death kinda deal.” Nobody thinks that on purpose. But depending on a million factors, and of course one of those is if you have a factory installed anxiety disorder or any other fun spice, everyone’s level of activation is different. And if you’ve never felt this, those first few times singing in front of people can make you feel completely out of control of yourself. AND learning how your body does this very natural process is part of learning to be a performing and takes a lot of doing and is an inherently messy process.

BUT HERE’S A THING THAT’S GOOD TO KNOW:

If you are a person who has ever experienced trauma of any kind, like roughly 1 in 5 people in the population, this is the same thing that happens in your body when you are experiencing a traumatic memory or a flashback only it is not a minor blip like the generic person in the biology textbook I described above.

If you are a person who has experienced trauma, the traumatic event itself created this same kind of reaction in your nervous system, because at the time of the thing, you were literally trying to survive. And so now, when your nervous system gets activated, either because of the traumatic memory or just because of regular human nervous system stuff, like oh, say, perhaps singing in front of people just as a random example, YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM WILL RESPOND AS THOUGH YOU ARE UNDER LITERAL THREAT AND YOU ARE NOT SAFE.

I am yelling because that is a really important very big deal.

It’s also very important to know that trauma messes up our brain’s ability to make memories in sequential order, and when traumatic memories or flashbacks arise, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish the memory from the present moment. So you might be singing in a lesson or a studio class and think that you are in a car accident or hospital bed about to die (these are mild examples).

This also happens with huge grief, which we don’t automatically register as trauma, but I’ll use it as an example here.

So let’s say that Xander the singer loses a very important person in their life very unexpectedly. It is a profound loss made even worse because it came out of nowhere. Xander is understandably hit really hard and takes a few days off of work to try and make sense of it all. But a few days go by and Xander realizes that there’s an important gig coming up in a few weeks that they really don’t want to cancel. They try to start practicing and the first time they make sound they just burst into tears and can’t stop crying. The next day they feel like high notes are incredibly strained and sometimes they don’t even come out. They try warming up more and drinking tea but the upper voice feels like a massive struggle and none of their usual technical stuff is helping at all. So now on top of losing a dear person are they having a vocal crisis?!

These are not two separate things: the singing stuff is a visceral sign that Xander is probably not ready to sing right now. Xander’s body does not feel safe making loud noises and putting itself in an even higher adrenaline state. It’s just too much. The body can’t handle this much activation with everything it is already carrying and working to process. So when singing starts, it’s like the machine goes into overdrive and Xander gets error messages from their voice and body. Crying and not being able to continue is your body’s way of saying “Perhaps this is not the kindest choice you could be making for yourself at this time.” Your throat shutting down on high notes when you normally have solid and reliable technique suggests that your body is doing too much work already and asking it to perform complex coordination tasks at this level is sort of like the emotional equivalent of competing at the Olympics with two broken legs. You can compete at the Olympics, and you can heal broken legs, but you probably shouldn’t try to do both at the same time.

The issue is that most of us have no idea how much work our bodies are doing on our behalf to process our emotions, and that’s a thing we can get into in a future discussion. One amazing advantage that performing artists have in the healing of trauma is that many of us develop amazing proprioceptive skills and kinesthetic awareness. As part of our artistic evolution we become fantastic at noticing how our bodies move in space and how things feel from the inside. This can become an emotional resilience superpower, and I can’t wait to tell you about that later.

I’m telling you all these things because I want you to know that:
1. Singing is a thing that activates our sympathetic nervous system
2. Trauma is a thing that activates our sympathetic nervous system
3. It is super duper normal to have a very difficult time singing after huge emotional events. This also includes anniversaries of huge emotional events.
4. It is super duper normal to have a big emotional reaction to singing if you are a person who has lived through trauma of any kind
5. If you are consistently having super huge emotional reactions to singing, it’s possible that your body is trying to let you know that something in your life requires some careful attention.

I’ve got a whole series of these planned, but I’d love to hear what you want to know more about! And of course you can always check out the book if you don’t wanna wait!

K, love you.

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Oh we are feeling the feelings.

And maybe we are even in the numbed-out, past feeling the feelings stage.

We’re in that dangerous place where the national media has gone quiet on Minnesota, making us think that lol, things are fine now? Unless you know anyone who lives there and is committed to continual truth telling about the occupation.

I continue to see well-intentioned folks turning to me in wide-eyed horror just saying that they don’t know what to do.

Turns out there are three answers here.

#1. No.

EMILAY WHAT ARE YOU SAYING WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO

A very wise person that I respect a lot reminded a large group of people that often, when we are struck with a BURNING BURNING BURNING URGE to do something RIGHT NOW WHAT DO WE DO what we are really looking for (take a deep breath now) is a way to swat away our own discomfort.

Take a breath now.

I know. I KNOW.

The feelings are huge and overwhelming.

Watching people being abducted is horrible.

Seeing people who look like you being killed in the streets is horrible.

You are not supposed to be able to “handle this” because it is not “handleable.” You can not breathe this away or good vibes it away or green smoothie it away or yoga it away. It is one hundred percent natural and correct that this is limiting your ability to function as a person in the world. This is an unconscionable level of violence and dehumanization. We don’t know how to handle this. We are experiencing collective trauma. We can’t process it because it is still ongoing.

Many of us are feeling this burning urge to ACT because we hate sitting in this discomfort.

And I love you deeply and dearly, and you cannot be of service to others when you are just trying to soothe yourself through action.

What Can You Do Instead

Ewwwww be with your feelings.

I know, I know. NO ONE LIKES THIS.

I think all the time about this fantastic quote from the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. She wrote in her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior. (68)”

Emily, what the hell does that mean?

Cry more. Yell out loud. Talk to yourself if you have to. Find safe people and talk about how you feel. Write it down. Do not hold all this inside. (and don’t spray it all over the internet). But you need to keep moving it through you. Don’t just sit on it. Make a little rage playlist for yourself - just like 3-5 songs that you can scream sing to. You have got to move this stuff through your body. You are mad. You are scared. That is all correct. But you need to move through that for yourself. You don’t want to take that into a helping space, because that’s not helping energy. And if you take that into a helping space, it will leak out in an unhealthy way.

#2. Anything.

I love you a lot a lot a lot and here in the year 2026 it does bewilder me just a little bit when people say they have no idea what to do. Because we do have the internet and I do not mean to sound like an asshole but you can genuinely ask the googles “how can I best help minneapolis right now?” as like the most basic? And also do you know anyone who lives there and could you ask or are they posting anything? Or friends of friends?

And also 5calls.org. And also indivisible.org. and sidewithlove.org.

Or just google immigration justice + the name of your town.

Because sometimes we forget that just because we are paying attention to something for the first time doesn’t make it new.

There are lots of people who have been working on these causes for long, long, long, long times.

I’ve told this story in many contexts but I think it bears repeating.

I heard the amazing Fred Small talk about Indigenous justice after returning from Standing Rock way back when. It absolutely broke my heart and I was weeping and I was beside myself.

I went up to Fred and I asked him so sincerely, “How do you do this work? Doesn’t it kill you to see the cruelty? What do we do?”

And Fred is really kind and has also been involved with justice work for a really long time, and he saw my breaking heart, and he looked me in my wet eyes and said, “Emily, I take my cue from this community. They’ve been dealing with this shit for five hundred years.”

And I woke up.

I thought: Oh. My heartbreak is not actually helpful here.

More accurately: I can feel my heartbreak on my own time, but this community doesn’t need that from me. If I show up for them, I need to show up clear eyed and committed to work. Me standing around crying is not actually of service to this movement.

It was a very loving education for which I am still very very grateful.

This leads me to answer #3 which is:

Follow your way through the chart. Connect with the people and the organizations that are already here doing the thing. There is no justice movement in the history of justice movements that has ever been one person doing a thing. Ever. None of us are supposed to do any of this on our own, which is another reason why you may be feeling so frazzled and broken right now. Read bell hooks. Read adrienne maree brown and follow them on instagram for revolutionary and joyful content.

Slow down and breathe.

Disclaimer number two: there are multiple layers of privilege embedded in everything I'm about to write in this post. It's just the nature of my life as a middle class cisgendered white lady. I'll try to point them out as best I'm able, but the nature of privilege is that it's sometimes hard to identify all the things that are afforded to you by the miracle of your birth. I will do my absolute best and I'm sure there will be things that I miss. As you read, you'll also see why I might not be in the clearest frame of mind and so I ask if you might be willing to hold these things with a little bit of grace.

Today I woke up and it was very clear to me that I was at my saturation point.

What does that mean? I've lived through a couple periods of intense burnout in my life and I'll write to you about them at a future time (trust me: I am amassing quite a huge library of future blog topics). I'm not saying I'm burnt out right now, but I have become highly attuned to the little warning signs that sort of show me that I'm in an unsustainable season of work, and I'm at a point in my life now at 46 years old, aware of my autism diagnosis and the cumulative cost of burnout that I'm never willing to go back there again. So when these little warning bells go off for me, it is a very clear sign that something needs to change.

Luckily I had a feeling that this might happen right around now and so my husband and I are going away on a mini vacation this week. 🚨 Privilege alert🚨 but what became clear when I woke up this morning is I have no energy in my body. My affect has become flat as the psychologists would say, meaning I'm not interested in smiling or caring or trying. You may recognize this feeling. I basically don't care about doing anything. I have a massive amount of work to do today and I don't feel like doing it. I don't really care if I do a good job. It would be really easy for me to just decide to go back to bed and not do anything and not care what happens. This is not cool. I will not do that. I will go and do my work. My husband gave me a pep talk before leaving the house. He said you can do it. I said I don't want to do it but I'm going to do it. I've done it before and then I'm going to go to bed.

How did we get here?

As I've mentioned before, I work in a liberal church setting where let's just say things have been pretty intense since we came back from the Christmas holiday. You know why. People are feeling things in a massive way and as a staff, we've been working as hard as we can to hold space for people to feel their enormous feelings, create practices where people can move through things, and just generally be present to the reality of what it's like to be a human in the world right now. This is known in the business as “emotional labor.”

Contrary to popular belief, not all autistic people are bad at doing feelings. In fact, feelings are my autistic superpower. I'm deeply empathic and I'm always aware of what people are feeling in any given space. I joked yesterday in a room full of colleagues that I seem to have a banner emblazoned on my person that just says PLEASE COME TO ME FOR ALL OF YOUR EMOTIONAL NEEDS. Most of the time I don't mind this because like I said, I'm really good at it. After all I did go into trauma healing as a profession. I'm really good at holding space for people and being present with them and I love that work. However, everyone has a limit and there's only so much that one person can hold at any given time. Laura Vandernoot Lipsky wrote an amazing book about this called Trauma Stewardship about how really you just can't do trauma work all the time. Nobody can.

So holding emotional space for like 200 something people is really really hard work. At the same time, there have been a number of special projects popping up here and there which require my time and attention and creativity. This is hard work y'all. At the same same time, healers and teachers are still human beings in the world and I know you know what the world is like at this time. Not nice.

Luckily for me several months ago we were sitting in a staff meeting and I looked at my March calendar and I thought: “hoo boy that looks nasty.” As in: too much Big Big Stuff. My boss looked at me and said: what could you do before that to fill your cup? 🚨 Privilege alert🚨 Not everybody has a caring boss who is willing to look at your workload with you and help you take preventive steps to ensure your well-being. So I haven't even gotten to the “hard part” of my calendar and I am at the nadir of my energy and caring capacity because of the events of the world. Thanks a lot, world.

So here's what I'm doing for these last few days. While I know I'm a little frizzle frazzled

💥Wearing only my favorite clothes. No scratchy textures. Nothing uncomfortable. Nothing that my friend Elizabeth would call “hard pants.” Nope. 🚨 Privilege alert - I'm working at home the next few days.

💥Because I'm autistic this is a thing that comes very naturally to me: I like fixating on eating things that I really like. At this current moment that includes a shit ton of Ritz crackers. God they're so buttery and crispy. I love those fucking things.

💥I am comfort watching a lot of my favorite things right now. This includes Marvel movies and detective shows set in England, Ireland, and Scotland. There's brain research on why this is good for you. When you watch something you already know, it's soothing because you know what will happen. And detective shows are great because they fix all the problems by the end.

💥(Please keep contacting me about special projects!). If people contact me about special projects, I need to get a little bit more active about my calendaring generally. Up until now, when someone says “hey, will you read this book proposal or will you write this chapter for us or will you submit a blah blah blah blah blah?” I kind of just look at my calendar and see if I can fit it in and generally I just find a way to fit it in. But now I need to be very persnickety about making sure I only do one extra thing at a time. Am I offering a workshop at church this week? Then that's my extra thing and I can't do any extra stuff and so if someone says “hey will you read this thing for me?” I need to say “sorry this week is not possible, but I could do it during the week of blah blah blah.” 🚨 Privilege alert. 🚨 Like I mentioned before, I've been through several periods of deep burnout and my current professional and life goal is to build a career that is compatible with my mental health and energetic needs. This has required a shit ton of schooling and a bunch of professional development, trying a bunch of things that don't work for me and moving across the country several times: once straight down and once straight over, losing income, being really unhappy, etc, etc etc. The level of privilege I have currently attained came with a shit ton of work and exhaustion and its own related burnout, but I have some choices now that weren't available to me several years ago.

💥Snuggling with my dog as much as possible. She is really, really good at that.

💥Going to bed as early as I want. Sometimes 8:00 or 9:00

💥Being under blankets

💥Eating warm things even if it's hot

💥Singing all my favorite songs and not caring how many times I've listened to them in a row. This is actually really good for you. There's vagus nerve research that I would point you to if I had the energy, but I don't. (see above)

💥Smiling at people and making eye contact with them. This is actually really good for you. There's vagus nerve research I could point to you if I had the energy but I don't. (see above)

💥Requesting to spend as much time as possible with my beloved. I know he has a job and he has things to do but when he's opting to be out of the house I'm going to ask him if he can opt to be in the house. He is really, really grounding and helpful to me, and I know that he can't be with me all the time, and I know that he has things to do, and I know that I cannot completely outsource my mental well-being to another person and neither can you, and that's a post for another time. If he can't be with me all the time I sometimes deliberately say, “Can you just smoosh me for a second?” Or “Can you hug me for a sec? Can you put your forehead on my forehead?” 🚨 Privilege alert 🚨 It's okay if you don't have a partner. The brain research shows that you can actually release your own oxytocin (a healing hormone) by hugging yourself or holding your own hand or petting your pet. There's research I could point you to if I was feeling better, but I don't have the energy. (See above). Also, if you have a friend you can hug them too. Doesn't have to be a romantic partner; that is not the be-all and end-all of life.

💥Taking showers as long as I want until the hot water runs out and not caring. 🚨Privilege alert🚨 I live in a place where my water use is not sanctioned.

💥Using the little vagus nerve stimulator thingy that I bought a while ago

💥Doing breathing exercises. Making sure that the exhales are longer than the inhales this is also why singing is good cuz it does exactly that

💥Making double sure that I put my antidepressants and other medication in my little daily pill dispenser. Lately I've been a little overconfident about this and just take my pills at the same time everyday. But when things go off the rails it's really good to put in extra safeguards for yourself and just make sure don't miss doses. Just make sure.

I'm hoping maybe one or two of these things can feel interesting or useful to you. Get curious about how you might apply them to your own life. You don't have to wait until you are burned out or feeling like you might be burnt out to do some of these things. Start taking care of yourself before it is an emergency because when it's an emergency it's way too hard to start doing these things.

Time for my nap love you bye.

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I wrote a mini version of this on my Instagram account last week, and I knew as I was writing it that it deserved a little more attention.

Due to the wonders of Al Gore’s internet, I stumbled across this brilliant cartoon by Katie Abey:

First of all, it’s perfect and I love it just for what it is: this weird little character holding their flower of whimsy and the flame of political outrage. We bless you, Katie Abey.

And also: the actual trauma-informed depth to this is phenomenal. This is totally it.

Some of you know that I also work in a liberal religious community, and this is one of the biggest messages we have been returning to over and over since the election, when people were devastated and afraid and overwhelmed. We have a practice we call “Joys and Sorrows” where someone will come forward and tell us that they lost a job, or that a loved one is entering hospice, and the very next person will say that a grandbaby was born or a dear friend is visiting or the community has been a gift this week. And we don’t offer commentary, and we don’t try to segue from one thing to another, and all of these things are just mingled together in the loving witness of the gathered community. And we remind them that that is the practice: we tell the unvarnished truth about life, and we take deep breaths, and we cry if we need to, and we sit together, and then we find a way to go on to the next part of the service. Some days the going on just takes a few breaths. Some days I end up giving an impromptu soliloquy on the messiness of it all until it feels like I might possibly be able to lead a song without gulping through sobs.

I studied with an amazing Alexander Technique teacher in Boston (Betsy Polatin) who described this as the practice of “Being With.” You just attend deeply to what is actually happening. You don’t try to change it, you don’t need to soften it, you don’t need to deeply plumb the depths of why you are feeling the way that you do. And you don’t judge or assign any value to anything. It’s just exploration and gentle curiosity.

Betsy is also (like me) a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, so we’ll explore this practice a little bit further.

When you practice Being With, you can really get into granular detail of everything that is happening and arising for you. It’s different than a meditation practice where you are trained to sort of witness everything from a level of remove; in meditation there’s an expectation that of course things will still be going on inside you but it’s your job to let them all pass by like clouds. Don’t engage, don’t study yourself, just keep breathing and let it all pass. Being With has a different quality.

Being With allows us to track our sensations and follow where they lead us. So let’s say you’re reading news about Minnesota and you start to get incredibly angry. Instead of judging that response, or telling yourself not to be angry, or trying to channel or redirect it in some way, let’s make up what it could be like to Be With it.

You’re reading the news and you start to get incredibly angry.

You decide to put down your phone so you can be with this feeling.

You take a deep breath and settle into your body.

You notice that your cheeks are HOT.

Not only are your cheeks hot, but it feels like your mouth is full of spit, behind the hotness of your cheeks.

You take a deep breath and just hang out with this.

You notice that the breath you tried to take feels a little bit tight, almost like breathing through a smaller pipe than normal.

This helps you notice that there is a slight squeezing sensation at the base of your throat. As you tune into the squeezing though, it goes away somehow.

Then you notice that you can feel your own heart beating inside of you. That’s kind of cool; is it always doing that? Oh wait - I’m just supposed to notice things and I’m not supposed to assign judgment to stuff. Okay. Noticing, noticing. I can feel my heart beating inside of my chest. That’s interesting to me so I’m just going to stick with it for a little bit to see what happens.

Oh by the way, are my cheeks still hot?

[they are not]

In short, Being With is a way that we can attend to our feelings without letting the feelings overtake us. When we actually get underneath the obvious signal of what we can see on the surface (in this case, the anger) we tend to the physical reaction to the stimulus of the news. And that part, the part that lives in the body, is the part that neuroscientists have determined only lasts for 90 seconds.

AHEM

Your embodied reaction to a stimulus only lasts 90 seconds.

What happens after that usually involves our storytelling, spiraling, and other fun things that our brains do.

Which brings me back to this amazing cartoon!

When I posted it on Instagram, I then went into a riff on pendulation, and how we can transition from feeling something intense to feeling something else, like a warm coffee cup in your hands, or your soft dog or a blanket. And while that is still true and useful (and while I will post more in depth about pendulation at another time… aren’t blogs so fun!), I think my brain is asking me to tell you about the importance of dialectical thinking skills.

Girl, what.

The easiest way to think about this is in terms of “both/and,” instead of “either/or.”

So right now, when things are very intense and scary, we can become afraid and think everything is horrible and the world is coming to an end. Which, maybe. And also, I hear your breaking heart and I love you.

But also: have you seen baby ducks? They are yellow and fluffy. It’s ridiculous. And this remains true, despite the dystopian hellscape unfolding in Minneapolis right now.

Me loving baby ducks does not make me a privileged bitch or a Pollyanna. Because I also know what’s happening in Minneapolis and cry about it multiple times a week and follow posts of activists on the ground there and am doing my small parts.

I am practicing my dialectical thinking skills. Things there are unimaginably horrific for people of color, I simply do not understand how you can even be willing to go outside of your door right now, AND YET: my friends who live in the city are showing endless footage of neighbors filming unlawful snatchings, and blowing whistles, and people are trying their absolute damndest to protect each other however they can. And those of us outside the Twin Cities are funneling in money to get people groceries, to help them pay rent so they don’t have to go to dangerous jobs, etc etc,

Both/and. It’s horrible, AND beautiful things are happening.

To zoom out and talk about trauma healing in general, terrible things happened AND you deserve a beautiful life.

There is pain in life AND cake is delicious.

Did you ever notice that sometimes you have the very best laughs after you have been crying for a while? Both/and.

So.

You must. MUST. Hold on to your whimsy, your joy, your dancing, your favorite foods, your whatever it is you love. You simply simply must.

Like I said on IG, otherwise the bad guys win. And I simply will not have that. For me OR for you.

Here’s my snuggle dog Millie doing what she likes best: building a nest and roasting herself to perfection. Highly recommend 12/10.

As always, if you feel like you could use some support with this, book a one-on-one trauma session with me.

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It’s kind of amusing to me that I found my way to trauma studies by studying how musicians use their bodies.

Like most good things, I stumbled my way into the Alexander Technique (AT, or Alexander) by accident. If you don’t know anything about AT, and with apologies to actual Alexander teachers who probably have a much fancier definition, for me, it is a way of noticing what my body is doing in activity. When I’m chopping vegetables I can notice how I am standing in relationship to the counter: am I balanced on my own two feet or am I leaning into the counter for support? How am I holding this knife? Am I gripping it like my life depends on it, or could I hold it a little more loosely and get this job done even more effectively? My favorite Alexander question I have developed over time (with the guidance of great teachers) is: how much work is essential for the job I am doing?

This is a beautiful tool in music making. Because when we tie in our feelings about making music: phew. Oftentimes we are giving SO MUCH. And this shows up in our bodies as physical tension. Because we are thinking of years of instructions we’ve been given, or we’re thinking of not disappointing the ghost of Mozart, or our parents or our first piano teacher, or our entire home town. We may not realize that we are trying to prove ourselves in some way, and in a performance or practice room we are striving: to get it right, to do it better, to hold all the pieces.

Y’all: this sucks. Instead of holding our music making lightly, many of us are unintentionally choking it to death. We want so much to do so great that we are actually getting in our own way by creating these patterns of physical tension that make music making much more effortful than necessary, and in many cases, we actually cause ourselves physical pain and injury. Don’t get me wrong: there is tremendous concentration, coordination, and effort required, but I love the frame of the Alexander Technique because it reminds me to continually ask how much of this effort is actually necessary for the task I am trying to accomplish?

What I noticed after several years of Alexander study is that, sure, some of the patterns I observed in myself and my clients were physical. For example, I spent fifteen developmental years as a competitive swimmer, so my neck and shoulders were overly involved in my singing. This was super annoying to me and took a very very long time to work with. Constantly noticing, choosing, noticing, choosing. But I could also see that many patterns had this emotional component: my shoulder curls around because I still don’t feel like I deserve to be heard. My chest collapses and I have to jut my chin forward because I’m really just looking for validation. [nb: of course these physical habits don’t always mean these things; I am just making up examples]. So I started to think: If Alexander gives us the tools to notice these physical patterns and make choices about how we use our bodies, could trauma healing help us get to the bottom of some of these physical habits and clear them out for good?

This set me down the multi-year road of completing my training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, which I’m sure I’ll write about more in the future. But during that process I also started to realize: holy shit, for a lot of the people I have worked with as a professional singer, trauma was built in to the way that they were trained. And that is some bullshit for sure. So then I became super passionate about helping singers to understand that:
- you may have brought some pre-existing trauma into your training as an artist, and that may have led to some hard things
- you may have had a perfectly fine upbringing but perhaps you were treated like garbage in your training which has led to many complicated feelings about your voice
- you may have had a perfectly fine upbringing and even very lovely and supportive training, but occasionally a life event will occur which will have an effect on your voice because of the way trauma manifests in the body

I said in an earlier post that trauma is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, meaning that it can mess with our brains, bodies, and our relationships with other people. Guess what, my bbs? SO IS SINGING. If any one of those elements is out of whack, so too will be thine vocal output. It’s fascinating, infuriating, magical, and I think: hopeful.

Why hopeful? Because we can heal trauma. So whatever has happened, there is a way forward with trauma healing. Whatever your story, you get to reclaim your voice, and decide how you feel about it. Even if you decide that you are going to put it in a shoebox in a closet. That is completely up to you. You can say “you know what? I have explored all this and made my peace with it, and it’s not haunting me anymore, and it is a beautiful gift that I have, and I don’t really need it to feel like my favorite self.” And you can put it in the closet and tuck it away and know that you have a beautiful voice and it’s one part of your magnificent story. But when there is an unhealed something that is always trailing behind you, you never know what will set it off, or make you feel awful about it, or whose Facebook post will send you into a little shame spiral, or when you will suddenly feel terrible when thinking of something that happened in grad school sixteen years ago. And you deserve to be free of that.

OR! You can get your voice back and decide what YOU want to do with it. Because it’s yours and you’re the boss.

So come to my webinar on Saturday and I’ll teach you all about taking the first steps and you can get an inkling of what your body will feel like when it gets free. Because that’s all I want for you. And I need you to know that it’s possible.

Register for Trauma and Your Voice right here.

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The year was 2013.

It was not. going. well.

At that point I had a stupid number of jobs: I was the high school choir director where I conducted musicals and I was coaching the swim team, I had a church job, I was teaching a few private voice lessons, I had started adjuncting at a state university where I also conducted musicals. Oh and I was casually performing a few times a year. And bless it: I even had friends who wanted to occasionally socialize with me. And I think I was trying to go to yoga class sometimes.

Hopefully you can read that paragraph and see that this is like, really really stupid.

Anyway, it must have been summer time because I was singing in a choir for this cool music festival that happened in our area, and I never would have had time for that otherwise, and a bunch of us were carpooling to a rehearsal. And someone I really liked and respected a lot said “I just have no idea how you do it all!” and I honestly have no idea what came over me because this was so not me at this particular point in time but I said “well, my house is a giant mess and I don’t have any money if that makes you feel any better,” in an attempt to tell the SHOCKING TRUTH behind the lie of “doing it all.”

And thus began the period of my life that I refer to as The Great Unraveling.

What I realized in that moment was that nobody knew me. Nobody knew what I was going through and what it was like for me to try to “do it all.” I was trying to be amazingly, incredibly good at many, many jobs, and I was holding up this Very Professional facade and just trying to look like I had it all together and like: do we need to review the stupid amount of jobs up there? Nobody can do that. But I realized that all anyone could see was this professional veneer, this person who was working her ass off to seem Ultra Competent and diplomatic at all times and supremely unbothered by whatever. And as many of the poor sweet high school kids who worked with me in those early days will tell you: I was very bothered! I was not always so good at keeping my bananas together when high school kids did high school kid things. I eventually got much much better at that but that took me a long time.

I digress.

Fast forward a little bit till I was out of the high school and working mostly at the college, and one of the best and brightest students and I were having coffee and talking about what she wanted to do when she graduated. And the worst possible thing happened: she said she wanted to be like me. What she meant in that moment was that she wanted to put together a portfolio-type career with multiple income streams, being creative and flexible. Which on the surface is pretty smart and great, and in reality that’s how a lot of creatives build their lives. But what I thought was: Oh god: does she think I’m happy? Does she think this is fun? Do I make it seem fun? Because I am miserable.

At that time in my life I was still very much not super okay and I realized that I was doing these students a disservice by not letting them know the real truth about what was going on, or how my life worked.

Now. To be clear: I am not talking about using my students for emotional labor, or dumping my problems on them, or turning them into my friends or confidantes. I didn’t talk to them about paying my bills, or my childhood trauma, or my deep existential wounds and shit. I am talking here about being a little more transparent about the pros and cons of each choice I was making. For example, I was at school almost every day and so most of them assumed that I was a full-time faculty member, and I started mentioning more that I was a part-time employee. And that when I wasn’t at school, I was usually at another job because I needed to make more money to supplement my work at school because while I loved it a lot and wanted it to be full-time, it wasn’t.

Why was I getting that doctorate? Oh: because you can’t work full-time at a college without one. Oh and by the way when I get it, I will probably have to leave here because colleges almost never turn part-time employees into full-time employees (this is exactly what happened).

But they thought I was such a good performer! Why didn’t I just perform more? Well: let’s talk about the scarcity of performing opportunities created by other people, let’s talk about what those fee ranges are, and about how many times a year I perform, and what do you get when you multiply those two numbers together? What would it take for me to be marketing myself as a performer more? Why don’t I go to New York for “audition season” anymore [my personal choices only and I always talked about my friends and colleagues who loved New York and got huge thrills about going every season and the smart choices they made about how to choose which auditions to pursue etc etc. And how did I make these choices when I was actively doing that?] And how do I get gigs now by the way?

This carried over into other areas too.

I had so many students who, several weeks into the semester would start to struggle with their work and then finally reveal that they were finding it difficult to manage their depression or anxiety or other diagnosis. They would usually tell me this with so much shame and fear, as though somehow this was the moment that they were “found out” and everything had utterly fallen apart and all was lost. And so I just started being really open about the fact that, hello world! I am a person who lives with depression and anxiety. This is just part of my life. I am also a great teacher and a smart person and a functional adult. And I’ve learned to live with and manage this other stuff that is a constant part of my life. Again: I don’t need to get all detailed about what I’m crying about this week or what I’m talking about in therapy. But I just let people know that this is a part of my life, and here I am, living my life. And really, as performing artists, did you ever stop to think about how much of the material we work with is about IMMENSELY heavy topics like the meaning of life, and death and grief, and my child was stolen from me or I was forcibly extracted from my home or my whole family was killed or I died at a young age, and we’re just supposed to casually handle that and not be affected by it? And maybe every artist should have a relationship with a mental health professional just because the work is mildly hazardous emotionally? Also, representation is really important and I really wanted my students to see that they too could pursue whatever path they wanted to follow, and that learning to manage your diagnoses is sometimes hard and sometimes a huge pain in the caboose, and you can do it and it’s worth it.

So in short (ha ha, sorry never gonna happen), I’m always preaching what I practice. As my doctoral mentor Lynn Eustis says about singing, “I’m not in the teacher’s chair because I have all the answers, I’m just here because I’ve been walking on the road longer.” And that’s how I feel about trauma healing and mental health and overall emotional wellness. I’m out here on the road, and I know it’s okay. Sometimes it’s a bitch of a road, but I also know that it is passable and that you can do it. Because I’m right here.

See look?! Here I am on this road! This is an old vacation picture of me at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

This is a very casual and unscientific retelling!

A bunch of scientists had these mice in a cage and decided to administer little electric shocks to them at completely random and unpredictable times. There was nothing the mice could do to avoid zaps from happening. Eventually the mice became so stressed out by the zaps and the fear of zaps that the scientists left the cage open and the mice wouldn't go anywhere. The mice were just convinced that there life was just living in this cage and getting zapped randomly, and sure the cage was open, but what good was that gonna do?

It turns out that people do this too under stress, and the psychological name for this is learned helplessness.

When we live under extremely stressful conditions, or experience trauma, we can sometimes get to a point that psychologists have labeled “learned helplessness.” We start to feel so overwhelmed by our circumstances that we stop feeling like choice is possible, or that things could ever be different.

NOW. There is something important that I have to say here to all of the black and brown readers, and chronically ill folks, and trans and queer beloveds, and disabled folks, and people in fat bodies and people from poor backgrounds and people with other marginalized identities that I haven't named specifically and that is that learned helplessness simply could never ever ever apply to SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION that are created by other people to harm you and are very real and are exhausting dehumanizing fights that you are hideously fighting against your will, consciously and unconsciously all the g damn time. You know what, maybe don't even read the rest of this if you're already feeling a little activated about it. Because the very real trauma of living in systems of oppression is a whole other thing that we can talk about a whole other way which involves preserving your humanity at all costs and I promise to write that for you in whatever way I can.

Phew.

Okay.

I see people talk about this with their jobs a lot. They've been at a job for a long time, and now they hate the work and they hate the people and they hate the commute and absolutely everything about it is simply crushing their soul to ash, but when I ask them about looking for other jobs they're like “eh, I've been there for ten years.” As if that is a reason to just say goodbye to your spirit for the rest of your days. Or they say “well I'm 48 so it really feels too late,” or something like “well I'll retire in eight years.” EIGHT YEARS OF DAILY MISERY.

Do you want to know something really cool?

The research on burnout shows us how much our brains love solving problems, and that this can be medicinal for us. Just spending time researching other jobs is soothing to your brain, even if you don't actually end up leaving your job.

Is this not amazing and hopeful?

Just thinking about how you would take action to change something is an antidote to learned helplessness.

I taught high school choir from 2006-2013. Being a high school choir director was the second Dream Job I concocted for myself in high school. (The first one was physical therapist until I found out how much chemistry I would have to study in college and I got really scared. But that's a story for another time). There were a bunch of reasons why it started to become clear that, alas, I was not actually born to be a high school choir director, and at the same time, I was becoming deeply depressed. I knew I needed to leave that job after about three years and I started accumulating part-time jobs in the spirit of a) experimentation (do I like this any better?) and b) math (if I have enough “side gigs” will they sort of combine themselves into something resembling a full-time income? Spoliers: for me, no they did not.) So even though I was really sad and stressed out, I was kinda working my way out the door until the right combination of things happened. Weirdly, I have always felt this way about work, although I absolutely do fall into learned helplessness patterns in other parts of my life.

You'll know you're in some learned helplessness when someone offers suggestions about your stuff and no matter what they say, you have a “yeah but” for why that won't work. You can't hear other perspectives with curiosity because some part of you is convinced that you are just stuck here getting these electric shocks and there's nothing you can do about it.

My beebees. No. I love you way too much for this.

I was in South Carolina last week and do you know the state motto that is printed on their license plates? “While I breathe, I hope.”

Come on.

I tried to Google this real quick because I wanted to make sure that it didn't have some racist undertones and you never can be too sure. I guess in the third century BC the Greek poet Theocritus wrote “while there is life there is hope, and only the dead have none.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

Do not stay in your cage just because you know these particular zaps. Your brain loves problem solving. Just start by thinking about changing something. What would it cost to have someone clean the house once a month? What if someone came and filled your freezer with meals once a week? What if you just looked at job listings on Saturday mornings for one hour? What would it cost to have someone babysit your kids one afternoon a week after school so you could get two more hours of work done? You might even find that one little change that makes your life better is not as hard or expensive or time consuming as you thought it was. And then you might even do it?

The Cage is Open.

The Cage is Open.

The Cage is Open.

My friend Nick Vanderkolk took this picture when we were in South Africa!

I'm doing this horrible running plan that has been too hard for me since I started it, but I'm trying really hard to keep going because I want to get better at running, and every once in a while I have a good day that gives me some dopamine and makes me feel like the targets are attainable, and I can tell that I am actually getting faster. And then I got this notification that I am entering a new phase of the training plan where the workouts are going to get harder. HARDER. First there was swearing, but then I read that the workouts are getting strategically harder in order to increase my aerobic capacity which is the exact thing I am struggling with right now. I can actually run the times they are giving me, I just can't sustain them. So I thought: okay. These couple of weeks will probably suck, but then I will hopefully have some increased stamina, which will actually help me with my goals.

And this got me thinking about seasons.

You can't just be actively healing all the time. It has to work in seasons. In Somatic Experiencing, we specifically use the word “integration” for the time you need to stop, see the progress you are making, orient to where you are now and how your current level of healing is changing the way you experience the world. Do you see things differently? Maybe you want to update some habits as a result of what you are learning or experiencing. Then that takes some time. And if you're always in the dirt of your life, excavating, looking at hard things and examining them and finding old patterns and questioning the way your thinking works and how you operate…

HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXHAUSTING.

I don't think we are always really good at acknowledging that, but I have seen a lot of clients (amazingly!) get to the point where they are like: woof! Can I stop healing for a little bit?! Please?!

Oh my God, yes.

Please stop healing for a little bit.

Because what we don't say enough is that when you heal really deeply in a profound way, the ground beneath you shifts. Beautifully and wonderfully. In a future post, I'm going to talk about how trauma trashes our fundamental beliefs about the world and the people around us. But you can imagine that if trauma does that, and you heal it, then you get to install or reinstate the things you actually believe: that you are not broken, that there can be goodness, that you have a life worth living, or whatever beautiful threads you get to reclaim for yourself.

And, like: hi! That has a way of altering the ground beneath you.

Which is good and great and wonderful and will take some getting used to.

You might see yourself differently. You might treat yourself differently. You might not like the way that Person A talks to you. You might notice that you are really thirsty a lot of the time. These could be tiny little things or really big things, but the point is that there are changes happening within you that will ripple out in very real ways, and that could take a while.

I often talk about healing as a spiral staircase. It keeps looping around, and so you'll encounter the same topics as you climb, but each time you see them, you'll see them from a different vantage point, because you are higher up, that is, further along on your healing journey. Even if all you are doing is hanging out in your integration phase. You're further along in your journey. This is how you know it's working! And if you're always just digging, digging, digging, you don't really give yourself the chance to stop and look around and notice how far you have come and how well you are doing. This is how sometimes the people who have done THE MOST tremendous healing work and developed fantastic resilience skills still see themselves five or seven or ten years in the past, stuck where they were before they ever started any of this work. They fail to notice that they have casually changed their life circumstances and ditched harmful patterns and painful self talk. They get so zeroed in on the next healing target (I'm imagining a video game pilot locking on to things to bomb) that they somehow think they are always a mess, always a victim, beholden to their past and their patterns.

What might you notice if you took some advice from 80’s anti-hero Ferris Bueller and stopped to look around once in a while?

It is true though. Trauma can mess up your:
biology - the systems of your body
AND/OR your
psychology - your emotions and mental states
AND/OR your
social relationships to other people.

Like, how rude is that?

So sometimes people will ask me things like, “my father just died and it seems like I can’t sing high notes. Is that weird?” Based on what I know, dear love, that is not weird at all.

Or they will say “I had surgery on my ankle and everything is totally fine but when I try to sing I just burst into tears! I have no idea what’s happening! Am I going crazy?” The research indicates that, no, absolutely not.

“My spouse lost their job and my nonbinary kid is having a horrible time at school and usually choir rehearsal is so fun for me but right now it just feels like all the muscles in my neck are made of iron and I don’t know what’s going on.” Lovingly, I have some curiosities about that, sweet friend.

To be completely honest, the more time I spend in the field of trauma healing, the less surprised I am by anything that clients report, because you never know what the current trauma is touching into. The painful thing that you can identify as the right now thing might be bringing up reminders of something that happened twenty-five years ago on a snowy night in Minnesota and so while it’s about a weird audition experience you had last week, it makes you shiver. Lots and lots of people have unexplained medical events happen on significant trauma anniversaries. There are very cool smart people doing research on exactly why and how our brains and bodies do those things; my job is to know that this is real, to see you, to believe you, to listen to you, to help you pay attention to your body, and to help you heal.

In the coming weeks, we’ll start to break down some common trauma responses and some of the mechanics of what in the gosh darn heck is going on in there.

Also! I’m offering my first ever Trauma and the Voice class FOR SINGERS! In the past, I’ve always offered these for teachers, but now I want to talk to YOU about what you’re feeling and how to move through it. You can sign up right here!

I’ve been a swimmer my whole life and am currently trying to capitalize on that experience and translate it into becoming a baby triathlete, which I will tell you more about at another time. All you really need to know for the purposes of this post is that I was doing a swimming workout where I was purposely supposed to be experimenting with speed. And I promise that this is a post about singing.

I started getting back into swimming when I was doing my doctorate, the vaguely dark and hazy years from 2014-2018. I was, how you say, NOT in a good place, in really any way, and I can also tell you about that later. (All of my stories have nineteen sub-stories, and this whole blog was originally titled “More on that later” because I have to remind myself that not every post can be a novel.) Anyhoo. By this point in my life and career, I had been studying singing and teaching for a pretty long time, and I had also done a fair amount of studying the human body and how it works. I had also fallen in love with the Alexander Technique (AT), which real AT teachers will explain better, but is a way of exploring our movements and examining our habits for efficiency and ease.

Revisiting swimming after exploring the body in this way was really interesting to me, because I started swimming competitively when I was about five years old. When you are that age and your body is just developing, you’re just trying to get from point A to point B. You’re not thinking much about optimal coordination. You’re blowing the bubbles and making the circles and doing whatever your coaches told you. Of course, as you grow up, you get stronger and things become more refined, but I also stopped swimming halfway through college, just about the point where natural talent, working hard, and a little bit of grit generally run their course.

Plus, friends, quite shockingly, and against my will, my body had aged: eeeeeeeeeeeeew. So things, like, hurt. And I was rusty. And I asked myself: did my neck always bother me this much? (Answer: probably very much so).

I applied some curiosity and tried to make some changes on my own, and then remembered I had been gifted a very cool book called Total Immersion, which is all about efficient swimming technique. (I will spare you the details so that I can eventually get to the part where this relates to singing.) One of the most interesting points that the author makes is that speed is a byproduct of good technique, and if you want to go faster, you double down on your technique.

* record scratch*

I am having fun flashbacks to singers who would essentially do a hairflip and say that their voice was just so huuuuuuuuuuuge that it couldn’t move. And also, when I was a beginning singer and my voice had absolutely nothing to do with my body, I could do all sorts of coloratura whatnot because my voice wasn’t connected to anything. So of course it could flip around all over the place. That doesn’t mean that it should. A particularly salty piece of feedback I received came after I did my audition for the opera programs during my master’s degree. I had already been admitted to the degree, due only to the rapport I had with the teacher I was going there to study with (I figured this all out much later). Unfortunately, she had become ill and was on medical leave. In any event, there I was, overconfident, singing totally inappropriate repertoire. Afterwards, a member of the faculty said “It’s amazing how you make all those sounds without ever taking a breath.” womp womp.

First I will say that not all my singers want to sing repertoire. But when they do, I tend to assign things rather conservatively. I am much more inclined to give out something with a beautiful legato line that sits mostly in the middle voice. I am obsessive about fundamentals. If you can’t breathe, you probably shouldn’t be striving to be a Donizetti specialist just yet. When we pile on challenge after challenge, we make it really difficult to focus on the essential skills we are working to build and maintain. And that’s really what singing is: an intricate balance of skills. And I won’t lie, it is difficult to coordinate all of those things at the same time. This is why I like to modulate the level of challenge I’m asking people to surf at any given time. If it’s your first time singing in German and we decide that singing in German is a really important goal, then I will probably choose a song with easier notes and rhythms so that you can focus on the details of the language. If we’re still working on breathing, I’m going to choose a piece with short phrases and ample rests in between so that you can work on the intricate skill of breathing, and that’s enough of a huge thing to work on that I’m not going to make it hugely complicated in a bunch of other ways.

When breathing is working really well, when vowels are aligning well, when legato is working well, when registers are balanced,

when languages are working well, then we can start to think about movement, probably in small chunks first. I will probably look for either phrases that move pretty consistently in eighth notes, or I’ll look for places where there are two to four measures of sixteenth notes. We are not going to go from legato half notes and quarter notes to “O had I Jubal’s Lyre” or something else with extended runs because it’s too far of a leap; that learning is not scaffolded well. I haven’t talked to my student about how to learn these more intricate passages. We haven’t talked about how to sing them well. We haven’t done anything like this yet and I’m basically setting them up to be overwhelmed and ultimately frustrated. I can teach better than this and help my student scale their skills more effectively.

My student can’t go faster than their technique. And I can’t just assume that their technique is magically growing on its own like a plant. I love you but it doesn’t really work like that. If you want it to grow, dear teacher, you must plant the seeds and make sure that you are helping it to grow.

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Okay, we need to talk about this.

Take a deep breath.

Are you okay?

You can cry a little bit or a lot, or yell, or shake, or do whatever you need to.

Let me clear my throat and be one hundred percent clear on this: HUMILIATION IS NOT A REQUIRED PART OF TRAINING IN THE ARTS.

Humiliation is not a required part of training in the arts.

Humiliation is not a required part of training in the arts.

Take a deep breath.

You are okay.

You are safe in this moment.

I know that the slide above talks about caregiver and child relationships, but the dynamic between teachers and singers often closely replicates this. We put all of our trust in an expert in the field, and we expect them to shepherd our development, teach us what we need to know, and help us grow autonomous in our work. So there is a lot of faith, and unfortunately that faith is not always bestowed upon a healthy and trustworthy person.

Though this is changing in our field, throughout history there have been many, many artists who have been trained through humiliation and shame in the name of “discipline” and “tough love.” And I am here to tell you that those things are not the same. I worked with a teacher who had incredibly high standards who also never belittled me or called me names or shamed me. She pushed me, hard, and required me to dig deep and build skills, but I always knew, very clearly, that she believed in me, and cared about me as a human being. Discipline and high standards are not the same as abuse and shame.

Last week on social media, I posted just a handful of the mind-florking advice about having a body and being a singer, not even scratching the surface of the insidious and borderline abusive things that many singers I know have been told throughout their training. Things like:
- you’ll never be cast until you lose weight
- you’re not really pretty enough for [whatever] types of roles
- you’re too tall
- you’re too short
- no one wants to see a black [name of opera character]
- you wouldn’t be crying if you really cared about pursuing this career
- people in the business are a lot harsher than this
- I think you’re just upset because you know that you don’t have what it takes
- this piece is a mess
- you really shouldn’t be singing [this composer, this repertoire, this language]
- I even know a friend whose teacher shared their whole internal monologue. They said “why are you being so hard on [this singer]? It’s not [their] fault [their] voice is so ugly.”

Please take a deep breath.

None of this is okay.

As the graphic above states, when we put our faith in an “expert,” someone in a position of power, we believe what they have to say. So when they belittle us or treat us this way, we think that this is true, especially because we have no other evidence against which to weigh these statements. We think that this must be true. And so of course, we feel bad about not only our singing, but about who we are as people. We think, “my voice is bad, and therefore I am bad.” This is classic shame. We are unable to separate the trainable, developable, changeable parts of our voice from our intrinsic self, the part of us that is unassailably whole, holy, and worthy of love and belonging simply because we are alive on this earth.

Let me say that again another way.

You are whole, holy, loved, and beautiful, simply because you are alive on this earth. You are a person full of dignity and worthy of love and belonging, which has absolutely nothing to do with singing. Even if you never made another sound for the rest of your life, you would be a whole and beautiful person. Your worth and your dignity are inherent and undeniable simply because you are here. No one can ever take that away from you.

But when the person you have entrusted to help you grow humiliates you and shames you, it is almost impossible to believe these things. You begin to feel hopeless and helpless. And we know that shame multiplies in the dark; we feel so bad about ourselves that we don’t talk about how we feel. We don’t want people to know the hideous “truth” of what’s going on inside, and so it festers and multiplies and feeds on itself. And often, we get to the point that every time we open our mouth to attempt to sing, we compound these terrible feelings.

We try to practice and “get better” because obviously we are terrible and horrible. We know that our teacher is very disappointed in us and so we simply must practice. I can almost guarantee you that the type of teacher who belittles and abuses you is not spending time educating you on efficient methods of skill building, so you go to the practice room to do… what exactly? Not suck? How, precisely, does one not suck?
Step one: take out binder full of repertoire that I suck at
Step two: do some warmups that I suck at
Step three: sing some arias and try not to suck
Can you perhaps imagine that this is perhaps not the most effective way to free ourselves from this mental hellhole?

Please take a deep breath and tap your feet on the floor and wiggle your fingers because I love you very much and I am here to help you. I need - yes: NEED - you to know that I know these things from talking with HUNDREDS of singers over nearly two decades of teaching. You are not alone. This is not your fault. I know this pattern because I have seen it happen to countless singers, NONE OF WHOM ever deserved to be treated that way, ever, not even for one second.

We are going to begin to rewrite this narrative.

We are going to start with you and your beautiful brain.

For about twelve years now, I’ve been studying shame, self-compassion, self criticism, the internal critic, and brain science. And I’ve put all that stuff together and I have been teaching people to practice well for the last seven years. I’ve combined all of these separate threads into a little webinar called Practicing and the Brain.

We break down everything:
Why do the ways most people practice not actually help them?
What does brain science tell us about how we learn best when dealing with complex sets of skills and how can we apply that to music making?
What’s the difference between practice mindset and performance mindset?
What do we do when that horrible gremlin just keeps telling us that we suck?

We’ll cover all of this and more, including a guest appearance from these guys:

There’s a reason, but you gotta
a) trust me and
b) show up!

It’s Saturday, August 26th at 10:00 mountain time. That’s noon for you east coasters!
Alllllllllll the info you need, including frequently asked questions (yes! there will be a recording if you can’t make it live!) is right here on this handy dandy webpage.

I really really really hope that you will come.

You are smart and you deserve to feel smart.

Practicing does not have to be a big giant mystery.

Also!

Practicing SHOULD NOT MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE GARBAGE!

Please do not throw things at me, but I actually like practicing now. I can tell you about that in another post.

For now, I love you. Sign up for the webinar and then go have a snack and move your body a little.

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