Okay, I'm going to break that promise I made the other day. I hope no one minds.

When I walked into the lesson today, my teacher said, "Oh, I'm so glad to see you. I was afraid you were going to want to quit after how you felt on Sunday." (So I guess I'm not fired as a student.)

I think part of my distress was due to the fact that I had some Mean Clarinet Teachers in the past - people who would berate their students, for whom you could NEVER practice long enough. Even one who told me that unless I was aiming to play for a symphony orchestra (and by extension, give up everything that was not narrowmindedly aimed at that goal), that I was wasting my time and his.

So there's an unpleasant past of music-education to be overcome here. (For my part, I didn't start to tear up when she mentioned the recital, so that's some progress)

The post-mortem of the recital, we didn't talk that much about it other than:

1. she knew I was prepared
2. stage fright is unpredictable sometimes (and in the future? I am going to see if I can get into the venue before the recital a couple times to practice so I don't suffer from the shock of being in a new place)
3. the arrangement of people was BAD. Apparently one of the other teachers (she was coordinating for three of them) INSISTED on ranking by age. And she didn't realize how accomplished the people directly ahead of me were, as they were another teacher's students. Next time, she said, she was going to insist on ranking by length of experience.

So, whatever. And you know, there just MIGHT be a "next time." The next recital is a year from now. Perhaps with a year's more experience - perhaps with making an effort to try to play in more settings for more people on a casual basis - perhaps with the additional months of training (because part of it, really, is overcoming some fundamental weakness, especially in my "number 4" fingers) - I will be ready to do it again. Because being able to do a recital successfully after bungling this one is actually becoming sort of important to me.

And it occurred to me, a couple of things:

1. She knows what I can do and that is what is important. The fact that she wants me to continue as a student means I must have SOME potential, even if I never perform.

2. The least said, the fastest mended, or however that old saying goes. In other words: I'm going to follow the WWMPD? idea I had the other day: keep my head up and pretend the bad performance either never happened, or wasn't as bad as I remembered it to be.

3. IF someone IS enough of a boor to mention it (I used to have people in my life - fortunately no more - that would bring up people's failures as a sadistic game, to see if they could upset them or get them to react. Or else, there are some people who have such a giant, hypertrophied, squishy pity gland that they have to exercise it in every opportunity), I will smile broadly and say, "Thank you, you know, I had only been taking lessons for four months at that point?" And then drop the subject. Not try to explain (which I am too prone to do), not try to find blame. But to try, in at least some little way, to OWN my failure. (And I don't think the WWMPD? model - give them a swift karate chop - would be quite as classy.)

4. Because you know what? Even though I failed, I failed well. I didn't start to cry. I didn't throw up. I didn't stop dead in the middle of the piece and sit there (I may have stopped and re-started at one point, but it would have been a "hiccup" of maybe 2 seconds). I didn't scream, I didn't clench my hands in anger as I walked off the stage. I failed, but I looked good doing it. And, if I may use what is my favorite "dirty" word, but that I rarely use because I know some folks are offended by it (even though it does show up on network television now):

I kicked ass at failing.

And you know, realizing that is a new thought for me. I am so entrenched in the paradigm of "Failure Bad!" that to realize it's possible to fail WELL, and in fact, that it's possible to fail in such a manner that it doesn't really MATTER in the bigger scheme of things...well, it's kind of surprising.

Perhaps part of becoming a grown-up involves learning how to fail graciously when failure happens.

5. I can enjoy playing even if I never get that good. Surely there are a lot of otherwise-accomplished people out there who played the piano and were kind of lousy at it, but still enjoyed it. (I thought President Truman was that way - solely based on a cartoon I saw years ago - but the online resources I checked say he was an 'excellent' player, so that one doesn't fit).

And heck, for that matter, I may not even turn out to be a "bad" piano player. Right now I am a "beginner" piano player.

6. No one (other than my teacher) that I have seen in the past three days even KNOWS. I admit feeling almost ashamed walking into my 8 am class Monday..thinking, surely the grapevine that exists in this small town must have passed it along. But nope. I assume no one knew. Or if they did, they were being too classy to say anything. But I really think they didn't. (Another bad mired-in-adolescence tendency: assuming everything is about you. I've just recently got past the "if I see two people I know laughing over some private joke when they see me, they must be laughing about ME" tendency).

7. Once again, I am reminded that I am a lot more resilient than I give myself credit for being. (I think sometimes God or the Universe or whatever you want to call it whacks me upside with a reminder of that from time to time.)