So, what did I do next?

Well, first I sat down and had a little cry. I don't care what some of the pop-psych types say; sometimes having a tiny little meltdown in the privacy of your own house is what you need.

Then I changed my clothes, washed my face, put on new make-up, and went out to teach Youth Group. (And ironically enough, the lesson I had chosen (earlier in the week) was on "running the race." Paul uses lots of metaphors of running footraces to explain the life of faith - including the idea that you keep going at it, even (presumably, though I don't remember Paul explicitly saying this) when you screw up sometimes.)

And I tried to remind myself of something someone once said to me, but that I tend to forget, because, really, a part of my psyche is still mired in adolescence:

Q. What do most people think about you?
A. They don't.

The truth is, most people are focused enough on themselves - or their kid - or their being bored - or that thing that Judy said to them last week - or how they will get the car into the shop in time to get to work tomorrow morning - that they really and truly don't pay a whole lot more than passing attention to what's going on with the people around them.

I suspect a month out, relatively few people at that recital would even recognize me, let alone remember how I played.

Or at least I hope so.

I was able to play the piece, at the urging of my co-leader, nearly perfectly for her and the (small) Youth Group, even on a rather out-of-tune spinet piano that has washed up in the Youth Room. (We have a piano in nearly every out of the way room in that church; it seems that there was at one time a real necessity to have an abundance of them. Most of them have not aged well). So it's not that I totally can't perform for others; it was that being on stage, under lights, in a room where SERIOUS musicians were supposed to play (the fact that it was in the "Little Theater" on my campus did not help) made me too nervous.

The thing that gets me - and yes, I realize, these things don't equate - is that I have absolutely ZERO public-speaking fear. You could shove a poem into my hand, and provided it's not embarrassing subject matter, I could get up and read it to a roomful of people. You could ask me to expound on nearly any topic on which I have even a tiny bit of knowledge and I'll get up and cheerfully tell what I know, and sometimes what I kind-of-sort-of THINK I know but what might actually be wrong. Heck, I make my living standing up in front of groups of people and talking about stuff. I can even pray extemporaneously in public (I am an elder in my congregation) and I have been told by a number of people that this is not something people are commonly comfortable doing.

But performing, I guess it is different.

(I will admit to the frighteningness of stage fright: how it is something seemingly from outside, something unexpected, something that seemed impossible to control at the time. Perhaps had I been permitted to get up, walk off stage, and walk back on, it might have quieted, but I didn't feel like I had that option).

Since I am (perhaps overly) fond of extracting lessons from life events, what can this teach me?

(Again, the mired-in-adolescence part of me speaks up, huffily crossing its arms and pouting: "It should teach you NEVER to do THAT again." I envision my inner adolescent as sort of a wanna-be Goth...maybe not the full black-and-white makeup, but heavy eyeliner and dark lips and hair down in front of her face.)

I suppose the main lesson is this: I cannot be uniformly good at everything. That comfort in one public area of my life does not automatically translate to the other.

And I suppose, as the wise-beyond-his-years Linus informs Charlie Brown in the segment just after the one I linked to yesterday: The sun came up again today. I screwed something up, and the world didn't end. Because I kind of tend to feel that way when I mess something up. Not so much that the world will end, but that everyone is looking at me differently, everyone knows how I screwed up. Which makes me want to stay in bed, in the dark, like Charlie Brown did.

Then again, if I did that, maybe my baseball team would finally win a game.

(See? Humor persists).

So, will I try public performing again?

I don't know. I really don't know. I think for me to be able to do it, I'd have to get a small group of people I KNOW are supportive (rather than indifferent) and put them in the room I was to perform in, and run through a few times in a non-recital situation before I could do it again "for reals."

But do I want that? I don't know if I even care about being able to perform. I will NEVER be as good as some of the people I heard perform today - so what is the point of performing for other people? And for that matter, going to the recital and hearing someone play the Bach Minuet in G I had been working on "in my free time" on my own, and hearing her play it better than I probably will ever play it...well, that took away a little bit of my enjoyment of playing the piece. Yes, I know, I'm too competitive. But I'm afraid that hearing too much of other "amateurs" who are so far better than me will awaken that old feeling of "why bother?" in my mind.

I get it about everything, sometimes: I know I've nattered on here about my teaching and how sometimes I feel like I'm no good at it, and about the whole question of why keep knitting or quilting when all I ever really do is follow patterns other people have written, when the (apparently) "real" craftspeople are out making stuff up totally from scratch and writing books on it and getting all kinds of adulation.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be preferable to be really outstanding, I mean really amazingly good, at one thing, and not that great at others, instead of sorta-good at a lot of things. Because being "sorta" good is unsatisfying sometimes when you see someone who is really good.

Would it be better to be, I don't know, an amazing poet and yet be incapable of doing math well enough to balance a checkbook? Or to do incredible glassblowing, but be tone deaf and have no head for science? It almost seems a Faustian bargain: give up all your skills at other things, in return for this AMAZING skill in one thing. Would I take it, if it were offered? I don't know. Some days, I think I would, just for the simple security of knowing that THIS (whatever the skill was) was what I was meant to spend my life doing. (I admit, with some embarrassment, to taking a wide range of undergrad classes, and each time I started in with a new one, holding out some kind of vain hope that, if not a dove descending and settling on my shoulder, there would be some kind of a sign: This Is What You Are Supposed To Do With Your Life. No, I never got it.)