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Valentine’s Day is here and we are all here to celebrate or ignore the over-commercialized holiday with love and candies. Personally, you should show affection to your partner each and every day without any conditions or the over the top events on just one singular day. With the past 11 months of us quarantining ourselves in our homes due to COVID19, a lot of us are still trying to find a sense of normality. Many of us are pushing ourselves to new goals that we talked about in my last post, others are still trying to find themselves and trying not to fall into the hole of depression and obsessive self reflection - while the vast majority of young adults are swimming in the endless sea of craziness in Zoom University. This academic year has been a constant struggle and life events of losing loved ones, and losing a sense of humanity is going away day after day. Regardless of where you feel like you are, there is one question I want to ask you - When was the last time you loved yourself?
This isn’t a joke, when was the last time you stopped to actually take care of yourself? For me, I’m in the endless typhoon of work - my Master’s thesis is due and I’m spending every waking moment writing it out, my Graduate recital is in less than three weeks, and I’m constantly trying to find time to polish my work, I just wrapped up my five DMA auditions and I’m waiting to hear back from a lot of them, and I’m trying to keep up my other academic work while trying to find practice. I was talking to a few friends of mine this week that I honestly haven’t taken a day off of anything in a near month, and that is clearly the unhealthiest thing for me or any of us to do. When you constantly keep working at bettering yourself or just trying to meet the next deadline, you need to take a break for at least one day a week. Our bodies cannot physically handle the amount of stress we take in on a daily basis. Yes, trying to sleep the full eight hours a day is a small way to let your body recharge, but our brains are continually wired to think about what our next task is the moment we wake up. With this, signs of burnout and mental walls can begin to form, and everyone starts to follow in the same routine - Wake up, shower, breakfast, coffee, work, work, lunch, work, work, dinner, work, vegetate, sleep, wake up, shower, breakfast, coffee, work, work, work, work, work, and more work. One day a week, that is all I’m asking for. As a musician, we are constantly conditioned that we need to practice at least three hours a day every single day of the week. We are like athletes constantly training throughout the week and wanting to make ourselves stronger and better players. Trust me, I’m completely guilty these days of continually playing every single day - the constant rehearsals, the graduate auditions, the recital prep and juries, the list goes on and on. Over the summer while studying with Andrew Bain (Los Angeles Philharmonic) in his Invested Musician MasterCourse, I was playing every single day constantly. I wanted to be just as good as the rest of my colleagues in the program and I was going down in the same routine each day. It got to the point where in a few weeks time that I started experiencing some serious back pain. I spent weeks blaming the stiff dining chair I was sitting in each day as it was rather uncomfortable, and by each day, my pain got worse. It didn’t take until my Alexander teacher Rachel Niketopoulos (North Carolina Symphony) did a guest masterclass with our MasterCourse for me to realize that it wasn’t really the chair after all. I had been building up so much stress over the course of the eight week program in my body that I was tensing every back muscle in my body just to hold my horn up. Once I began to be aware of the problem, I also began to relieve all of that tension and I began to feel better over time and became aware of the signs of bad habits I had been creating. It was also preeminent to the fact that I was playing seven days a week without break and though my face felt great when playing, my body was trying to send me clear signs that I needed to take a break from the horn as well. All of this pain and tension has no one to blame but myself. I didn’t stop to realize what I had been doing to my body and mental state to the point of injury, and as a musician, that is the last thing that we want to have happen to us. Since then, Andrew and my wonderful friends Emma and Dana were super helpful to make sure I continued to take care of myself for not just my face and body, but also for my mental health after talking with him about it even more even after completing the MasterCourse. Most people aren’t so lucky to have three amazing teachers stop and tell you that your body is the reason why you’re in pain. My fiance, David, was dealing with a lot of mental stress from his current job back in the Fall to the point that he pulled out his back. The poor thing was hobbling around our house for two solid weeks and could barely move, and we moved his entire office from upstairs to our dining room on the ground floor (which we later made permanent anyways). During that time, I was taking our Alexander Technique course with Rachel here at UNC-Greensboro, and I was working on a guided constructive rest project that I thought David should totally be involved in. Along with our friend Bryce, I guided them through constructive rest for around 20 minutes twice that week with different techniques that I learned from Rachel in the process of her course. Not only did David and Bryce start to feel better almost immediately mentally, but physically David already began noticing huge differences in his body. I follow a trombone friend of mine, Austin Pancner (DMA student, Indiana University), and he talks about mental and physical health to not just musicians, but to people from all walks of life. His Instagram and Facebook pages are completely centered around taking care of ourselves to prevent the point of injury, setting us back to being our best selves. Every time one of his videos appears on any of my timelines it gives me a moment of self-reflection to double check where or not I am truly taking care of myself. I highly encourage people to check him out whether or not you’re experiencing anything in regards to mental stress or physical injury. Injury should not be the point where we tell ourselves to take care of each other. It needs to start today when we’re feeling what we think is our best. Find one day in your calendar to just do absolutely nothing. I don’t want you to pick up your horn, I don’t want you to answer a single email, I don’t want you to even think about cleaning your house. Take an entire day to read a book, watch a Netflix Series you’ve been to catch up on, order some takeout and just vegetate for the entire day, heck even spend a day in bed and take many naps. Your body and mind need a chance to stop and recharge just for one entire day. For Valentine's Day, David and I are taking the day off. We’re planning on watching the rest of the second season of the Mandalorian, and I’m going to catch up on this entire series of Wandavision. We’ve decided not to cook for ourselves like we do every day and order take out. We both agreed early on with the amount of stress that the two of us have been under, we needed to take the day to recharge and mentally reset ourselves before the new upcoming week. What are you doing to take care of yourself? When is your day off? Take a second to like and comment below your thoughts, and don’t forget that this year’s Valentine needs to be you.
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I think we can all agree that 2020 was a pretty hellacious year. We have all said it, we’ve all lived it, but what did we do in these long ten months? Some of us baked bread for the first time, others had time to pick up a book for the first time in years, others spent hundreds of hours building fictional islands filled with digital animals with different personalities. I for one also fell into that Animal Crossing trap, but this time has got me thinking.
As a young musician who makes a living running around from state to state playing in different ensembles just to make ends meet, I barely make the time for myself. My practice sessions fell into what I was getting ready for in the next week or month. I never really focused on myself as a musician, especially as a Masters student where my time should be spent making myself an amazing player to go into the professional world. I was hardly sleeping or even eating and I felt so mentally unhealthy, and I didn’t even bother to address it. It didn’t take until around February when my teacher sat me down in her office one day after Spring Break. I had just come back from an audition for the Air Force Ceremonial Band after we did a tour with our university’s horn choir. I had spent months preparing, and my result turned into not even advancing past the first round. That meeting was my wake-up call. She sat me down and said that I need to just stop everything I’m doing, and think about why I’m doing this to myself. Think about the fact that I’m not improving as a player for one sole reason - I’m not focusing on the basic fundamentals to make me a great horn player. Sure, I practiced more than three hours a day like any other music student, but I was practicing the music just so I could get by. Not even a week later after that meeting, everything shut down. No more gigs, no more travelling, no more normal. Sure, I could’ve spent the first two weeks of quarantine sulking and complaining about what had happened before as I watched my calendar slowly erase itself as I fell into the void of Nintendo’s new release, but what was the point? My teacher is fantastic, and every time we’ve had chats like this, it was to make me better - but what difference was doing nothing going to make? The continuation of that story can be given for a different time. I’m a different person, a different student than I was this time last year. Now, I practice smarter, my playing has improved tenfold, and I have a new hunger as a musician and student - but what changed? Simple - goal setting. Every January of each new year, people make these false end games that they strive to achieve by the finish of the year - cook healthier and from home, work out more, spend more time on mental health. We call these resolutions, and by the definition itself, a resolution is a way of fixing oneself when we’re not happy with what we’re doing. Yes, I’m guilty of doing these resolutions - I’m never always happy with the person I was in the previous year, and I always want to make a change - but in the end, I always go back to my creature of habit and never meet the finish line. Here’s the thing though, I wasn’t ashamed of the person I was in 2020. That Tyler was someone who fell down, got himself back up, and pushed so hard to be the way 2021 Tyler is now. I’m proud of 2020 Tyler, and he taught me something that I’m never going to forget - resolutions are absolute garbage. Why do we strive to fix ourselves? It's a way of saying that we aren’t good enough and we’ll never achieve unless we fix problem after problem. As musicians, we are taught to make goals for ourselves - win orchestral auditions, get into a good graduate school, successfully play a lip trill - why can’t we make personal “resolutions” into achievable goals? “Resolutions” are made at a certain time and they have a set end, whereas goals are achievable at any point of time, they can last days, minutes, or even years, but the trophy is still at the end of the finish line. Goals can also be changed at any point. The great thing about goals is that when they’re met they can be rearranged to be made larger, bigger and even more self-glorifying. By the second week of January, I set a few goals for myself, added some things, taken some things out, but by now on the fifth week of the year, I’ve started to reflect on my progress of these goals I’ve set for myself. 10% of the year is gone and I’m happy with who I’ve become in this amount of time. Here’s what I have as of yesterday (Friday, February 5, 2021)
These are some goals that I have given myself for the course of this year. Every Friday, I come back and reflect on my progress. I think through my week and I think about what I have already done to achieve my goals thus far. Some weeks I put a goal down that I’m wanting to try and I reflect on whether or not it is worth my time or energy, if it is something that is going to make me happy, and if it’s something that I can be proud of myself in the long term. While these look like your typical New Year’s Resolutions, I will argue that it isn’t the case. These aren’t things that I’m requiring myself to do every single day in order to make me a better person, but rather something I can reflect on and continually change to make myself feel better at any point in time. I am guilty that journaling every day didn’t happen. I skipped a day early in the first week of the year, and it jokingly haunts me everyday. Journaling is something I do every morning when I wake up. I go downstairs, I make breakfast for my fiance and myself (of course, he doesn’t wake up until several hours after I do), and then I spend the next hour writing. It is something I enjoy, it is something that I look forward to, and I highly recommend it in these times when all we want to do is get our words out. Everything else is on my own time. I go for a walk whenever the weather is nice and I need to clear my head, I always go and listen to an album or two or three in its entirety and then I log about my walk (my current apartment complex is massive so it’s great) - the distance, the thoughts, the albums critiques. I read at least 25 pages a night before bed, and that is something I really enjoy because for someone who doesn’t sleep easily, it winds me down instead of falling down the TikTok rabbit hole. DuoLingo is a completely different story and I will have to talk about that in another post, but I’m 313 days strong currently and I’ve enjoyed every second of it. Every single thing that I have listed is something I do every day because I enjoy it. The arbitrary number beside them is just something to look forward to. 10% of the way through 2021 and I am already ahead on my goals, every single one of them, and it makes me happy every Friday when I write down the percentage achieved. Anyone can write goals for themselves at any time. I put mine in a journal, some put them on their music stand, some on a giant white board above their desk - heck, I know someone who puts them inside the refrigerator with a pad of sticky notes. Goals are meant for self accomplishment - you don’t need to fix yourself through a crippling resolution. Start with one thing that you want to achieve in the next week or month. Write down your progress when you do it, and take days off when you need to. I don’t go out for a walk or read every single day, I do it when I make the time to do it, but if I fall behind or fall short it is on myself, and I’m really ok with that. Whenever I don’t get a chance to do any of these things, I make up for them on my own time, not because I have to, but I want to. Trust me, when I’m into a good book, I am sometimes happy about the fact I’m behind so I can spend hours reading hundreds of pages getting lost in my own world. Please comment down below a goal that you have for yourself this year. What have you accomplished so far in these last 5 weeks? How are you celebrating yourself right now? |
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