The One True Valentine - Yourself

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.