Candidly, this year has been a bear. Besides the pandemic, the loss of professional opportunities along with it (including a live audition invitation at a dream opera house, which had to be postponed), and my paternal grandmother passing away (and within 24 hours of my birthday, in a surreal twist), this year has been rough.
Over the last six months, I've been trying to figure out various ways to deal with this year. On one hand, I have been trying to make lemonade out of pandemic lemons by learning new opera roles and taking languages lessons.
(I'll give a shout-out here and many thanks to Janine and Natalie, my German and Czech teachers on italki, and also my Russian lessons with the Derzhavin Institute).
On the other hand, the mentality of making lemonade out of these pandemic lemons can get old very fast. It feels like running a marathon, and in subzero conditions.
I've constantly revisited the question of "How the heck to deal with this period?" That's when I realized there have been several instances over the last six months of hearing words, or realizing things, at exactly the right time:
-I shared with someone during this pandemic, that looking ahead at mostly empty opera and audition seasons felt like looking out at a desert with tumbleweeds. And that during this time, it was hard to feel like "a real singer." I wondered how it was possible to feel like one, especially when most things couldn't possibly take place. She told me that so long as I'm working on my voice and singing everyday, and I don't sing repertoire that's wrong for my voice, then there's no problem. That I shouldn't be so hard on myself.
-An unwelcome feeling I had found with this uniquely-scarce performing landscape was the feeling that each rehearsal, performance, or audition submission I did have felt much more fraught, because there were so many fewer to begin with. The normal ebb-and-flow of work days doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, there was one rehearsal in particular recently in which what should have been a simple piece to sing felt much more loaded emotionally than it should have been, and my voice was much tenser than it should have been.
This was another case in which I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. Especially since other colleagues of mine had expressed to me similar feelings of emotional whiplash in their singing during this pandemic. Even in normal circumstances, one’s voice tends to reveal one’s emotional state—of course that effect would be even more acute during a once-in-a-century catastrophe, and especially if you’re someone whose voice is your profession. I was relieved to remind myself that I was far from alone. Besides, all I can do on any given day is sing the best I can. Everyone else is going through this situation as well.
-I’ve been through various grieving stages, missing my "normal life.” I realized that if I’m feeling this way, then that meant that the life I had been living and building until the pandemic was truly right for me and made me happy. I wish it didn’t take a pandemic to show me the extent to which this was true, but I’m glad for what I had, and am optimistic to have again when the pandemic is over.
-I've also thought a lot of the people in my life who are dealing with or have dealt with chronic or terminal diagnoses. I still look up to them a lot--if they could find ways to turn even more difficult circumstances than mine into something good, then I remind myself that I can, too. And that's a reminder I need often. If one of my closest friends was able to sing at Lincoln Center on her second set of lungs, while they were failing her, then there's no reason that I can't rise to the occasion now as well (even if I don't always see how).
-At the risk of sounding trite, I’ve truly found that working on my singing has helped carry me through this pandemic, in both the better and worse days of it. The day after my paternal grandmother died (which was also my birthday), I had a voice lesson. After sharing with my voice teacher the news of what had happened, I knew the best way for me to carry through that lesson would be to sing, especially remembering how supportive she’d been of my singing. (In fact, I’d remembered that a few years earlier, when I sang a recital at her hometown, she’d invited over a hundred of her friends to come.) I’ve found repeatedly that even if I initially started that particular day not wanting to sing, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t feel better after having sung—I always feel more human and like myself when I do, and that particular day was an especially strong example of that.
-I realized that one of the things I’ve found strangest about quarantine is how you lose your sense of time. I tended to feel like I hadn't done anything all day, because the things that would break up my normal day-to-day life into parts weren't there. But when I started to list three things to do on any given day, and kept myself to doing no more than those three, I saw that I actually got more done than I felt like I did. To an extent, I feel like this quarantine has been a learning curve in being kind to one’s self. And so long as we’re in this situation, taking the positives that could possibly come with it doesn’t hurt.
-One of the things I've been amazed by over and over has been the inventiveness and creativity of people during this pandemic--everything from building hospitals and also ventilators on incredibly short notice, to the abundance of arts that continues to boom online, to other ways whole industries are reinventing themselves now. I remind myself that with this kind of growth and creativity, the timelines for things to be created will likely get shorter and shorter. Growth of this kind tends to be exponential--once an idea is proven as one that works, other places follow suit and build on it quickly from there.
-And as I have to remind myself constantly: This pandemic will pass. Not soon enough. And if it were over six months ago, it wouldn't have been over soon enough. But it will be over at some point. And everything will look different then.