Tuesday afternoon I sat in a midtown studio, in our second Pelléas et Mélisande music rehearsal of the week, and for the second day in a row feeling crippling nerves — even though I knew I had sung well and done justice to my own preparation the day before. I sat there, in a room of lovely people happy to be making art together, listening to my incredible double-cast Mélisande sing, and I thought I might be ill.
Clear as day my brain said to me, “What if you got up, and left this room, and never came back again?”
I didn’t move.
Not until I got up to sing ten minutes later. And, singing, I didn’t feel afraid anymore, and I didn’t think of what my brain had offered me just a little while earlier.
I thought about it when I got home, though. Yes, when I got home I sat down and questioned everything. What did it mean that my brain offered me that out with such clarity? Did that mean I would be happier if I weren’t singing? Will the anxiety always be this bad — is it worth it? Am I not made for this kind of pressure? What if this dream has been such a long, slow time in being built that, in fact, it’s not what I want for my life and I just didn’t have the perspective to see that? — oh they weren’t comfortable questions that I sat with last night.
But then I remembered something a good friend and teacher told me several years ago: if you’re in a situation where you feel anxiety or panic, one of the things you can do to help calm your system is to find the exit, recognize that you can leave, and acknowledge that you are making the choice to stay.
Yesterday — and the day before — I was anxious, I was afraid, but I stayed in that room. Without even deliberating over it, when my brain offered me the way out, I chose to stay.
I didn’t go to sleep with clear answers to my tumbleweed of questions last night. In fact, it would be a lie to say I slept much at all until about 5:30 in the morning. And when I woke up the anxious nerves weren’t all gone — even after two good, solid rehearsals — but it was different. No part of me suggested running away anymore; and when I stood up to sing today there were roots… and lightness… and joy. Not only could I choose to stay in that room on this day, I could choose to bloom in it. I could choose to let the core of me reaffirm that this space, this song is for me; that although I will always have the choice to leave, I am also made for this space, I am made able to withstand this pressure, I am made to bring out these songs and stories with love, and care, and courage.
I have learned something important this week, throughout my whole body and entity, from my aggressive fear. I have learned that I always have a choice, and that in that self-allowance there is no shame.
Every single day I can make the choice to stay, and celebrate myself for it. Some days the choice will be completely unconscious. Some days fear will prod the question to the very surface. Either way, I will appreciate and enjoy my choice.
And whenever, if ever, the day comes that I choose to walk out of the room, that too will be cause for joy. So long as whatever the room, hall, field, forest, street, or garden that I enter next, I continue to choose my own true, honest voice.
AddieRose Forstman
Bronx, NY
Wednesday, 13 July 2022
