3:23am June 4, 2012

I was gone for a few hours tonight.

(Written for quite awhile, then realized it was rambling on too long and stopped. This is the abridged version.)

So Fey is running around the house alternately yowling at the top of her lungs, going “mrrrrrrrmmmrrrrrgghhhhh” in a furious voice (usually accompanied by looking like a grey streak going across the house), and meowing while running, so it sounds like eee-yowww-yowww-yoww.

This is after making sure she has food and water. So it’s most likely linked to my absence, given she tends to react strongly to that.

Now that she’s gotten that out of her system, she’s curled up on the windowsill. We’ve sniffed noses and nuzzled a bit. And now I’m horizontal.

Which is a good thing. Because holy [insert litany of cussing here] my back hurts. It hurts so bad that breathing hurts. And this is from being in a very comfortable wheelchair that was tilted back and had supports to keep me from falling sideways.

Of course it wasn’t just the wheelchair. I was talking to someone about a topic so stressful that my entire upper body started tensing. So I’m feeling the combined effect of chronic back pain stress, which is a horrible combination. I’ve just in the past five seconds come to the conclusion that it’s good I moved to a school that didn’t have an orchestra. I can think of a variety of different possible results of continuing my violin playing the way it was going. None of them are good, and most of them would have resulted in my never wanting to pick up a violin for the rest of my life, or worse, selling the violin.

Not that I shouldn’t have been taught how to play at a young age. That’s probably the only way I can play now at all, I learned the basics before my motor skills started careening backwards. But (my mom just told me about this) moving me to the junior high orchestra at age six with a month or two of lessons under my belt and my general lack of emotional strength? I loved my violin teacher (a very shy, gentle person who loved music and loved teaching it) but I can’t imagine what he was thinking. Even with how oblivious I was capable of being (I did not know it was the junior high orchestra, did not know my classmates hadn’t come with me, had far less language comprehension than most kids my own age, didn’t understand why kids were asking me my IQ, didn’t know what an IQ was, didn’t notice the kids were all at least five years older than me, etc.)… that’s way more stress than any kid needs.

(Oh and I’m now permanently confused about which orchestra was which and whether I was in one or two or even more. Because I was going so many places for rehearsals and performances that they’ve mixed around in my head. Back then, I mashed it all together and thought it was all one place. Now, I don’t know how many.)

So now I have this simultaneous terror thing going on. Fear that I’m not good enough and never will be good enough at the violin to get anything but laughed at by “real” musicians. And fear that I might get seen as too good for what’s expected of me, and then get the same combination of pressure and hatred I got as a kid, plus that really nasty kind of praise that I can’t describe, and isn’t intended to be nasty, but is so very not a good thing. My friend tells me that insecure people always make things like that where we think either way is horrible. I don’t know. All I know is I get incredibly freaked out over these things. But I’m trying to keep it from stopping me from doing stuff. Because I already let it stop me for too long, and now I just want to make up for that.

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