AN EXPERIMENT

Performing in the Christoph Loy production of Mozart’s La finta semplice at Oper Frankfurt in 2006. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

When I began blogging back in May of 2006, the online landscape was a drastically different and perhaps simpler place. My life was in a simpler place, too. I was still relatively fresh out of a young artist program at the Houston Grand Opera, on the cusp of making my European operatic debut with Oper Frankfurt in a production of Mozart’s La finta semplice. At the beginnings of a professional career without the training wheels of an apprenticeship, I was adjusting to life on the road, learning how to work abroad, and struggling to make sense of this next chapter of my life as I shifted into the driver’s seat of my career. It was a time where all I thought about was the craft of singing and the art of music, and things like the “business” of opera and “entrepreneurship” had not entered my mind. I started this blog as an experiment, born out of two impetuses: I was lonely on a six-week stint in Germany, and I thought it would be a fun way to play and re-engage with my childhood dreams of being a writer. On top of that, being an American, I was unused to working in a place where down time was valued. Working in a German opera house for the first time, finding myself with more free time and days off on my hands than I was used to when working back at home, I was also simply looking for a hobby.

As my career and life have evolved, my relationship with this blog has changed a lot over the years. What began as a very open and personal journal accounting my experiences navigating the wild course of this life in music has become more of a place for me to ruminate about the importance of music in society today, as well as attempt to highlight why I believe the songs I choose to sing are relevant to the modern world. As I became increasingly aware of the importance of maintaining a boundary between a public life and a private one, I began to shy away from sharing many of the details about my personal life on this platform, and began to shift the focus of my writing towards the work and why it was important to me. At some of the most painful personal transitions, I abandoned the blog for long periods altogether. I also left it to lay fallow as other professional passions began to enter my life, most specifically when I joined my visionary colleagues Shannon McGinnis and Nick Hutchinson to co-found Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago 11 years ago. As CAIC, my own career, and the social media landscape ballooned, I found I had less and less time to devote to blogging. I also found I was less willing (increasingly fearful?) to make myself vulnerable in the ways that writing leaves me feeling exposed.

While every creator and artist grapples with an inner critic who is perhaps more vicious than any real-life critic or online troll could ever be, mine is most aggressive when it comes to the act of writing. While I have managed to learn how to cope with critics (both internal and external) when it comes to singing, I am still not as adept at grappling with them as a writer. At the very end of my first blog post 15 years ago, I confessed a whole slew of insecurities that I hoped to overcome, writing: “…Assuming I get over my fear that people will think me stupid, boring, trite, contrived, ineloquent, clumsy, inarticulate, offensive, poorly educated, narcissistic, and vapid, I’ll have something else (perhaps meaningful) to share in the near future.” I’ve managed to push past those fears enough to maintain some sort of presence here over the years, but they still stop me in my tracks more often than not. As I have progressed further and further down this career path, and the stakes feel increasingly higher, the easier it is to be paralyzed. Combine that with the increasing number of distractions both online and off that tempt me away from this extended experiment, and it’s always too easy to find a reason to not write.

That said, all these years later I still feel called to write, and it’s a summons that I would like to heed. The deep, knowing, voice inside me that calmly, yet firmly speaks the truth tells me that despite my own inner critic’s best efforts, I wish to continue. And so here I find myself. 

Showing up to my heart’s call, I am going to attempt one of those 30 day experiments and see if I can write a post every day from today through March 17. The point of this exercise is not to churn out page after page of the best writing ever. It will be simply to force myself to write every day and build those creative muscles similar to how I train as a singer and musician every day (well, almost every day…perhaps that can be tomorrow’s post…). The point of publishing it here will be to simply have you, the internet, help hold me accountable to this goal I have set for myself. The posts may not be long or even that good. The point will just be to make sure that I am writing at least something every day. My hope is that in doing this, I can learn to get better at pushing past some of those insecurities that can stymie me. Perhaps in the process, I can also figure out what the next chapter of this ongoing experiment will look like, how my boundaries around it can adapt to the present moment, and maybe find some more confidence in other areas of my life, as well.

See you tomorrow.

Performing with soprano Alexandra Lubchansky in the Christoph Loy production of Mozart’s La finta semplice at Oper Frankfurt in 2006. Photo: Monika Rittershaus