a new life

It is amazing how quickly one can just walk out of a life.  “Welcome to your new life,”Jeoffrey said as I began to struggle with my second paper jam in the famed RISO machine.  Yes, it is a new life.  For the first time in my adult life without being a student, I am working primarily in an office.  It has been a little over 20 years since I first started working as a professional singer, 25 since I taught my first piano student and 26 since I was first paid to accompany someone on the piano.  I’ve also spent 15 years directing various musical ensembles. 

I turned 40 less than a month ago, and this is the first birthday that I have been unhappy to see.  Looking at my life thus far, I have loved my work. On the whole, I have loved the people I work with. Over the past year I have lived apart from my partner.  We’ve been together for over eight years now.  Circumstances aligned to make his moving to another city for a job inevitable.  I resisted.  I held on.  I spent a year in a dingy little apartment sleeping next to my piano and doing as much work as I could while I was there so that I could spirit off to be with him and our pets as much as possible. 

Again, I loved my job.  Child of a mismatched coupled whose marriage seemed to never have been happy, I swore I would never give up my life for a man.  Never.  I considered these jobs as my prized possessions, as my life.  Over the course of the year and through the inevitable march of time, the luster of these activities dimmed.  My professional singing life was plagued my social unease and personal insecurity.  I loved to sing, but I often distrusted many of my colleagues.  My inadequacies as a teacher magnified in my mind so that I would find myself praying for a good successor who could fulfill all of the needs for these children that I myself felt I was failing to do. 

Over the course of the year apart, I prayed for the right situation.  I dreamed of a perfect situation, thinking that with enough work and preparation I could land in a new city with a situation as great as that which I had developed over years in the old city.  I applied and interviewed and auditioned for many jobs.  I applied for jobs in which my training, experience and years of graduate school would say I was qualified for.  Some jobs were offered, but for salaries that were insulting or under conditions where I was certain I could not have been an effective teacher or leader.  Finally, as I had given in to starting another year in the old place but this time with a large commute, everything opened up.  It was quick and hardly painless, but as I look on the events of the past week there is a strange sense of déjà vu and almost inevitability about them.

In wondering about one’s future, in musing about ‘how will this part of my life end?’ sometimes there comes a quick small thought, and you think to yourself with almost horror, oh no.  I don’t or I won’t leave like that. I’ll be this or more that.  I’ll do it right.  And then, sometimes years later, that actual thing happens and in a dim place inside you remember that reflection of the future that came unbidden once some time ago.

Then in the next moment, you realize that what you had feared may have happened, but the earth is still turning.  The sun still comes up in the morning, and the dog needs to be walked.  In the next moment you see that the majority of external circumstances in your life that you had claimed as yourself no longer apply.  But here you sit.  And really it doesn’t seem so bad so far.  You start to wonder if those notions you’ve held about yourself make it easier or harder to relate to others.  (You look at the dog sleeping and pray she wasn’t poisoned by one of the many dangerous looking things on the street that you tried unsuccessfully to keep her away from.) 

You know that you’ve had a rich and full life in other places, and you pray that you will be able to build one in this new place, even if it doesn’t look like the ones before did.  Somewhere inside you think that you really don’t want that again.  It was fantastic, but in retrospect my life in LA resembled an arc.  It started very low with those first few months in an ill-advised doctoral program where I weekly considered just piling my stuff back into the Hyundai and driving back across the country to New York, that shining past where I imagined all had been wonderful.

I didn’t pack up.  I stuck it out, worked the four simultaneous jobs, eeked by until I found better employment.  By that time I had personal reasons to stay.  Work came. Clarity helped me to jettison unnecessary graduate school. Professional opportunities came.  High profile opportunities even, and all the while I could step back and see the trajectory of the arc.  I could see where it would most likely go, yet I rode it all the same.  I resisted but persisted.

It was time to go.  I week ago, through my crazy tears on the phone to my boss, I finally admitted the inevitable out loud. Finally there was at least a financial net to catch me, and I jumped.