Disappontments of success

So, I got in to Bowling Green, after a terrible practice session-induced drunken walk home in the snow the night before. I was so afraid I wouldn't even be able to pull it together enough just to be accepted, much less get the assistantship I need so badly to be able to afford this. When I got that email, I was caught between ecstasy and the immediate diminishing I tend to do of a place that might actually want horrible me. Oh, and the fact that I still don't know whether they want me enough to give me money.  The other thing the acceptance caused was less of a desire to practice, or even the realization that I should be practicing. Two whole days went by without touching a keyboard and I hadn't even noticed anything was missing, I was so comfortable on the high of my successful audition. On the third day, I (no, wasn't raised from the dead--sorry, that just seemed like the logical thing to follow "on the third day") knew I should get my butt in gear, but enough other things came up that it got pushed aside.

Not only this but I don't even feel that happy anymore. Probably if I get the assistantship, I will have another mood spike. But when I went to see Mahler 3 last night I was overwhelmed with this sadness, sadness at the melancholy beautiful sounds coming out of some of those musicians' instruments, at the fact that I know I belong with them (in some "musician's realm?" what do I mean here? I'm not sure) but I'm not certain that that will ever be realized since I possess a little fat baby duck of a technique and can't fully express all the ideas I have on my instrument. Basically, even if I've come this far, it's not far enough, I'm too far behind, and I never will be able to catch up (is what was going through my head, along with all the other wonderful and awful sensations caused by Mahler and orchestral music).
 
I think this calls for a NY Times article (sent to me from a friend, to whom I'm grateful).

The article is "Depression's Upside" by Jonah Lehrer, and it follows two scholars in psychology who published a paper saying that proneness to depression is actually a beneficial, evolved trait. Studies have shown that the part of the brain that lights up with activity when we're highly focused on solving a task is extremely active in depressed patients. Lehrer says, "Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated."

Except, when you're depressed, that kind of focus is called rumination, and it's not usually considered a good thing. Still, Paul Andrews, a VCU evolutionary psychologist, is convinced the brain has evolved this way for a reason. '“Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”'

According to Lehrer, "If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain."

The idea's simple enough. Thinking hard about real-life problems is painful, and is brought about by pain, but it's good for us in the long run. A friend told me that having a good day in the practice room can sometimes be the worst thing for you, because you're apt to get comfortable on those laurels. It's when you feel like you're at the bottom of the abyss, and the only thing you can do is think of ways to haul yourself out, that you're making the most progress.

I do think suffering is important. I wouldn't want it to be easy; then it wouldn't be nearly as engaging. I also think sadness is in some ways inherent to music, and delicious, so why not experience it as much and as often as possible, eh? Apparently, psychologists noticed this too. In the Times article, Lehrer talks about a social psychologist in Australia who decided to test the relationship between mood and focus/memory. To do this, he set up a bunch of tiny objects on the checkout counter in some shop and saw how many of the objects customers could remember when asked later. "To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets." Go Verdi.