It is less than 24 hours after finding out about the competition results. I have spoken to my teacher, my mother, my sister, and a colleague.
Sometimes I felt normal today and almost forgot what had happened yesterday. But tonight while at Zumba class, I felt for several minutes in a row that everything was o.k. That I had become someone I have wanted to be for a very very long time. Or, more accurately, that the someone I hoped I was but feared that I was not actually did exist somewhere inside my skin and neurons and had been invited to Carnegie Hall to do something I had always dreamed of.
After dinner I checked the website to see if my name was in fact listed there. A flash of joy and excitement 0- there I was, right after James Behr and before the other residents of the rest of the alphabet. Who are these other people, I thought? So I googled them.
Now my nerves are going crazy again. This one played in Vienna. This one studies at Indiana University. This one is a professor. This one has composed all this cool music and released 4-5 CDs. This one lives in Italy and has been winning contests for 8-10 years. One is a young African American man who lives in North Carolina. His site is mobile friendly. One is a Korean American woman, or maybe a Korean Woman, can’t tell, too many different women with similar spellings of her name.
But anyway, they all seem more experienced and with more visible means of support than I.
I wonder if the river of emotion I am rafting down alone with no trained guides, full of boulders and white water, is similar to Kubler-Ross’s grief process? Maybe I am losing something here? A self image?
To be continued. Hope I can sleep tonight. I bumped my toe badly this morning, and hit my head for the thousandth time while vacuuming the studio. Clearly I don’t know my shape and size anymore.
To be continued, thankfully.
