S3 E44: What I Learned From My Biggest Failure
I get vulnerable and share the story of the biggest failure of my music career! It felt devastating at the time, but I’m actually really glad it happened. I share what I learned from this failure, and how it changed the course of my life, as well as a way to reframe it that will help you self-compassionately make friends with failure. Hopefully next time something doesn't work out, you'll have a softer place to land.
MORE FROM REBECCA
Sign up for the free Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge (5 days of super easy creativity + wellness prompts)
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Let’s Talk About Anxiety - blog post about my experience with anxiety and how I helped it get better
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 44 of Being A Whole Person. Today I'm going to share with you the story of my biggest failure. Fun stuff.
But first, I have a couple announcements. There is free coworking coming up on August 25 at 3:30pm Pacific. This will be a 90 minute session where we'll get together, take a few deep breaths, get in the right mindset to be compassionately productive, and set intentions together. Then we'll get to work, take a break in the middle, and at the end, we'll have a little mini party, a little toast to celebrate what we accomplished.
It's been really awesome each time I've done this so far, and people have really gotten a lot done and had a great time. So if that interests you, there's the link in the show notes to sign up.
And if more regular coworking is something you're looking for, in September, I'm going to be launching a weekly membership for coworking. I'll share more details about that soon, but just wanted to plant the seed that that is coming. If you want to be the first to know, make sure you get on my email list. I send out a newsletter every other Monday, that's encouragement for your creative journey and help with self care, wellness, and being a human - all that good stuff.
So let's get into it. It feels vulnerable to share about my biggest failure, of course. But it's been 11 years since this happened, and I'm actually glad it happened. It changed the trajectory of my life, or rather, didn't change it as much as I thought, which I'll tell you about in a minute.
I just want to say, I'm using the word “failure”, because that's how I felt about it at the time, and I failed at what I set out to do. I felt like a failure in a bad way at that time. But failing doesn't have to be bad. It can just be good information about what we do want and what we don't want, and what works and what doesn't work.
I just really want to share this experience with you, in case you have an experience that feels like a failure, something that maybe has caused some shame. You're not alone in it.
So my biggest failure was auditioning for a master's degree in collaborative piano, and I got rejected at all for the places that I auditioned at. It's funny saying that out loud now. I'm kind of like, “Well, so what? There have been many bigger failures by other people over the years.” It's definitely not a contest, and it doesn't really matter how big the failure actually is. It's more about how big it feels at the time. The more risks we take, the bigger the failures that might happen. We recover from failures, so it's okay.
But in my life, at that point, I had not taken that many risks. I had never failed at something large before. And my life had also been, very gratefully, free of tragedy. So this was the biggest devastation that I had experienced thus far in my life at age 26. So let me set the scene for you.
In that period of my life, I was working as an accompanist at a music school, and I was also working, as a day job there, at the front desk doing customer service stuff. I was playing music with, Batucada do Norte, the drum group in Minneapolis that I was a part of. Those were kind of the major things that I was doing, besides freelancing stuff on the side, too.
I had known for a while that I wasn't super satisfied in my current position. I had benefits and there were a lot of nice things about that day job that I had, but I didn't love having to be “on” all the time in a customer service position. I didn't love having some people view me as if I was kind of a second class citizen compared with the teachers there, even though I was also teaching piano at the time, so I knew I wanted something different.
I knew I enjoyed learning, and that school had always been a comfortable setting for me. And, you know, this was in 2010, so a lot of people were going back to school at that point, or had already, because of the recession that had just happened. I'm also someone who finds it very appealing to have a defined path. I knew that accompanying was something I was good at.
I'm using the terms accompanist and collaborative pianist interchangeably here. I know people have feelings about either of those sometimes, but I'm just not going to get into that - just telling you I'm using those interchangeably.
I knew that accompanying was something I was good at. I knew I wanted to get better at it. And so I was like, “Okay, cool. I think I'm gonna audition for these programs, I want to learn more.” So I spent a year preparing. I did a solo recital the summer before that, because I wanted to get my chops up, and get used to performing again after a break from since I had been in school.
I recruited people to practice some of the major duo works with me, like piano and violin, piano and clarinet, and piano and cello - different instrumental combos that were common.
I applied to four different places. At one of them, I didn't even make it past the pre-screening. But the other three, I did live auditions, and they were all in the span of one month, in February 2010. So I flew to three different cities in this one month, on these weekends. And at this day job at the time, we were also working with this new software that hadn't been fully tested and it had been a very stressful school year up to that point.
So, just setting the stage for you that tensions for me were running high, even though I don't think I understood fully how high because I was just in go mode, and I was just trying to accomplish what I was accomplishing.
At one of the schools where I auditioned, I had a really terrible experience. This is part of what made it feel more like a failure than just getting some rejection letters. I booked a hostel with a private room, because that was cheaper, and you know, I was on a budget at the time. But this place happened to be right by some train tracks, and the trains were going by and blowing their horns basically all night. I was really anxious about my audition, so I already was not primed to be sleeping well. I'm not sure if I got any sleep that night. If I did, it wasn't very much.
The other complicating factor there was, they required, essentially, two different auditions and sets of requirements. Most of the schools just required you to do a collaborative piano audition, the works that involve other people. But this school required a full solo audition on top of it. So it was a lot more work. A lot of the schools had some overlapping requirements - some of the music I prepped for one school might work for another. But the solo requirement was basically like a small recital's worth, it was four major pieces of solo music, too.
I knew what the requirements were well ahead of time, but there was something about it that wasn't as clear. I didn't understand that I needed an extra piece, essentially. And about a month before I realized, Oh, no, I need to add this other thing to meet the requirements. So I was kind of cramming one of these pieces. I was dusting it off. I had played it in the past, but not at this level.
So I kind of didn't feel fully prepared in that way already. And so I go there, and I play, and it felt okay, not great. I was thinking, “Well, I didn't bomb anything. I didn't do terribly, you know? Cool. We'll see what happens.”
The second part of the process was to have an interview with the professor of the collaborative piano program. I was excited to meet him because we'd both studied with the same teacher at Ithaca College, you know, common background. I thought that was fun. But when I got there, he spoke to me in a very patronizing way. And he told me flat out: “Your playing just isn't virtuosic enough.”
So I was just trying not to cry. I was extremely tired, extremely stressed out. I was trying to listen and talk to him. But I was basically just doing everything I could to not start weeping in this interview. He went on to try to convince me to pursue an education degree instead. I think he was trying to help me. I think he had good intentions, but I just viewed it as “You're not good enough,” and, you know, “You will never be good enough, and you should just quit, because you should do education instead.”
I had a lot of baggage around that, a lot wrapped up in what I was thinking about it, so I don't want to say it was all on him, but he was very patronizing in how he talked to me, and that voice stayed with me for years afterward.
Has that ever happened to you, where your self criticisms take on the form of a person who has been critical of you in the past? I think that's a really common experience. Honestly, I just needed someone to speak to me more sensitively in that moment, and that's not what happened. I have a lot more to say about dealing with criticism, and especially in these teacher roles. I think that'll be another episode, probably the next episode: how to deal more self compassionately with criticism and rejection.
But this was just a terrible experience. I was just trying to pick up the pieces of my disappointment. I knew that I had one more audition the next week, so I wasn't completely devastated yet.
Those auditions were over in late February., and the tension kept building, of course, throughout March, as I waited to hear back. This was a big life change that I was contemplating, I was going to move somewhere across the country, and everything was potentially going to change, as well as wondering, “Am I good enough to do this?”
It just got worse and worse, the anxiety that was building. Eventually, I got all of my letters back from those three schools, and eventually, I knew I had been rejected at all of them. I had picked all schools that were fairly hard to get into. There weren't any safe choices, which maybe wasn't the wisest thing, but I also kind of picked the locations based on what I thought would be cool places to live, and places where I thought there'd be a lot of Brazilian music going on. Those were kind of clues that maybe I was just using grad school as a reason to change up my life.
I was just blindsided by anxiety. This was a full on quarter life crisis, right in that age bracket, and very a Saturn return type of experience. I know that both the sudden absence of the stimuli of needing to do all these things to complete the auditions, and just the huge amount of uncertainty totally makes sense that that much anxiety would have happened afterwards.
But I had never experienced this much anxiety before. It probably looked like I was functioning okay, on the outside, because I'm good at being stoic, but I really felt like I was gonna puke almost all the time, because I just was so anxious. For a while, I think I was only eating bananas and toast because I just felt gross all the time, which I had adapted to, but was very much not normal.
I didn't know that I had anxiety. I didn't know that label applied to me. Once I heard the description of it, I was like,”Oh, yes, this is familiar.” But I just, things needed to get that bad before I really looked it in the face. I got to go to therapy for the first time, because I really felt like I was losing my mind, and I learned that I didn't have to listen to my thoughts. I didn't need to accept every thought as truth, which was just totally mind blowing, and a huge game changer for me.
Luckily, this anxiety experience forced me to take care of myself better. I wasn't eating super well. I would eat whatever sugary snacks were in the office. I wasn't sleeping enough, and I didn't exercise very often, if at all, which are all things that would take me down if I didn't have them as habits now. So it really forced me to make a lot of changes in response to this extreme situation.
Would I advocate for everything falling apart before making these changes? Of course not. But you know what, that's the way it happens sometimes. We have to be hit over the head to get the message. That's okay. So I definitely learned that I needed to take care of myself better, even though I was just kind of coping as I was learning tools to deal with the anxiety.
When I couldn't stand it anymore, I would just sometimes walk out the door and walk as fast as I could for as long as I needed to. Sometimes I would have a little meditation mantra to go with it. But sometimes it would just be like, go, walk as long as I can. Eventually those endorphins would kick in, and not necessarily make me feel good, but at least make me feel better. I definitely started doing more meditation and mindfulness practices, because, again, I felt like I was just on the edge of losing my mind.
I don't know that I would have done that without this extreme experience. Then once I came down from the acute state of anxiety, I started to think about, okay, what do I really want from my life?
I realized, like I said, before, that I’d picked schools based on places that I wanted to live, and that had cool Brazilian music going on. I also realized that I didn't necessarily want to go to school for all the right reasons. If I had gone to a collaborative piano program for two years, I would have been consumed by that. That's great, that's what the experience is supposed to be about. But I don't think I would have been happy with that. I think I would have had to do that at the expense of other things I was passionate about, musically and otherwise. That probably wouldn't have been a great decision for me. Also, super glad that I didn't take on that amount of debt for an experience that wasn't really what I wanted.
I also realized that because people said, “Oh, that's too bad that didn't work out, you can try again,” and I realized I didn't really want to try again, not because I was afraid of failing again, but I just didn't want to. As a multi-passionate person, I don't think I would have been happy putting all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. If I only had to do one thing, career wise, I don't think that would be it. So that was really good knowledge that I didn't have otherwise, or I wouldn't have had if I hadn't fully pursued this path, at least to that extent.
I definitely felt very lost for a long time afterwards, like I didn't know what to pursue next. I didn't know what to create. I wanted to do something that made me feel truly Me, and a true expression of my creative identity, but I wasn't really composing yet. I wasn't playing a lot of improvised music. I just hadn't had the guts to follow the stuff that felt a little bit riskier. So this was like a big old kick in the pants to force myself to figure out what my own path was going to be.
This isn't a story that I can just tie up with a little bow, and immediately after, “Then I did this cool thing, yay!” Yeah, cool things happened afterwards, but that's not how life works, right? It takes a long time to recover from burnout. It took me a long time to feel normal again after that level of anxiety, which is a common experience. And, you know, it takes a long time for us to figure out what we're meant to be doing, and I'm still figuring it out. We're all continually still figuring it out.
I did come to terms with the fact that I knew I would never be the best in the classical realm, but also that that is not really what I wanted anyway. It was going to be way more rewarding to work on being the best version of me as a musician, and the most “myself” that I could be.
So, yeah, this was a failure to go to grad school. Didn't go to grad school, didn't make it in. But in terms of life achievements, I don't think it was actually a failure because it really steered me in a different course, and it put me closer to what I actually wanted to be doing, being forced to shake it up like this.
So if you have something that feels like your biggest failure in life, and it is still haunting you and still hanging over your head, maybe there's a different way to view it, like, what did you learn from that failure? What happened afterwards, that might not have happened if the original plan had worked out? There are so many cool twists and turns in our life stories and our stories as
artists. The more things that we try, the more things we're gonna fail at, it's to an extent, a numbers game.
Yes, the more things we try, the more things we're going to fail at. But that also means the more things we're going to succeed at, and the more information we're going to get about what works and what doesn't work, and what we really want from our lives.
So I'm wishing you success and failure, because it's all part of the package. Most of all, I'm wishing for you that your failures don't discourage you, that you're able to keep going afterwards. So I hope that me sharing this experience has maybe made you feel a little less alone, maybe a little more comfortable with being vulnerable about sharing with other people if that feels good to you, and that next time something doesn't work out, you'll have a little softer place to land. So as always, I'm rooting for you in all of your creative endeavors with enjoyment and self compassion. Until next time, be well!
Pianist and composer