Imposter Syndrome

 I have tried so many times to write about this particular phenomenon, and I'm going to try it again: imposter syndrome. That gnawing feeling that comes up and makes you think that you're really not as good as anyone else, that you're worse than everyone else, and that you're really just faking it and living with the paralyzing fear that at some point, someone is going to call you out on your bullshit.

Ugh.

But what does this have to do with playing the ukulele? As it turns out, EVERYFUCKINGTHING.

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One of the things that I have always loved to do is teach. Whether I'm teaching beadwork and jewelry making or how to read Tarot cards or yoga or Reiki or (now) ukulele, I have always loved sharing what I've learned with other people who are interested in the same thing. 

I have this philosophy about teaching and learning where I stand by the idea that anybody should be allowed to learn anything they want to, regardless of whether or not they're "good" at something. You're interested in music? Cool, you should totally be allowed to study music anywhere you want, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. 

Maybe it stems from my own twisted experience of studying music at the college level. Getting in the ol' wayback machine and going back 30+ years to when I graduated high school, I started college as a music major, majoring in piano. 

The summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, my parents received a beautiful old spinnet piano from a family friend. In case you've never heard of it, a spinnet is like a short version of an upright piano. I was smitten from the moment it arrived - I had always wanted to learn how to play the piano. So, not knowing anything about how to play, I just decided to teach myself.

Mind you, this was way back before the internet as we know it, YouTube didn't exist, and books about how to teach yourself the piano were few and far between. I haunted my local library and checked out as many books as I could about the piano, and started playing every single day. 

Since I had grown up playing the violin and took private lessons for several years, I was already very well versed in music theory and reading music. It didn't take me long before I figured out how to play the piano, and my parents were so impressed, they sent me for group lessons through a local adult education program.

Well, the teacher of that program was so impressed that she offered to take me on as a private student. So then I was taking private lessons on piano. 

All of this was happening at a time when I was supposed to be deciding what to do with the rest of my life, i.e., applying for college. At the time, there really wasn't anything else I was incredibly interested in, so I decided, fuck it, I'm going to be a music major. 

And not just a music major - I really wanted to major in music therapy. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I just did. It was one of my first inklings of intuition, I just knew that there was a reason I wanted to study music therapy. 

However. I had one major hurdle to overcome, and that was The College Audition. 

From the first moment I read about it, I had this sense of doom. Foreboding. The requirements didn't seem all that bad until you really looked at what they wanted - you had to learn at least three pieces of music, possibly more, and have at least one (preferably two) committed to memory. 

And these were not easy pieces. We're talking things like inventions by J.S. Bach, and piano sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven and music written by Brahms and Chopin. Things that I heard being performed by concert pianists on Sunday afternoons when I would get on a bus and head down to the NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark for their Sunday afternoon concert series with the NJ Symphony Orchestra.

I had no doubt that I could learn then, but could I learn them well enough? Most of the kids applying and auditioning to be music majors (and especially those playing piano as their primary instrument) had been playing for at least a decade, maybe more. They were those wunderkids you saw on t.v. who could play all of Mozart's piano concertos from memory by age six. 

I was not one of those kids. 

Did I even have a chance at this? My piano teacher said, absolutely. So I got down to it, practiced for hours a day, and met the requirements. Maybe I wasn't playing exactly up to speed, but close enough for someone who had only been playing the piano for a little over 2 years by the time she decided to audition for colleges.

Oh, and did I mention sightreading? That was a fun requirement. The folks on the panel who would evaluate me would plop down a relatiavely complex piece of music in front of me at random and I would have to just pick it up and play. 

My first audition went great until the sightreading part. Someone put a piece of incredibly complicated piano music in front of me, some modern stuff from the 1950s with a wonky time signature and more marks than notes, and I just froze. I got a few bars in, but I had no idea what it was supposed to sound like, and I knew I fucked it up. Got a resounding NO from that college.

But my second audition went slightly better. I didn't freeze up as bad during the sightreading part, and I left feeling pretty okay about it. I figured if I didn't get into the music program there, I could always just register as an undeclared major and maybe wiggle my way in later on.

I remember being elated, ecstatic upon reading the letter that said, "Congratulations, you've been admitted to the music therapy program starting this fall semester." I had done it!

And then I read the second page of the acceptance letter. There were "comments" from the audition panel. I can't remember the rest of them exactly (they were mostly very good and very encouraging), but the one that stood out in my brain was, "Barely passable. You will have to work very hard to keep up."

Ope.

There it was.

They were on to me. 

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I started college that fall and I loved every second of being a music major, but I couldn't let myself enjoy it. Because the whole time in the back of my head, the words of that anonymous panelist haunted me: "Barely passable." 

Ugh. 

After a couple of semesters, I dropped out and went to work full-time because I was convinced that I wasn't good enough to be a music major or a music therapist, and that I was just kidding myself. That the other panelists had decided to admit me just out of kindness, or greed that they wanted another paying student in the program. 

Those words still bounce around in my head from time to time. Well, all the time. It seems like whatever I do creatively these days, I can close my eyes and still see those words - barely passable - and how they apply to whatever I do. 

Like, I'm not really talented on the uke or good at teaching. But see, nobody really knows that. If someone really discovered that I'm a talentless hack - and it's just a matter of time before I do - my life will be over, and I'll be revealed as a fraud. 

That's imposter syndrome. 

I've tried for years to write about this, and I've tried for years to overcome it. It's the reason my heart pounds and I get weak in the knees when I teach a class, and it's probably the reason I wasn't a very confident yoga teacher back when I was teaching. And it's probably why I hesitate to post videos on my YouTube channel or offer ukulele lessons to people who really want to learn. 

So last week I got an email from the ukulele teacher program I enrolled in a couple of years ago that they're hosting a special 2-day workshop on imposter syndrome. Before I even got to the end of the email, I thought, sign me the fuck up. 

I'll let ya know how it goes.