Flaky, like a really good pastry

I played the flute all through junior high and high school.  I was pretty good at first, but as the years went by I found myself losing interest in it.  I hardly practiced, and by the time my senior year rolled around I sat in one of the last chairs in my section.  By that time I was only in the band to be in marching band.  The rest of the year I spent an hour each day in symphonic band learning classical pieces that bored me.

When I was a senior, I committed to entering Solo & Ensemble with one of my friends.  She chose a flute duet for us to play and I was very nervous.  My only experience at being judged on my performance was chair auditions, and that was just for the band director.  I had never performed for judges or an audience before.

I grew more and more nervous as the time came for us to go to the competition.  I was probably the inferior flutist and wanted nothing more than to back out, but I had made this commitment to my friend.  She saved me though.  A couple of weeks before we were to perform, she told me she had another commitment on that day she had forgotten about when she had signed us up, something her parents wouldn’t let her get out of.  She apologized profusely for the oversight.  She had really wanted to go to the competition and was extremely disappointed.  I made sympathetic noises, but inwardly I was doing a little happy dance at my good luck.

I told that story because I’m dealing with a lot of performance anxiety right now.  No, not THAT kind of performance anxiety, but the Solo and Ensemble kind which makes me want to retreat into a dark corner and down a healthy dose of invisibility potion for good measure.

It also doesn’t help that I’m lazy.  I’m a lazy person who has found herself in a number of situations that require her to not be lazy.  I don’t like it.

Let’s start with school.  I feel very really good immediately after each class period.  Pursuing my master’s is a great thing, but come the weekend when I try to squeeze in 80 pages of literary theory and wind up only reading ten pages Sunday night, I can’t help but wonder if I’m cut out for this.  Am I disciplined enough to see this through?

I wanted to drop after the first class period.  I wanted to say “screw it” and free up my Wednesday evenings for something else.  We had already chosen groups for theory presentations and my withdrawal would have left a hole in two groups.  So I decided to stick with it.  Unfortunately a woman in one of my groups didn’t feel the same way and dropped the class.  She e-mailed me last week and apologized, saying things were too crazy at work and that she didn’t think a master’s was in her future.

Then there’s this event planning committee I signed up for at work earlier this year.  My gut told me to decline the invitation to join, but I thought it would be a good experience.  I’d learn how to organize small development workshops and order enough cookies and soda to make everyone happy.  The next meeting is tomorrow and I’m just not looking forward to it.  My attitude might improve once I get through my first workshop, but right now I just don’t want to take that bus downtown tomorrow.

And finally there’s the pedometer challenge.  One of my co-workers came around this morning and asked if I wanted to put my name in for it.  I didn’t want to do it.  I have no idea how I’m going to fit time to walk into my day, but I said yeah, sure, sign me up.  I’ll do it and will probably disappoint my team mates with my lackluster performance, but at this point I’m not really looking to win anything anyway.  I just need to move more.

There’s a part of me that says life is too short to be adding crap I don’t want to do to my “to do” list, but the other part of me is trying to look towards the future and see how these commitments will enrich my life.  Each one of these commitments, once fulfilled, can only make me a better, wiser, healthier person.

I guess this is what being an adult feels like.  The only voice telling me I need to do these things is the voice of my own conscience.  It’s kind of empowering to know I can listen to that voice or tell her to shut it, and boy do I really want to exercise that latter option right now.

But I won’t.