Guitar Hero: The First Days are the Hardest Days (Part Two)

A few days ago, I wanted to talk to Josh and I wanted the kids out of the room.  First, I asked the ChickieNob politely.  Then I told the ChickieNob to get out of the room.  Finally, I told the ChickieNob that I had to tell her father something terrifying and if she overheard it, she would have nightmares for months so could she please, for the love, get out of the room so I could tell her father this without damaging her delicate psyche?

Absolute wrong tactic: she perked up and moved closer saying, “you’re going to talk about something terrifying?  I’d love to hear!”

There are things the ChickieNob doesn’t like, but few things that scare her.  We were hiking in the woods and we came across this snake, and the natural instinct would be to jump backwards, but she moves closer.  She loves haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, and monsters.  She always picks the roller coaster, the steepest part of the hill for sledding, and marches straight into the ocean.

At 6-years-old, she is absolutely positive that she is going to be a bass player in an all-girl band (this all-girl band includes her brother because — as she rolls her eyes — he’s her twin and she guesses that he should be included).  At the music school, she announced to the cashier working in the store where I bought some guitar picks that she needed a 3/4 electric bass — a silver one — and an amp.  She needed the amp to go extra loud because she was going to “rock out.”  She told the boy that she was going to form the band with some other kindergarteners, and casually dropped that they were going to be bigger than Green Day.  And I believe her.  She has me convinced.  She has this swagger when she walks and she is fearless.

I once asked her how she was so brave.  She thought about it and said, “I try to be the scarier thing.  When I’m scared, I either scream to scare the other thing, or I try to freak the other thing out so that it isn’t the scariest thing in the room.  I am.”

Let’s juxtapose my timidity with the ChickieNob.  Before the first lesson, I sat on a piano bench outside the music room with my stomach in knots.  She danced around and I silently stressed out about how bad I was going to be.  I kept reminding myself that there was nothing at stake.  If I sucked, I sucked, but it wasn’t like high school where I’d be getting a grade and it would direct my future.  This was supposed to be fun, but it was making me a stress case.

My teacher came to fetch me and the twins, and I walked back to the practice room.  We talked about form and posture.  I was deeply aware that my enormous boobs were resting over the top of the guitar due to the way I was sitting hunched over.  We talked about what I hoped to accomplish with these guitar lessons (you mean, beyond the ability to ROCK OUT?  Oh, then I guess I’m looking to play some stadium shows.  You know, that sort of thing).  And what sort of music I like to listen to and hope to play.

I have a bunch of old papers and sheet music books in my guitar case, and I took one out to show him that I had taken guitar lessons from this school when I was a child.  Underneath it was the book I had been working on when I quit and he picked it up.  “Did you know that this is the book that they use for first years at Peabody?  You were playing from this when you quit?”  We flipped through my old teacher’s notes on songs and I felt so enormously sad.

I felt like I really wasted something by being so damn scared of everything.  When I quit, I chalked it up to wanting long nails (and to be able to wear polish) and not spend time practicing.  But I also know that a lot of it had to do with the anxiety I felt playing for anyone.  I’m not talking about performances — I mean, just playing for my old piano or guitar teachers.  I was so worried that I’d mess up and spent those lessons as a kid with my stomach in knots.

Josh and I joked before my current lessons began that I’d have to ask the new teacher to face the wall while I played so he wasn’t looking at me, and I would have if (1) I wasn’t concerned with also appearing sane and (2) the Blair Witch Project sort of ruined the whole face-the-wall thing for me.  I can count the number of times I have ever played piano for Josh, and in all of those cases, I was drunk and inhibition-free.

In quitting, I stopped feeling that anxiety.  But when I look at those old books, I also look at what I missed out on due to the fact that I made myself feel so terrified over something that was — again — low stakes.  So what if I messed up, especially when it was just me and my teacher?  What if it took longer than expected to master a song?  I was really really good — I have the notes from my teacher to prove it — and I had literally no self-confidence.  And I’m not even talking about having the self-confidence of the ChickieNob who, at age six, would literally be able to command the stage in a stadium and get people to rock out for two hours.  I didn’t even have the self-confidence to play in my own living room.

I walked out of my first class elated simply because I had gotten through it.  I had picked up my guitar and played a few chords in front of another human being.  I have had three classes now, and while I can’t say that I have picked up much of the ChickieNob’s swagger, I am now able to play for Josh every night.  I am playing for my teacher and when I mess up, I just laugh and say, “start over.”  It’s not that I’ve gotten rid of that internal voice that keeps telling me that I could suck.  But I am working on being the scarier thing in the room.

What fear would you like to get past?  What fear has limited you?