Validation, please!

I’m not all that surprised when I receive enthusiastic and supportive comments about my blog posts. After all, I have enthusiastic, supportive, loving friends.

What does surprise me a little are the comments about me being a good writer.

Now you have to understand…when I was in school in California (many, many years ago!) the educational process was in a bit of an experimental phase. I vaguely remember having a spelling class in seventh grade, but in eighth grade my “English class” consisted of being on the yearbook team. In high school I had one semester of creative writing and a year of journalism. And that was it.

Nouns, verbs, and adjectives were the extent of my grammatical understanding, although I had a fairly developed sense of what looked and sounded “right”, thanks to being a voracious bookworm.

My early musical years were also somwhat skimpy in terms of formal instruction. I always played music (piano, then flute, a switch to saxophone, and finally back to flute again) and was in bands with a number of fine young musicians, but I didn’t have any private lessons until I was almost twenty years old. And my high school–which was very new and very small–didn’t have a strings program, so I wasn’t exposed to orchestra until college as well.

But, having a certain amount of natural talent, loving music, and not knowing what else to do, I threw myself wholeheartedly into my musical studies…feeling all the time like I was playing “catch-up.”

So I did recitals, played in orchestras, earned my bachelor’s degree in flute performance, played in better orchestras, did recording sessions, played tons of wedding and parties, graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with my master’s degree in flute performance, subbed with the SF Opera orchestra, auditioned for the SF Symphony, and even performed as guest soloist with a couple small orchestras. But here’s the thing…I never–EVER–felt “caught up!”

This was all pretty subliminal until the afternoon when I was lamenting (yet again!) having missed out on studying a particular set of student-level flute etudes. My dear friend and flute colleague laughed and said she wished she could validate me by rubber stamping my forehead with FLUTIST in big letters–etudes or no etudes!

But here’s the thing: if I had those kinds of doubts about being a flutist–even after all my hard work and experience–how could I possibly consider myself a good writer when I haven’t done anything to deserve it?

Wow…even as I wrote those words I could feel in my heart that there–right there–is where my real work lies. Getting beyond having to be “deserving” and opening up to simply “being”. And letting it all be okay just the way it is.